Category: About Foresight

from the wish-he-were-here-to-see dept.
The top five individuals or teams in two categories, Experimental and Theoretical, have been selected as finalists for this year's Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Winners will be feted at the Feynman Prize Banquet on November 4, 2000, at the 8th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Congratulations to these world-class nanotechnology researchers, and thanks to all who made nominations this year.

from the many-hands-make-lots-of-work dept.
Senior Associate TomMcKendree writes "I understand the intent of "Engines of Creation 2000" project is to produce an up-to-date version of Engines of Creation by integrating the work of many contributors. An excellent model for such an integration is the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, Smith (eds), 1994). It combines the work of 63 contributors, many providing just a single section of a few pages. The book is organized into chapters by topic, with individual sections identified by type (solo exercise, team exercise, guiding idea, resource, etc). It is intended to be highly browsable–readable in any direction." In addition, the book has its own website under construction.

from the brain-overload-party dept.
Register by August 1 to save $100 on this fall's Foresight Senior Associate Gathering. Speakers and participants at previous events in this series include: Bruce Ames, David Brin, Eric Drexler, Esther Dyson, Doug Engelbart, David Friedman, John Gilmore, Robert Hambrecht, Bill Joy, Steve Jurvetson, Brewster Kahle, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Virginia Postrel, Eric Raymond, Paul Saffo, Eric Schmidt, Vernor Vinge & Roy Walford. See comments from participants.

from the entrepreneurial-opportunity dept.
WillWare can't make it to all the Foresight conferences, and has an idea on how to address this problem: It would be cool to remotely hire somebody (local to the conference) to strap on a wearable computer with a camera, microphone, loudspeaker, and wireless internet connection. I could remotely observe conference goings-on on my home computer, and I could talk to people at the conference. For the amount of time that I was hiring this person, he or she would wear a hat or t-shirt with my name and picture. It might take a T1 line or a cable modem to get acceptable bandwidth, but after a very few conferences it becomes a lot cheaper than airfare, a hotel room, and a rental car. Read More for the full proposal.

from the rewards-for-good-workers dept.
The deadline for Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology submissions is July 31, 2000, but now is the time to get your nomination in.

If you suspect your nominees may be too busy — or modest — to complete the process, you can do the whole thing for them; it's pretty easy.

from the other-dot-talks-nano dept.
Our parent website, Slashdot, has a discussion of the Foresight Guidelines for nanotech safety. There are some useful comments embedded in it. To read the highest-rated comments first, do what you do on this site: use the pull-down menu to change "Oldest First" to "Highest Scores First", then press the "change" button. See also Jeffrey Soreff's and others' comments on the original item here on nanodot.

from the hurry-up! dept.
If you plan to present your work at this fall's Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Bethesda, MD, you'll need to get your abstract in immediately. The formal deadline is June 16, but if you get it in by Monday, June 19, you'll be okay. After that, there's still a chance, but it decreases over time.

from the identity-crisis dept.
This server needs a name! Preferably one of 1 to 3 syllables that doesn't conflict with something else in our community namespace (and that can also be used as a machine name in the foresight.org domain… "216.240.168.216" does not roll trippingly off the tongue).

A couple of names have already been suggested:

• NanoLog (since the Slash software running the site is a species of the genus that has been called a "weblog")
• ForeSlash (pretty self-explanatory, with significant geek appeal)

Please append your suggestions as comments to this message. Then we'll pick the one we like best; or if we can't choose, we'll run a poll.

Update: In the interests of making the server available to the widest possible audience as quickly as possible, we picked a name ("foreslash", suggested by Geoff Dale) and went with it. Thanks to all who made suggestions!

Update Again: We may not be able to keep ForeSlash as the name of this server… so please continue adding comments and suggesting names!

Dave

from the who-will-help-me-grind-my-grain? dept.
Got an idea for the improvement of ForeSlash? Attach it as a comment to this message. We'll use how each comment gets moderated as a rough measure of its popularity and proceed accordingly. Specifically solicited suggestions:

• Topic categories. Those who email PerlDiver an appropriate icon (GIF or PNG no larger than 80 pixels in either dimension) will earn a sterling silver Waytogo from my family collection. Obvious categories (like Medicine and Foreslash itself) are in the works.
• Sections. Slashdot, the mothership, has sections for Interviews, Ask Slashdot, Science, Apache, etc. Please make your suggestion in the form of a complete scheme of sections; the winning set of sections will do a good job of spanning the likely universe of ForeSlash stories without the categories overlapping too much.