Presented annually by the Australian Museum, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes reward excellence in the fields of scientific research & innovation, science leadership, school science and science journalism & communication. Up for nomination this year is Dr Hala Raghib. Inspired by a family history of heart disease, Hala thought her PhD at the RMIT School of Medical Science would focus on finding a cure. Her studies meant she would have to take cultures and cells from lab animals though – something she didn’t like doing. So she added an extra challenge to her research – to find a way to ensure that all new medicines are safe for human use and do not have serious effects on the heart, without using animals to test them. Hala’s discoveries mean we would no longer need to use animals, or animal products to make sure our drugs are safe. Follow this link for more information and to vote for Hala.
Since McDonald’s launched their massive “Name it Burger” campaign to name the new McDonald’s burger, their website has been inundated with suggestions like ‘Murder Burger’, the ‘Obese Burger’, the ‘Animal Abuse Burger’, the ‘McColonCancer Burger’, and the ‘McDeath.’ Sadly, it is unlikely that McDonald’s will ever make these brilliant suggestions public. So in the interests of letting the public know what people really think the new McDonald’s burger should be named, Animal Liberation Victoria has launched NameItMurder.com. If you want to let the world know what you really think of the new McDonald’s burger, please visit the site and enter our Name it Murder competition (the competition ends in one week so get your entries in soon). Please also forward a link to nameitmurder.com to as many people as you can!
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) are holding a series of FREE public forums as part of still/open Program during September in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane as part of their emerging technology labs. The forums are running;
Melbourne 6pm, 5th September 2007 @ Digital Harbour
The forum will explore recent projects by internationally renown guest thinkers: Alessandro Ludovico (Italy) a publisher, media artist and editor in chief of Neural (http://www.neural.it/), Andy Nicholson (Australia) a free software hacker, new media activist and part of the Engage Media collective (http://engagemedia.org/) and Beatriz da Costa (USA) an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works with open science (http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/). Creative Commons Australia will open the floor for discussion of Open Source Culture.
Open Source Culture is the growing global phenomenon of creative practices of sharing content for others to rework, reuse and redistribute. It has created a digital collective media culture and cult like following where everyone from teenagers to grannies are getting involved. It has moved from the programming sphere into the general and business communities; the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion and MySpace for $580 million by News Corp. and Google highlight just how much value they can have.
Open Source Culture aims to empower the user and challenge the power of the media giants. Currently a conflict is occurring between the owners of online “user generated” infrastructures and those who use them. User submitted and generated content often is moderated by the site or organization it is uploaded to, giving absolute control to the powers that be to do as they wish with the content submitted. By its nature Open Source Culture brings up many opinions and questions including; how open is Open Source Culture? Is it user friendly or financially beneficial to the big players? How might artists make use this cultural movement? And [insert your own question here] will be part of the discussion in the still/open forum.
The forums are presented as part of ANAT’s emerging technology labs, which are responsible for the hugely successful reSkin program.
For media information and availability of the facilitators for interviews please contact Amanda Matulick email communicate@anat.org.au or for more information on the forums and still/open please visit
www.anat.org.au/stillopen/blog/forums/.
