Topic: Entertainment

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Professor Jesse Schell, from the Entertainment Technology Center, about the serious task of designing video games.

Steve Jelley, Eric Lindstrom, Matt Locke, and Jeremy Silver discuss digital media in the context of teen social networking, books, activism, and predictions of what the digital future will look like. Because we are a social race and need to communicate, content will remain even when platforms mutate and we create and talk about content in new ways. Each panelist gives his predictions of the dramatic changes which will define the digital world just ten years from now.

What do you get when you apply Moore's law to robotics and GPS? Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine, explains what you get in this Where 2.0 presentation. Cheap and ubiquitous location technologies combined with robotic toys have given birth to a thriving amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles community. Though these sophisticated spy toys, which are powered by open source software, are usually flying just for the fun of it, the federal regulators are trying to figure out what is even legal, in this brave new little world.

Jeremy Silver discusses why the world of music in the internet age is on the edge of enormous change, but not on the edge of disaster. Silver reviews the recent difficult history of the music industry since the growth of the internet. He sees positive signs in the many areas of experimentation in music activity. Although the new business models are not proven, there is tremendous energy at work.

Eric Lindstrom, cofounder of VideoJuicer, believes that story telling in the television industry is going to change because of the Internet. He talks about what a hub site and an aggregator site is, and which one you'd need at which stage in building your brand. He also talks about the impact of time-shifting in daytime programming, and how the television industry perceives the Internet as a solution to their problem known as the DVR (digital video recording).

"Electoral Dysfunction 2008" is a sample of some of the political comedy that is taking on the presidential campaigned. The sketch show is performed by Kansas Public Radio's Right Between the Ears comedy troupe. This is an excerpt from the full show which is an hour of high energy take-offs and put-ons, spiced with off-the-wall sound effects and music.

On February 17, 2009, all analog television broadcasting in the United States will convert to digital. Millions of households will need to either replace their televisions, sign up for cable or satellite service, or install a digital signal converter. While the Federal government has subsidized these and assured that the switch will be cheap and easy, a reporter for IEEE Spectrum radio who tries it herself finds that for her, it is neither cheap nor easy.

The Technological Singularity - the moment when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence - is coming. According to Vernor Vinge, who invented the term, it will occur sometime around 2030. In this interview with Spectrum Radio's Harry Goldstein, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge discusses his latest novel "Rainbow's End" and the concept of the Singularity as depicted in his book.

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could hold a "book" in your hands which had hyperlinks? Why would that be amazing, you ask? Well, what if the hyperlink triggered a process that makes a nearby computer, for example, play an MP3 of animal sounds that match the story? In this keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Manolis Kelaidis introduces blueBook, his prototype that merges the analog and digital worlds of books.

Blunt Youth Radio Project is a weekly, youth produced public affairs radio show on WMPG in Portland, Maine, featuring teen broadcasters. William Nelligan, a host and producer for the project, has been a political junkie since he was a preteen. He talks about how the television series, The West Wing, led to his interest in politics and current events.