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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: There is a high proportion of psychopathic CEOs in Silicon Valley, enabled by protective investors and weak human resources departments, according to a panel of experts at SXSW festival. Although the term "psychopath" typically has negative connotations, some of the attributes associated with the disorder can be advantageous in a business setting. "A true psychopath is someone that has a blend of emotional, interpersonal, lifestyle and behavioral deficits but an uncanny ability to mask them. They come across as very charming, very gregarious. But underneath there's a profound lack of remorse, callousness and a lack of empathy," said forensic and clinical psychologist Michael Woodworth, who has worked with psychopathic murderers in high security prisons, on Tuesday. According to recent studies there's a high prevalence of psychopathy among high-level executives in a corporate environment: 4-8% compared with 1% in the general population. This makes sense, according to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bryan Stolle because "it's an irrational act to start a company." "You have to have a tremendous amount of ego [and] self-deception to embark on that journey," he said. "You have to make sacrifices and give up things, including sometimes a marriage, family and friends. And you have to convince other people. So they are mostly very charismatic, charming and make you suspend the disbelief that something can't be done." However, the positive attributes are accompanied by manipulation. "One of the main things that makes them extremely difficult to organizations is their willingness to manipulate through deception," said Jeff Hancock, a Stanford social scientist who studies psychopathy. "Psychopaths will handpick people they can use as lackeys or supporters, such as someone in HR they can have in their wheelhouse," said Woodworth.

the_newsbeagle writes: We don't often get insider accounts of hacks against major institutions like hospitals because they immediately go into damage control mode. But at a SXSW talk, a couple of experts told tales out of school. The experts, [John Halamka, CIO of the Boston hospital Beth Israel Deaconness, and Kevin Fu, a University of Michigan engineering professor, recounted incidents in which hackers downloaded patient X-rays to China, took down entire networks, fooled Harvard doctors, and more.

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, the South by Southwest Festival announced that it had canceled a pair of panels about online harassment after receiving threats involving them. The cancellation generated a massive outcry, including threats from media organizations to withdraw their support for the festival. Now, SXSW has announced that they're reinstating the panels as part of an all-day summit dedicated to talking about online harassment. They said, "By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry. The resulting feedback from the individuals involved and the community-at-large resonated loud and clear. While we made the decision in the interest of safety for all of our attendees, canceling sessions was not an appropriate response." They've scheduled more than two dozen speakers for the event, and they plan to stream it live online. "Online harassment is a serious matter and we stand firmly against hate speech and cyber-bullying. It is a menace that has often resulted in real world violence; the spread of discrimination; increased mental health issues and self-inflicted physical harm."

New submitter rMortyH writes: Two panels on online harassment in gaming scheduled for the upcoming South by Southwest festival have been cancelled due to online harassment and threats. According to a statement from SXSW Director Hugh Forrest, "... in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming. ... If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised."

New submitter rMortyH writes: Two panels on online harassment in gaming scheduled for the upcoming South by Southwest festival have been cancelled due to online harassment and threats. According to a statement from SXSW Director Hugh Forrest, "... in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming. ... If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised."

While Timothy Lord was at SXSW, he chatted with Yuki Nishida of AgIC and learned about the company's conductive ink products. But AgIC wasn't the only company at SXSW showing off conductive ink. You could also meet the Electroninks people and see their Circuit Scribe product, which had a Kickstarter campaign a while back that raised $574,425.

This kind of product seems to be attractive to the kind of people who fund Kickstarter projects, and this bunch seems to have good resumes and some interesting, well thought-out products. There is apparently room in the 'draw circuits and learn electrical basics' market for both AgIC and Electroninks -- and probably for another dozen competitors, too.

There he was at SXSW with a tableful of beeping and booping electronic (musical) instruments made by his company, Delptronics, surrounded by kids and adults listening to and playing the instruments. One of the adults was Slashdot's Timothy Lord, who pointed his videocam at Mickey and asked (slightly paraphrased), "What's going on here?"

itwbennett writes Organizers of SXSW said this week that flying of drones is banned for safety reasons. 'The airwaves and/or frequency spectrums generally used in the remote control of drones are too congested during the popular event to ensure operation safe from interference,' they said in a statement. The Austin Police Department will be watching for drones in crowded or public areas and anyone flying one could have it seized, the organizers warned.

