Berkeley went nuts last night. Yesterday around 3PM I went to Triple Rock to start watching the returns roll in. At around 7 or so, once we realized that the geniuses at Triple Rock weren’t going to turn on the sound on their TVs, and not wanting to miss the speeches, we headed up to Haas to watch on the big screens there. On the way there we heard cheers erupt from all around the city–they had just announced Obama’s victory. We got to Haas just in time to see McCain’s concession speech and, of course, Obama’s long-awaited victory speech. Afterwards we went outside to see masses of students filling Bancroft, climbing up on traffic lights, waving flags, chanting U! S! A! (something I don’t think I’ve ever heard in Berkeley)… Every car driving down Shattuck was honking like crazy, fireworks, sparklers, and drums everywhere. A great night. I couldn’t be happier.

In honor of the last debate, a slideshow of a mural that recently went up a few blocks from my apartment:

I just got back from the premiere of Continuous City, a theater production being workshopped at UC Berkeley by Marianne Weems of The Builders Association. I helped create the website at which you can (via webcam) perform scenes and choruses that will then be incorporated into the show. But this was my first time seeing the offline portion of the production, and I was really impressed. So if you’re in the Bay Area, I highly recommend you go check it out sometime before the last show on October 14th. If you’re interested at all in networked culture, or even if you’re not and sick of the hype, you’ll find it very entertaining. If you’re not in the Bay Area, or you can’t make it to Berkeley in the next week and a half, you can see the completed version when it goes on tour over the next few years. (The software I’ve been building for the site will have matured by then too; right now it’s rather early beta–we started writing code about 6 weeks ago and some of the seams are definitely still showing. I’ll post something geeky about the process of creating the site later in the month.)

This is pretty wild. This weekend the UC Berkeley police are participating in Urban Shield, in which various disaster scenarios are simulated in order to train and test emergency-response teams. Apparently one simulation will take place on the UC Berkeley campus, according to an email from the Vice Chancellor:

Warren Hall will be the site of an “active shooter” simulation. Especially in light of the tragic events at Virginia Tech and other past incidents of campus violence, the University is committed to the highest level of preparation and prevention possible, and is proud to participate in this opportunity to provide realistic and valuable training to so many law enforcement agencies.

Police personnel will begin staging equipment and preparing the building on the evening of Friday, September 28. At 5:00 am on September 29 (Saturday) the exercise will begin. Activity will include role-player movements on the first and ground floor of Warren Hall, the arrival and departure of personnel and vehicles in Mulford Hall parking lot, and some loud noises. The scenario will repeat once every other hour for the entire weekend, day and night, ending before 9:00 am on Monday, October 1.

That’s at least 24 “active shooters” over the course of the weekend… jesus.

As seen at the Berkeley Kite Festival.

I like working with cool people. So if you’re cool, and you’re a person (who is still a student and will be in the Bay Area next week), you should some to the Yahoo! Research Berkeley Open House next Friday and bring your resume. I’ll be standing by the punch bowl.

Today brings the official announcement of Yahoo! Research Labs Berkeley, an experiment in which we’ll see what happens when we take the mobile media and social media research we’ve been doing at Garage Cinema and supercharge it with Yahoo! brains and backing.

This is really exciting: it means that great ideas from Garage Cinema, unmediated, and elsewhere will have a chance to be implemented and deployed to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Even better, Yahoo! is committed to making the Berkeley Lab a place for open, collaborative research–meaning we can publish and exchange ideas with colleagues at Berkeley and everywhere else. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

So next time you’re in Berkeley, stop by the Lab and say hi!

This week UC Berkeley is recognizing the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a series of lectures and re-enactments. You can check out the goings-on in Sproul Plaza yourself at demonstrate.

Ken Goldberg’s viewer-controlled robotic camera has attracted a lot of controversy on campus lately, which of course was exactly the point. Most people assume that the name of the project was selected to evoke the memory of the demonstrations that took place here 40 years ago. Personally, I believe that the term is used more in the spirit of a software demonstration: to show the power and promise of a particular technology. In this case, the audience is not a conference table full of VCs or a potential customers but the citizens of Berkeley, who are mostly asleep to the fact that they are constantly surveilled.

Anyway, check out the cam and remember the moment when power stopped trying to limit speech overtly and began studying how to limit it covertly…