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Events
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Start: 6:30 pm
Wednesday, November 4, 6:30 p.m. The Future of the Internet BUY NOW Palo Alto Arts Center, 1313 Newell Rd., Palo Alto Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard University; Author, The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It Pulin Sanghvi, Assistant Dean, Director of Career Management Center, Stanford Graduate School of Business - Moderator Networks connect people as well as devices, and when they are cheap and easy to use, intellectual tasks can be broken out and performed elsewhere by other people. We are in the initial stages of distributed human thinking that can be directed at mental tasks the same way that surplus remote server rackspace or Web hosting accommodate sudden spikes in Internet traffic. Among the many firms leading the charge are InnoCentive, which offer rewards of $5,000 to $1 million to solve challenges ranging from designing self-cleaning kitchen sponges to creating a new molecule or biomarker. Marketplaces like Amazon's Mechanical Turk offer "HITs" -- human intelligence tasks -- for sale one unit at a time, from as low as $0.01 for boring and repetitive work to as high as $10.00 for more demanding tasks. Imagine a future in which passengers on a subway train stare into screens even for just a few minutes and earn as much money in that time as their respective skills and stations allow. Zittrain will discuss the prospects and issues for this future in which human computing is ubiquitous and nearly any mental act can be bought and sold. Reservations visit www.commonwealthclub.org/sv or call 800-847-7730 Start: 7:30 pm
Wednesday, November 4, 7:30 p.m. Little Bird of Heaven: A Novel BUY NOW When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty. Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina) and The Gravedigger's Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Prince-ton University and, since 1978, has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 she received the Medal of Honor in Literature from the National Arts Club. Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger 'Little Bird of Heaven,' by Joyce Carol Oates Tuesday, October 20, 2009 Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/20/DDRA1A1EBC.DTL#ixzz0UVPjB3GS | ||