For many decades, gramophone records (the black vinyl discs in Grandma's attic) were made by cutting grooves directly into an acetate disc, then making a mold from that "master" and "pressing records." Nowadays, of course, we use digital recording software on our computers or even on our mobile phones. Vinyl? Strictly for fogies and maybe a few audiophiles who think analog recordings have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack. Naturally, SXSW is a haven for these folks, and among them Tim Lord found Wesley Wolfe and two German compatriots from vinylrecording.com, busily demonstrating their vinyl recording system, which is sort of the gramophone record equivalent of print on demand. Lots of background music in the video makes the voices a bit hard to hear; some might prefer the transcription -- although those who do will lose out on watching the vinyl recording machine in action. Either way. Or both. Up to you.

ICANN.org says, "The DotOrg Foundation [update: Note that the organization is now known as the Public Interest Registry], along with its operating partners, is committed to stable, efficient and affordable management of the .org registry." Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet's basic "plumbing," and few spend much time thinking about .org and the group that is responsible for maintaining it. That group did, however, have a booth at SXSW. That's where Timothy Lord interviewed .org spokesperson Thuy LeDinh, who was happy to explain what the .org people do and why they do it.

It's Austin, where people are proud to be weird -- and are more environmentally aware and more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas. Add SXSW, with its combination of techies, musicians, film people, and general hipsters. What could be more natural at SXSW than combining a pedicab (called a bicycle rickshaw in Old Delhi and other Indian cities) with Uber's smartphone-based dispatch system? Hook Uber up with local pedicab company Easy Rider, get Samsung to sponsor it all, and you are environmentally conscious, high tech, and (possibly) hip all at once. Totally Austin. Totally SXSW. And totally promotional for all three companies involved.

Slashdot editor Tim Lord was wandering around SXSW and ran into a small display for Lynx Laboratories, a startup that makes this claim about its Lynx A camera: "If you can use a point-and-shoot Nikon, you'll find the Lynx even easier to use. Instead of outputing 2D images, it produces 3D models of whatever you point it at. It's faster and cheaper than existing solutions today." There's a two-minute demo at the end of the video in which Lynx Founder and CEO Chris Slaughter shows how it works, and (at least in his hands) it looks extremely easy. The company is a University of Texas spinoff that "has received prestigious awards including the 1st Place Idea2Product (I2P) Texas, 1st Place I2P Global, Top 10 Dell Innovators and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Funding." Naturally, they're hoping to raise money through Kickstarter as well. They're looking for $50,000 and as of 13 March 2013 it looks like they've raised $88,548 of it. There are obviously other ways to make 3-D images and models. But Lynx seems to have made a novel device, and the images it makes can be picked up directly by a number of 3D printer software packages. The Lynx-A also does motion capture, which could really speed up rotoscoping and other techniques that make video games and other animations look more lifelike than pure animation. That's totally different from static 3D modeling but might be more interesting to more people, at least in a commercial sense.

sneakyimp writes "Both Wired and Ars Technica have reports on Jim Griffin's proposal that ISPs charge each broadband customer $5 per month to subsidize the ailing music industry. The resulting fund would ostensibly 'compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.' Although no specific version of the proposal has been referenced, a number of controversies are inherent to the plan: How is the money really divided? What happens when the MPAA, the Business Software Alliance, and various other industry groups want their own surcharge added? What about the supposed majority of broadband customers who never download illegal music? Griffin discussed the plan further at SXSW . We've previously discussed a similar proposal from the Songwriters Association of Canada.

Thor Larholm writes "Barcodepedia is a community-based online barcode database, where everybody can contribute whichever barcodes they have lying around on their crowded desks simply by holding it in front of your webcam. The database is completely free to use, and everyone is invited to participate. The site should be available in French, Russian, German and Swedish within a week, so get all your friends and go to your local store with a laptop for massive fun. Donations of cuecats and other specialized scanners are welcomed." Anyone who's read Bruce Sterling's book Shaping Things may immediately think of Sterling's concept of "spimes" — for those who haven't, Sterling's 2006 SXSW address explains a bit, too. (It's easy to create your own barcodes, too — and then, not quite as easily, you can use them to control your house.)

chupacabra writes "SXSW.com in Austin, Texas has a group of computers in various music venues around town. The ices/icecast stream is sent over 802.11 to a main server at SXSW. There are 6 venues running as of this moment. Thanks to the folks at Vorbis and their CVS we are rocking. See sxsw.com/music/livestreams."

"Its like being the world's tallest midget" is how Flansburgh describes They Might Be Giants fame at one point during the bands documentary, Gigantic. I was lucky enough to score tickets to the opening screening here in Seattle of the movie and was delighted with what I received for the price of admission. Of course having one of the John's, Flansburgh that is, plus the director AJ Schnack show up to the screening only added to the value. I am a fan of They Might Be Giants. The fact that I will have seen 26 films by the time that the Seattle Internal Film Festival is over also means that I am a fan of film too. Despite being a fan of film, this documentary could have been two hours worth of the TMBG's videos, or even two hours worth of staring at a black screen, and as long as they played some music I would have loved it.

