Current TV is an Emmy award winning independent media company led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt.

The cable television network went on the air at midnight EDT (4:00 UTC) on the morning of August 1, 2005. A second network, operated in the United Kingdom and Ireland started its operation March 12, 2007 for Sky and Virgin Media subscribers.

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, today are both in Rome. They will be introducing the latest release of Current.com network, operating in Italy and starting its operation May 8, 2008 for Sky subscribers and on line.

Current features “pods”, or short programs, of which a portion are created by viewers and users and Live Streaming.

From New Scientist:
“Another DARPA-funded group, led by Michel Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley, implanted electrodes into the brains of adult green June beetles, near neurons that control flight. When the team delivered pulses of negative voltage to the brain, the beetles’ wing muscles began beating and the bugs took off. A pulse of positive voltage shut the wings down, stopping flight short, and by rapidly switching between these signals, they controlled the insects’ thrust and lift.”

Donal Norman presented his latest book, “The Design of Future Things” at Share Festival 2008, with – Bruce Sterling, writer, Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine and Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino. The book talks about a world where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.

Here you can see the VIDEO and read the text Bruce Sterling wroted about in the catalogue:
”
Every design requires sacrifice; you can’t possibly have a real-world object that is all things to all people. So — if you plan to saturate future objects with computer interactions — where are the constraints? What is the grain of the material?

It was from Donald Norman that I first learned that the limits of the human brain in handling bad design. We lack infinite amounts of intelligence and awareness to devote to a demanding world, just like we lack infinite physical strength or the machine-like ability to chug along without food and sleep. So it’s both senseless and dangerous to predict “smart objects” or “future objects” without factoring in humanity’s “cognitive loading” and “opportunity costs.”

What are “opportunity costs?” Every time we respond to a beep, buzz or click, some mechanical prompt demanding our interaction, we are sacrificing something else we might do. We don’t simply gain interactivity, we *lose* the opportunity for some other interaction that might be better-designed and more effective. We can be harassed into an itchy condition of “continuous partial attention” where our ability to take coherent action is constantly broken-up by tiny flea-bite emergencies.

Then there’s “technological excise,” technical activities we’re forced to perform before we’re actually allowed to get on with our work. We might want a larger type-face on a cellphone screen. How much wandering do we have to do through the jungles of format, with tiny buttons, before the letters on our screen get bigger?

Maybe we’d like to stuff a video into our weblog. With what commands, in what format? How do we discover “how to get it in there” — how do we discover how to discover that? Quite possibly, through frustrated trial and error, we’ll discover some painful, time-consuming work-around — and once we’ve trained ourselves how to do that, rather than suffer the “excise” of going back to the rule-book, we’ll try to save ourselves that painful mental labor by habitually doing it the wrong way, again and again. That opportunity cost is huge.

“Cognitive loading.” How many processes, how many objects, can we bear in our minds? It’s painful to be mentally conscious of some minor. boring task; we’ll try to automate it, habituate it, remove our attention from it. Many American states now make it illegal to drive while using a cellphone. Even walking while using a cellphone can look like an attack of drunkenness.

How do we achieve the cyberneticization of the everyday without polluting our mental environment?
”
Bruce Sterling