It all goes down tomorrow night. The Canal Room, 4 bands of kids, 4 celebrity artists, lots of fun and a ton of good.

In an early entrée to the Canal Room, four bands of students from Education Through Music will be performing with their celebrity coaches. The night features Weekend Top 30 and WKTU’s “Hollywood” Hamilton as our MC; Twisted Sister’s Jay Jay French; The The Mooney Suzuki’s Sammy James, Jr.; Rachel Platten; Goldspots Siddhartha Khosla ; a special message from The Wu Tang Clan’s RZA; and many, many more.

Tickets include four-hour open bar, hors d’oeuvres, live performances and a DJ’d “after party”. (don’t forget to enter the code “alldaybuffet” for discounted tix).

All proceeds will benefit ETM’s music education programs in inner-city NYC schools.

Tickets are almost sold out so get your tix now, RSVP on facebook or check out ETM online for more information.

A copy is available online for teachers, students, and designers to download. Dig in!

Via Core77.

I Ran into my friend Chet as I was leaving the office today and he told me about the ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) spring thesis show up the road at NYU/Tisch so I went to go check it out. The exhibition displayed pieces of interactive sight, sound, and physical objects created by the student artists of ITP. Inside there was everything from wearable synthesizers to soft shell exoskeletons in prototype form; Gizmodo this morning covered a few of them in case you missed it. At times I was overwhelmed by the amount of energy in the room, a ton of people showed up to this. Here is a full list of the projects with descriptions. Be sure to keep an eye out for some of these students, their work was impressive.

Above image of project “Teste Touch”- A featured art installation where the user’s touch and the temperature of the environment makes two giant testicles retract and descend.

Waaaay <30 green thumber Hunter Gross is inspired to inspire others his age (and then some) after learning about the effects that global warming has on the planet. The 12-year-old entrepreneur is eager to demonstrate how small changes can add up to make a big impact. To do this Hunter and his parents created Project Kool, a company that creates and supplies re-usable lunch bags to school children. The goal of PK is ultimately to cut down on the 20 million paper and plastic bags that end up in landfills each year by encouraging his fellow classmates to utilize the all natural Project Kool Lunch Sak - a la old school lunch boxes minus the over abundance of plastic. The site contains everything from “Did You Know” facts (i.e. that it takes approximately 75,000 trees to print the Sunday edition of the NY Times) to interactive green games like tic-tac-toe via aerosol cans vs. the planet. If Hunter Ran It, all elementary schools across the US would join forces to become a Kool Skool in an attempt to decrease the 100 billion plastic bags thrown away each year within the US.

Last night in Los Angeles, Participant Productions honored 5 films from around the world by giving their filmmakers $5,000 grants. The grants are awarded by Participant, makers of Charlie Wilson’s War and the new Standard Operating Procedure and other amazing films, as part of its Outstanding Filmmakers Awards Program. Learn more about the 5 grant winners — each film links to a page on PangeaDay.org

From Africa, DEAR MANDELA (documentary) by Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza (South Africa)

From Asia/Australia, I REMEMBER LEBANON (documentary) by Zeina Aboul Hosn (Lebanon)

From Europe, MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER (documentary) by Saleyha Ashan (UK)

From North America, MOVING WINDMILLS (documentary) by Ari Kushnir (US)

From South America, PAPIROFLEXIA (animated) by Joaquin Baldwin (Paraguay

via TEDblog

image via larsenidealog.com

Victorians appeal to us in several ways, not only out of a faux nostalgia. These were people who were profoundly crafty, inclined to working on combustion engines in the tool shed at the end of the garden. It was a place where rank amateurs could make a contribution to knowledge in their spare time, a motive that is a great motivating hope here at This Blog. Several institutions of the Victorian period, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and great swathes of the periods of natural history came from amateurs working together in a thoroughly distributed way.

The anime freak in me has been into fantasy steampunk work like Galaxy Railways, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Full-Metal Alchemist. But work by William Gibson, Michael Moorcock and K.W. Jeter are closer to the origins of the genre, I think. If you’re interesting in 2008 Steampunk culture, check out the James Gang, an act that regularly performs at NYC hotspot The Box & who are opening up a shop in Nolita this year, with products under the design name TJG Engineering. Also, peep BoingBoing for a lot of news & projects of interest around steam-stuff.

via The New York Times, image of The Jones Gang via the New York Times by Robert Wright

Grant McCracken quote via This Blog Sits At The

Victorian Computer Mod Image via Boston.com via steampunkworkshop.com

via Mashable!

image via BusinessWeek

1. Check out the impressive, well-designed conference website

2. Stunners we’d love to meet from IDEO, Pandora Radio, a bunch of Universities & VC Funds will be there, so go & represent!

3. Sign up today using code MASHEAC for $20 off.

The event has been held for the past 23 years and is UCLA Anderson’s largest and highest-profile student organized event. The conference will focus on:
• Promoting entrepreneurship and fostering innovation.
• Providing a rich learning experience for entrepreneurs, students and business professionals.
• Sharing valuable insight on topics in entrepreneurship, critical business skills and emerging opportunities.
• Offering a networking venue for entrepreneurs, students and business professionals.

Using the concept of ideas and innovation, attendees will experience the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation in the keynote presentations, panels, workshops, fast-pitch competition and networking opportunities. The event unites students, alumni, business executives, and entrepreneurs for a full day packed with valuable business insights.

via Mashable

Nokia’s fired out some interesting concept phones this year, but this newest “People First” design centers more on the functionality of the device than its physical shape. The idea is based around what Nokia calls “three human universals of the way people think about communication” which are time, lists and people. So instead of being the standard pile of multi-option menus, the UI relies on a scrolling history list, with the most relevant and recent things popping onto the top. The phone would have a kind of dual-layer display: the main monochrome “history” scroller, and a smaller color display that deals with your selected options. At heart it’s very simple, having just the “mobile essentials” of phone (or push-to-talk), camera, calendar and calculator. But this is where hacking comes in: the idea is that the phone would have widgets support, a simple and accessible programming language and openly available software and hardware specs. Presumably Nokia imagines a host of applications would arise, better-suited to user’s needs than “default” applications, and saving them the bother of designing them too.

Via Kit Eaton at Gizmodo

This Portland-based company gives people the chance to work on any career of their choosing, with a mentor…The available opportunities range from bizzarre to unique and usually unaccessible to what you’d expect…Alpaca Rancher?  Check.  Baseball Announcer?  Check.  Broadway Producer?  Check.

The range is insane…check it.

via NYT “Internship at any Age

Image via Springwise.com