The documentary is a solid mix of band history and irrelevant pieces (would you expect anything different?). While I can not say that I got a good history on how the two Jon's actually started playing together from the documentary, I did learn a lot about their early successes and the director did a wonderful job of putting together scenes from different periods to give the audience an idea about how the band's early years were. The documentary does reveal how "Dial A Song" got started after a biking messenger accident left Linnell unable to play. We even get to see some photos, complete with price tag, of the actual machine. Flansburgh talks for a bit about how personal "Dial A Song" is and the entire experience of getting to be one with the machine.

The documentary was shot in video and in places comes out a little grainy. Some of the concert scenes definitely show off some of the short comings of the medium (this is not Lucus style digital filming). Despite this the film had a fully packed house during its opening in Seattle and the theater had to turn away 150 people at the door.

The director mentioned that their last showing of the film at SXSW had similar sized crowds. Hopefully this will mean that some distributor will pick up the film so the more people will get a chance to see it. If you are lucky enough to live in one of the cities that it will be playing in, and you love the band's music I can easily recommend going to see it.

dgris writes "ain't it cool is running a purported review of Epidsode II. Harry Knowles is claiming to have gotten a secret screening of the film while at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX. Short story: he loves it." Like the department sez: I'll believe it when I see it. After Phantom, I'm willing to wait a bit to see it.

Bruce Sterling is the sort of writer who invites his audience to an open house with "anyone they'd like and anything they can carry." He's also busy in his non-writing life keeping up with the resurrection and commemoration of dead media and not-dead-yet online freedoms. Fellow online agitator and decorated science fiction writer Cory Doctorow seems more of an Ernster Mensch; Doctorow points out that he's a writer second, activist first. When these two started a freewheeling discussion ("intellectual cyber riffing," as Sterling described it) on The Death of Scarcity Tuesday afternoon, the quotable quotes were everywhere. Read on for the ones I jotted down, and a link to some more.

Within five minutes Doctorow was describing the common ground that economists of all stripes might find in a world of increasingly information flow and decentralization, and Sterling was questioning conventional wisdom on Google, file sharing, and other sacred cows of the techno-elite. This public conversation in a smallish but packed meeting room in Austin's Convention Center served as an endcap on the Interactive portion of this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, and probably crystalized a lot of what conference attendees had on their mind between panel sessions and parties. Below are some of the thoughts that came out in the course of the Sterling & Doctorow Show. (And Sorry, but the open house is over now. Thanks, Bruce.)

The worth of Information:

Sterling: "All of this circles around the central declaration of S. Brand -- 'Information wants to be free.' Yet, Information also wants to be expensive. ... I have to wonder, what would happen if sheep actually did shit grass -- would mutton be free? ... Doesn't [widespread file trading] crowd out what was formerly a competitive menu of available choices? What if you just can't sell music any more? Nobody's going to go down to [Austin record store] Waterloo, nobody's going to hang out with them afterward. ..."

Doctorow: "Whether Kantian or Marxist, the most valuable stuff isnt the world is the stuff we want to concern ourselves with, because when stuff is really valuable, it becomes scarce. ... [by contrast], the Napster ethic is, 'Be as selfish as you possibly can -- the more crap you download, the more crap there is for everyone to download.' ... Code is a little like speech, a little like a tractor. Keynes and Marx both talked about speech [being different from] a tractor; Code is a little like speech, and a little like tractors. When you've got something that's both speech and a tractor, you've got something really interesting."

Napster, the RIAA and file trading:

Sterling: "[Napster is] a kind of profoundly undemocratic technical fait accompli. 'Look at this neat gizmo that we geeks built while you weren't working. We geeks accidentally ate your industry.' [This is a] techno-imperative market argument which I don't think really makes all that much sense in a stagnant monopoly ... where is the steamroller going, I don't see it going anywhere particular, it's just abolishing other people's money. Does Napster give anybody money for a reelection campaign? Do they have a friendly judge? Is there somebody to sue?"

"What would the music scene look like if the industry disappeared? I imagine things like the Royal family paying for the production of Handel's Water Music. "

Product Interfaces.

Doctorow: "[...] That's what why we have wrappers. If you have good stuff in a crappy interface, somebody will build a wrapper around it. ... This revolution is ongoing -- Travelocity may suck, but it's a lot better than SABRE. This process of wrapping is going on every day."

