Thinking About Tomorrow

The Wall Street Journal looks ahead 10 years–2018–to imagine how technology will change the way we shop, learn and entertain ourselves, and how it will it change the way we get news, protect our privacy, and connect with friends. Many of the changes will come from a couple of rapidly improving technologies: mobile devices and global positioning systems.

Site – http://online.wsj.com

The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet

From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras, 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence, the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. Bret Swanson & George Gilder estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (10²¹ bytes), or one million million billion bytes. “The U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006. Internet growth at these levels will require a dramatic expansion of bandwidth, storage, and traffic management capabilities in core, edge, metro, and access networks. A recent Nemertes Research study estimates that these changes will entail a total new investment of some $137 billion in the worldwide Internet infrastructure by 2010. In the U.S., currently lagging Asia, the total new network investments will exceed $100 billion by 2012.”

Site – http://www.discovery.org

Gustav Klimt

Klimt’s ‘Golden Phase’ was marked by positive critical reaction and success. Many of his paintings from this period utilized gold leaf; the prominent use of gold can first be traced back to Pallas Athene (1898) ,and The Kiss (1907 – 1908). Klimt traveled little but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery. Between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing he designed.

Site – http://en.wikipedia.org

M. C. Escher

Escher’s first print of an impossible reality was Still Life and Street, 1937. His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work also include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to morph fish in water into birds in the sky; Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective. Although Escher did not have a mathematical training—his understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive—Escher’s work has a strong mathematical component, and more than a few of the worlds which he drew are built around impossible objects such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle.

Site – http://en.wikipedia.org

The Universe within 1 billion Light Years

Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are not uniformly distributed in the Universe, instead they collect into vast clusters and sheets and walls of galaxies interspersed with large voids in which very few galaxies seem to exist. The map above shows many of these superclusters including the Virgo supercluster – the fairly minor supercluster of which our galaxy is just a minor member. The entire map is approximately 7 percent of the diameter of the entire visible Universe. Individual galaxies are far too small to appear on this map, each point represents a group of galaxies.

Site – http://www.ldps.ws

Let a thousand genomes bloom

Genetic researchers in China, Britain and the United States are teaming up to unravel the full genetic code of at least 1,000 people around the world – an unprecedented scientific project that could cost tens of millions of dollars and eventually reveal the roots of hundreds of diseases. The 1000 Genomes Project will examine the human genome at a level of detail that no one has done before,” Richard Durbin of Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who is the project consortium’s co chair, said in today’s announcement. “Such a project would have been unthinkable two years ago. Today, thanks to amazing strides in sequencing technology, bioinformatics and population genomics, it is now within our grasp.

Site – http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.^[1] His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí’s artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Site – http://en.wikipedia.org

Artificial Intelligence explains the Singularity

The technological singularity takes place when the human race succeeds in creating an A.I being more intelligent than any human could ever be. Let us call it Alpha. Since the act of creating Artificial Intelligence is a task that benefits directly from the intelligence level of the creator, this more-intelligent-than-men being would surely be faster and more efficient at creating his own A.I being, let us call him Beta. This second generation being would too be better than its predecessor, and could in turn create a third one, Gamma, who is even more powerful, and so on. As capacity increases, the median generation time decreases, resulting in an exponential rate of evolution that quickly becomes asymptotic, at which point it becomes difficult to speculate further.

Site – http://www.youtube.com

Semantic Web takes big step forward

The Semantic Web, a concept tossed around for years as a Web extension to make it easier to find and group information, is getting a critical boost Tuesday from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C will announce publication of SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) query technology, a Semantic Web component enabling people to focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used to store data, W3C said. The potential of the Semantic Web cannot be underestimated. By scanning the Web on behalf of users, even Google’s ad-based business model could be impacted, an analyst said. SPARQL queries express high-levels goals and are easier to extend to unanticipated data sources. The technology overcomes limitations of local searches and single formats, according to W3C.

Site – http://news.yahoo.com

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions. This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real.

Site – http://www.nytimes.com

Biggest black hole in the cosmos discovered

The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever before. The black hole is about six times as massive as the previous record holder and in fact weighs as much as a small galaxy. It lurks 3.5 billion light years away, and forms the heart of a quasar called OJ287. A quasar is an extremely bright object in which matter spiralling into a giant black hole emits copious amounts of radiation. But rather than hosting just a single colossal black hole, the quasar appears to harbour two – a setup that has allowed astronomers to accurately ‘weigh’ the larger one.

Site – http://space.newscientist.com

Wikia Search to offer first peek

In an e-mail sent to the Wikia Search mailing list on December 24, Wales wrote that he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form. “We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken,” he wrote.

Wikia Search, which aims to allow people to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, will have open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces. The search platform includes the Grub search project, acquired by Wikia in July, which employs user-donated distributed processing power to crawl the Web.

Wales, who also co-founded user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, hopes Wikia Search will eventually rival other search companies by making the way in which search results are arrived at more “transparent.”

Site – http://www.news.com