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Beautiful bodies |
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However, artificial beings need not be invisible or look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator". "My dream would be to create an artificial man that does not look like a robot but like a beautiful, graceful human being. The artificial man should be beautiful".  Nadia Thalman's hopes for beautiful robots may become reality in the work of MIRALab, a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva dedicated to realistic modelling of human functionalities. The laboratory has produced an artificial Marylyn Monroe showing just how beautiful artificial creatures can be, and there is a biography featuring details of her career and her - however virtual - love life. Yet beautiful creatures have been made before, at leas on the movie screen. Frank-N-furter, the protagonist of the Rocky Horror picture show ("I've been making a man / with blond hair and a tan / and he is good for relieving my /tension) did set remakrable esthetic standards.
While in Hindu mythology, avatars are bodies chosen by gods for their representation on earth, often animals such as swans or horses, the avatars populating cyberspace have a different function. The cyber bodies of real people, often 3 dimensional images of creatures whose aesthetics reflects both the tastes prevalent in the entertainment and advertising industries as the state of art in visual representation.
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Vinton Cerf
Addressed as one of the fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf together with Robert Kahn developed the TCP/IP protocol suite, up to now the de facto-communication standard for the Internet, and also contributed to the development of other important communication standards. The early work on the protocols broke new ground with the realization of a multi-network open architecture.
In 1992, he co-founded the  Internet Society where he served as its first President and later Chairman.
Today, Vinton Cerf is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at WorldCom, one of the world's most important ICT companies
Vinton Cerf's web site: http://www.wcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up/
 http://www.isoc.org/
http://www.wcom.com/
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