Sterling: "I think that the crappy interface is one of the reasons for the power of the computer revolution. People are trapped."

Google

Sterling: "It's a beauty contest, not a credibility contest. ... How is [google's reference-count system] different from turning on TV and seeing Dean Kamen talking on 22 channels about this revolutionary scooter? What I want to see ... the kid in Left Elbow, Kazakhstan, you give him an 802.11 Linux box, running google [and left to play]. In 4 years, I want to see him matriculate. [Laughter]

"... Now if we had an idiosyncratic version of google, that was sort of a Bruce Sterling google ... 'Well, Bruce, here are the things you're going to find really great today!" you know. There are things they they always claim on Amazon. 'So you've bought this book, ok? You might want to try this CD.' I've never bought any CDs on Amazon, they always think I have the worst possible taste in music. No luck over there at all.

"People gather together in little tidepools and trust, otherwise there would be no limits [on stagnation]. You'd simply say 'Oh, what's everybody using? Oh, Apple IIe, OK, that's it, end problem, Apple IIe, boy, that's for me ... Macintosh? Never heard of it!"

Doctorow: "I think the problem is that, as a society we've consistently choose the crappier and more available thing over the more beautiful and less available thing."

The last 5 years:

Doctorow: "In the last 5 years, Linux became useable. In the last 5 years we finally got. In the last 5 years we got Tivo. In the last five years we got 802.11 widespread. I mean, my life has been changed."

Sterling: "You mean, 'that fantastic innovation we saw until about 5 years ago.' ... I think [Innovation has] slowed to a crawl, and moving in a slow reverse, you're not going to see a lot of major innovation, outside of Linux --which is in danger of being outlawed. The 802.11b [phenomenon], same thing -- there are people who sit around all day trying to demonize 802.11b users and say that they're stealing -- 'the Parasitic Grid.' It's a social hack, but because of that, they're very vulnerable to political counter-hacks. They're not the same as genuine technical innovation. That's a difficulty."

Cultural spread and cultural inertia:

Doctorow: "There's an amazing story about the day someone sent the first hotmail message with 'Get your free email account at hotmail.com' at the bottom to India. The traffic statistics the next morning, they quintupled overnight, on the strength of one email."

On Copy Protection, the RIAA/MPAA, et cetera:

Sterling: "When will the U.S. snap? What will it take to put the genie back in the bottle, how many times will the genie have to be hit on the back of the head? What if someone accidentally breaks the bottle with his baton? What are we going to be left with that commands value? What can't we copy?"

Doctorow: "By an amazing coincidence, last week Congress held hearings about [copy protection in hardware] I think it's actually possible, I think it's actually possible, but the social consequence is quite horrendous. When Turing machines are outlawed, when universal computers that can do anything are no longer allowed to exist, then that kind of thing, I think the innovation we've seen over the last 20 years [will end].

This being SXSW Interactive, quite a few people in the audience were taking notes. Krow put his on LiveJournal, and I hope others will link to theirs below.

SnickleFritz writes "Monday the 18th at 9pm the Sundance Film channel will be broadcasting a documentary about the OSS Movement. It will feature interviews with Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman. It labels them as "computer visionaries." While it will probably be old news to most people here, I will still tape it and loan it to every OSS doubting Thomas in my shop." CD: It should be noted that cmdrtaco is in this, talking about free software while lounging on an inflatable sofa at linuxworld. Clearly you'll want to go buy a big screen TV to watch this. This is the same movie that was screened at SXSW last year and at LinuxWorld a few times. Other people featured in the movie include Michael Tiemann, Bruce Perens and Larry Augustin.

riiv writes "I saw the premiere of Bang The Machine tonight at SXSW 2002. The film is a documentary of the Street Fighter tournament scene. There's another screening March 15 so if you are near the Austin area, it is your moral obligation to watch it. I asked director Tamara Katepoo if they had a distributor lined up, unfortunely they don't. If you're looking for a film to distribute please get in touch with the film creators. The movie rocked and validated my wasted life ever since the purchase of Street Fighter 2 Japanese for SNES."

riiv writes "I saw the premiere of Bang The Machine tonight at SXSW 2002. The film is a documentary of the Street Fighter tournament scene. There's another screening March 15 so if you are near the Austin area, it is your moral obligation to watch it. I asked director Tamara Katepoo if they had a distributor lined up, unfortunely they don't. If you're looking for a film to distribute please get in touch with the film creators. The movie rocked and validated my wasted life ever since the purchase of Street Fighter 2 Japanese for SNES."