Visions of the 21st Century

What Will Replace The Internet? First it will become wireless and ubiquitous, crawling into the woodwork and perhaps even under our skin. Eventually, it will disappear. The Internet seems to have just arrived, so how can we possibly imagine what will replace it? In truth, early versions of the Net have been around since the 1960s and ’70s, but only after the mid-1990s did it begin to have a serious public impact. Since 1994, the population of users has grown from about 13 million to more than 300 million around the world. About half are in North America, and most–despite significant progress in rolling out high-speed access–still reach the Internet by way of the public telephone network. What will the Internet be like 20 years from now?

Site – http://www.time.com

Future Watch: A.I. comes of age

These are indeed nice days for artificial intelligence researchers. While Stair’s performance might not seem much better than that of a dog fetching the newspaper, it’s a technological tour de force unimaginable just a few years ago. “Stair, please fetch the stapler from the lab,” says the man seated at a conference room table. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, standing nearby, replies in a nasal monotone, “I will get the stapler for you.” Stair pivots and wheels into the adjacent lab, avoiding a number of obstacles on the way. Its stereoscopic camera eyes swivel back and forth, taking in the contents of the room. It seems to think for a moment, then approaches a table for a closer look at an oblong metallic object. Its articulated arm reaches out, swivels here and there, and then gently picks up the stapler with long, rubber-clad fingers. It heads back to the conference room. “Here is your stapler,” says Stair, handing it to the man. “Have a nice day.” Indeed, Stair represents a new wave of AI, one that integrates learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech and natural-language processing. It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the “hype cycle” popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance.

Site – http://www.computerworld.com

Site – http://stair.stanford.edu/

State board to hear science testimony

The (Texas) State Board of Education spent the morning hearing from members of the public regarding proposed changes to how science is taught in Texas schools. Although the standards cover a range of topics and changes, most of this morning’s discussion was about proposed changes on the teaching of the origins and evolution of life on Earth (aka evolution).

The first thing that came to mind here is the seven day theory religious nuts bringing the hate on evolution again. Turns out they wanted to teach the ’strengths and weaknesses’ of the theory of evolution. I agree that when we teach evolution the first point that should be made is that it is a theory. However, I believe it is pretty much accepted as scientific fact. So then, what are the ‘weaknesses’ of evolution? First Google result yields…

Site – http://www.statesman.com

Robot “Twendy-One” has personal sense of touch

Have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? Japanese scientists have developed a robot called who can help you do just that – AND bring breakfast to your table.  The 17-stone robot called Twendy-One was developed at Waseda University in Tokyo.  Built with arms and hands the size ‘of an average adult female’, Twendy has enough strength to support humans as they sit up and stand, and can pick up and manipulate delicate objects such as a drinking straw.  In a demonstration the robot picked up a loaf of bread without crushing it, served toast out of a toaster and delivered a food trays to someone in a wheelchair.

Site – http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Brave New World: More Digital, Less Physical

Yesterday, I was with my wife in the L’Occitane store. The shelves were filled with fragrances, soaps, lotions: all sorts of handcrafted beauty products. It occured to me while looking at the labels that I have no idea how these products were made. In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person.  My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.  Yet, while looking at the bottles in the L’Occitane store, I wondered: could it be that the world is shifting from physical to digital? At first glance it is impossible, because we live in a physical world. But increasingly, we are surrounded by all sorts of software that fundamentally works differently from hardware. In this post, we’ll look at the interplay between physical and digital and argue that we are, in fact, heading towards a world dominated by digital.

Site – http://www.readwriteweb.com

The Ram Challenge

I got a little sick to my stomach today. No, it wasn’t the sub par Chinese food that I ate. It was something that saw on TV while eating my sub par Chinese food. The obscene spectacle of douchebaggery that is  The Ram Challenge! Now that “We the people” own GM, Chrysler, and probably soon Ford. I seriously think that they should reconsider wasting our money on this kind of crap. They are going to let the macho men (cowboys, firemen, military) depicted in the commercial drive all these companies and this country into the ground. Maybe, If this were the trailer for the next Vin Diesel movie it might be OK, but this is a legitimate publicly owned company selling a very real product.  They are expounding the virtues of a truck that you can drive through flamethrowers and exploding houses like its some kind of movie! Well… its not a movie and I think it’s time to come back to reality and realize that this is not an acceptable practice anymore. Now that I think about it a little more, it’s actually making me laugh because it’s just so ridiculous that this is real. It seems more like it should have been one of those fake commercials before Tropic Thunder or something.

