This, from Annalee Neewitz at io9, on the work in which Czech playwright Karel Chapek coined the term robot:

Rumor has it that production has begun on a film version of R.U. R., the Czech play where the word “robot” was invented. It’s about genetic engineering and robot rebellion, and it could be the best robot movie ever.

R.U.R. stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” and it’s about a company that figures out how to manufacture synthetic humans. They’re called robots, but in fact they’re more like synthetic biological beings – and eventually they revolt against their masters.

This isn’t the first time that R. U. R. has been made into a film – there is also a 1930s version – but it’s the first modern version. Director James Kerwin is said to be aiming for release of the movie in 2011. Kerwin’s previous film, Yesterday Was A Lie, played at both Sundance Film Festival and San Diego Comic Con – how’s that for a mix of inde cred and scifi cred?

My hope is that Kerwin will bring back the idea of synthetic biology in this adaptation, which seems far more futuristic than mere metal men.

See the official movie site here.

Between this and Purefold (see official site), looks like a return of the empathy/what-you-see-isn’t-what-you-get theme.

One of the more interesting stories not reported since late 2008 has been the abduction of NYT reported and Pulitzer winner David Rohde while researching a book in Afghanistan. Rohde escaped from captivity yesterday, after being held for seven months. The NYT:

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, escaped Friday night and made his way to freedom after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, was abducted outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 10 while he was researching a book.

All concerned kept quiet about this while Rohde was still captive. Echoing Ex here on kudos to the media. Looking forward – uncynically – to Rhode’s memoir of the ordeal.

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has just released a report on the Arabic blogosphere, as part of its Internet and Democracy project. There’s some funky visualization, and a full report. Abstract:

The project’s initial case studies investigated three frequently cited examples of the Internet’s influence on democracy. The first case looked at the user-generated news site OhmyNews and its impact on the 2002 elections in South Korea. The second documented the role of technology in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The third analyzed the network composition and content of the Iranian blogosphere. Fall 2008 saw the release of a new series of case studies, which broadened the scope of our research and examined some less well-known parts of the research landscape. In a pair of studies, we reviewed the role of networked technologies in the 2007 civic crises of Burma’s Saffron Revolution and Kenya’s post-election turmoil. In April 2009, Urs Gasser’s three-part case study examined the role of technology in Switzerland’s semi-direct democracy. This case expands on our study of foreign blogospheres with an analysis of the Arabic language blogosphere.

Read the press release…

H/t MESH.

MADRID — Spanish authorities blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for a car bomb that killed a police inspector Friday when it exploded in a town near Bilbao, in northern Spain. The inspector, Eduardo Pueyes García, was in his car in a parking lot in the Santa Elena neighborhood of Arrigorriaga, about six miles south of Bilbao, when it blew up just after 9 a.m., a spokesman for the Basque regional police said. The spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity under police rules, said, “The characteristics of the attack pointed to it being the work of ETA.”

Read the full article...