Site – http://ramchallenge.yahoo.com/

Robots that fetch

Whether you would care to admit it or not, man / machine hybrids are already walking amongst us, and robots are doing everything from building cars to managing the BCS and the stock market. I, for one, welcome and embrace our new technological partners (Note: partners NOT masters – lets not get silly here).

It took Norma Margeson a few minutes to learn to control the skinny metal robot. But instead of viewing it as a machine, she soon warmed up to it as a companion. “Oh, I love it,” she said. “I think it is such a unique character. It has a personality all its own. It can be a friend, a very good friend.” Margeson, an artist from Marietta, Georgia, is learning how a health care robot dubbed El-E (pronounced “Ellie”) can help her accomplish some simple household tasks. El-E is being tested by Margeson and other patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Right now Kemp and his colleagues are focusing on programming El-E to locate and fetch common household items such as a hairbrush, a bottle of pills, a cell phone or a TV remote. El-E also can open doors. A robot with those skills could provide some independence for patients with motor impairments and a respite for caregivers. Kemp said he hopes his robots could help people in wheelchairs, the elderly and those with such diseases as arthritis and diabetes.

Site – http://www.cnn.com

The 100 most important inventions of 2008

TIME magazine recently released their 100 most important inventions of 2008. Here is a quick snippet of the list:

1. The Retail DNA Test *Check* (See image above)
2. The Tesla Roadster *Check*
3. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter *Check*
4. Hulu.com *WTF*
5. The Large Hadron Collider *Check* (Tough I might bump it higher than the Lunar Orbiter)

Seriously TIME? Hulu.com is a more important invention than The Large Hadron Collider? So I site that basically copied YouTube and lets you watch such ‘quality programming’ as SNL and 30 Rock is more important than unlocking the secrets of the universe? Don’t get me wrong I love to watch the Daily Show on Hulu and that keeps me from having cable TV in my apartment, but that doesn’t really compare to what the LHC can tell us about who we are. Seriously half of the things on this list are not even inventions! Seems like, whatever company owns TIME must own Hulu too.

Site – http://www.time.com

Less Than 20 Years Until First Contact?

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has come online with its initial configuration of 42 antennas. The project, led by the SETI Institute, is a non-governmental project funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in which eventually 350 small radio antennas will scan the sky for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Senior SETI scientist Seth Shostak said that the array could become strong enough by 2025 to look deep enough into space to find extraterrestrial signals. “We’ll find E.T. within two dozen years,” he said. That’s, of course, assuming the distance we can look into space will be increased with new instruments yet to be built, and that the projected computing power under Moore’s Law actually happens. Shostak estimated that if the assumptions about computing power and the strength of forthcoming research instruments are correct, we should be able to search as far out as 500 light years into space by 2025, a distance he predicted would be enough–based on scientist Frank Drake’s estimate of there being 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of creating radio transmitters–to find evidence of intelligent life that is broadcasting its existence.

Site – http://www.universetoday.com

Asian nations vie for stake in moon

When India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter reaches its destination on 8 November, it will join two others – and neither is American, Russian or European. For the first time, probes from China, Japan and India will be orbiting the moon. This signals the latest stage in a new space race in which Asian nations are seeking a place alongside the established space powers. Both China and India are looking for helium-3 in the lunar crust as a possible fuel for nuclear fission reactors on Earth. The moon is estimated to have a millions tonnes of the stuff, the result of billions of years of bombardment by the solar winds.

Site – http://www.newscientist.com

Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time

It’s called “The Internet of Things” — at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.  “If we can imagine it, there’s a good chance it can be programmed,” wrote Vint Cerf, the original Internet evangelist, on the official Google blog.  “The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.”  At the nodes of this all-encompassing web of objects is RFID technology.  The reason why RFID is often called next-generation bar code is that the technology is more accurate, scanners can read more objects with less directional contact, and smaller chips can contain a larger quantity of information.  Bruce Sterling, one of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature in the 1980s and an active sci-fi guru, neologized the term “spime” in 2004 to refer to any object that can define itself in terms of both space and time, i.e. using GPS to locate itself and RFID to trace its own history.

Site – http://edition.cnn.com

Texas adds most wind power capacity

Texas led all U.S. states in the amount of wind power capacity added in the third quarter, and now stands not only as a national leader in wind energy but an international one as well.  The third quarter also pushed Texas past the 6 gigawatt plateau, ensuring its rank among global leaders. According to AWEA, only three countries — Germany, India and Spain — had more capacity by the end of 2007. 

Site – http://www.bizjournals.com

Site – http://www.pickensplan.com