March 2010
48 posts
Watchemergentfutures:
Kirk Citron: And now, the real news
This is a TED video about the Long News project - what news will really matter in 10 or 100 years time. An interesting concept. See our next text post for more thoughts
US Army meets with Apple, discusses tech for... →
Rather than continuing to invest heaps of money to research its own devices, Maj. Gen. Justice wants to take a different approach: leveraging the knowledge and research of the commercial sector into the Army’s portable equipment. This approach makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. Companies like Apple have already laid a lot of the groundwork for developing durable and easily portable...
Shifting times - in the IT world
Just saw and retweeted a tweet by Clay Shirky that said:
Shopping for a Nexus and a netbook when it hit me that my phone will cost more than my computer.
It is probably true and say a lot of things about where the world is going…
A grand unified theory of AI | MITnews →
In the 1950s and ’60s, artificial-intelligence researchers saw themselves as trying to uncover the rules of thought. But those rules turned out to be way more complicated than anyone had imagined. Since then, artificial-intelligence (AI) research has come to rely, instead, on probabilities — statistical patterns that computers can learn from large sets of training data.
(via tweet by Plausible...
It’s China’s World. We’re Just Living in It. -... →
It’s easy to forget that big international bodies like the IMF and the World Bank were created by just a few nations, led by the United States. These economic organizations have global reach, but that globe used to be dominated by the American superpower, and their policies were suffused with U.S. values. When Beijing was a small-stakes player its leaders didn’t always like the...
Final destination Iran? - Herald Scotland | News |... →
March 14, 2010:
Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.
The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included...
Are Microsoft Office and OpenOffice irrelevant? →
infoneer-pulse:
While I’m sure I’m not alone in this, it’s no secret that Microsoft continues to print billions of dollars in profits each quarter from its Office business. But I wonder how sustainable that business is.
At some point consumers are going to notice they don’t use Office very often. Perhaps never. (Yes, CNET points to people who “plan race course tracks in OneNote [and] people...
Brain research goes deeper and in real time
The last decade brain research have taken giant steps and the main reason is the increased availability of better tools. One popular and non-intrusive method is fMRI. By just looking at the patterns of blood flow in the brain you get a lot of information of what is going on. The problem is just that:
MRI is like viewing a city from space. You can see the brightness of the lights and the number of...
UK Conservative party is using Crowdsourcing:... →
There is no doubt that crowdsourcing is on it’s way to change the world. Not least the world of politics… Here is an early and somewhat feeble attempt from the Conservatives in the UK to get help from the public to analyze the Labour budget and identify weak points.
It don’t seem like a well thought through project but it is interesting to see that even conservatives, who seems...
“Rupert Murdoch has declared surrender. The future defeated him.
By building...”
– Rupert’s pathetic pay wall « BuzzMachine (via Techrisk)
Study: online cheating doesn’t help →
infoneer-pulse:
David Pritchard, a physics professor at MIT, recently conducted a study on cheating (see Cheaters Never Win, at Least in Physics, Wired Campus). Some of the data came from an online homework system, which was able to show how long students spent answering individual questions. Taking less than a minute to correctly answer a complex question was considered an indicator of...
FT.com / Telecoms - Data traffic outstrips mobile... →
“This is a significant milestone with some 400m mobile broadband subscriptions now generating more data traffic than the voice traffic from the total 4.6bn mobile subscriptions around the world,” said Hans Vestberg, Ericsson chief executive.
This tipping point means that the business models for communication from now on will change even faster. If the operators are not fast enough in tricking...
Six Industries in Search of Survival - ... →
Virtually all companies need to aggressively formulate and execute strategic responses to the overarching forces that are influencing their industry. The process begins with a dispassionate, focused analysis of existing assets and capabilities, and an assessment of their “fit” in a rapidly changing global landscape. Through that analysis, the path forward will become clear. It will mean holding...
The China Challenge - from Strategy+Business →
Corporate leaders who see China as a large but still-emerging market must now regard it as a diverse and immense group of global consumers. Those who see Chinese companies as partners in joint ventures must come to see those companies as active, highly capable global competitors. And those who see the Chinese government as simultaneously welcoming and opaque must recognize it as an active,...
Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely |... →
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
This is a telematics-based crime that affect relatively few cars and was committed by a simple computer intrusion by a former employee. The...
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WatchWhy teaching is ‘not like making motorcars’ - CNN.com
Sir Ken Robinson makes his really good and well formulated point again - here at the CNN.
WatchA really interesting and insightful presentation by Jesse Schell, which extends the thinking about how life might be more game like into a possible future world where everything generates a ping and 50 points.
To me this is also a logical consequence of that we are slowly understanding that feedback on the right level is the key to both change and learning - two desperately sought after concepts...
ClubOrlov: The Five Stages of Collapse →
When listening to the Long Now Foundation speech by Orlov some time ago I never thought deeper about the order if the different stages of collapse. Now when I stumble upon them again they doesn’t sound as logical as they did a year or so ago. They might be correct when describing the collapse of the Soviet Union, but how generic are these steps? Here they are
Stages of Collapse
Stage 1:...
“…when Joseph Tainter or Jared Diamond write of societal collapse, we are...”
– Resource Insights: An uneven collapse (Hint: It’s already happening)
Media Channel 2.0 — Blog — As The Political System... →
“Today, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors. That helps explain why 75% of voters are angry at the policies of the...
Humans were once an endangered species →
Modern humans are known to have less genetic variation than other living primates, even though our current population is many orders of magnitude greater. Researchers studying specific genetic lineages have proposed a number of explanations for this, such as recent “bottlenecks”, which are events in which a significant proportion of the population is killed or prevented from...
“Cloud computing will become so pervasive that by 2012, one out of five...”
– Gartner: 1 in 5 businesses will dump all IT assets as they move to cloud | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld (via interestingsnippets) (via infoneer-pulse)
“There were two planets talking to each other, and one said:
- “I’m...”
– Giddens runs an eco-related joke in a video of panel discussion from LSE February 16
“”
– How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck [video] | Switch | Fast Company
Tips for good mission statements:
Use concrete language
Talk about the why
Write a mission statement that means something. And I’ll give you a hint: If it contains the word “solution,”...
The BBC has a jolly decent go at leading its... →
What is the future of BBC? Adam Gordon is commenting on their recent report with proposals to the BBC Trust, where they seems to aim at limiting their effort to the areas where they can contribute with original content and not compete in areas where there are others who can provide content.
But as Adam points out: it is really all about politics!
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“Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief...”
– George Monbiot in the Guardian
Cyborgia Now! Your computer really is a part of... →
Heidegger was (of course) right!
…people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.
(via chrbutler)
Bad employee! 12% knowingly violate company IT... →
The low number surprise me… and not only me. Read the short article and don’t miss the comments!
infoneer-pulse:
By now, it’s practically a mantra that the biggest problem with corporate IT security is the employees themselves. However, we usually assume that’s due to ignorant users or poorly enforced policies. Not so for a chunk of the US working population—according to a survey...
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Club of Amsterdam blog: The world needs a new... →
As taxation is both an administrative and a political issue of prime importance to all societies and their power-structures, are changes in modes of taxation both rare and slow. Income taxes, profit taxes and VAT dominate, and are so heavily entrenched in our societies so we hardly even notice how outdated this combination has become.
Even if the taxation is merely one of the systems that need...
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Free will is an illusion, biologist says →
However, Cashmore argues that there are deeper explanations for why we think we have free will. He thinks that there must be a genetic basis for consciousness and the associated belief in free will. Consciousness has an evolutionary selective advantage: it provides us with the illusion of responsibility, which is beneficial for society, if not for individuals as well. In this sense,...
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Five things we need to know about technological... →
Through a tweet by @klang67 I was directed to a blog post that republish a very thoughtful speech from 1998 by Neil Postman, a famous and insightful thinker about how technology is affecting human life.
In this speech he delivers five important ideas or insights about the nature of technologies in a human context:
All technological change is a trade-off - ’“What will a new...
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“if this is the information age, what do our children know that our parents...”
– Edge: TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY By David Gelernter
No Consensus on Future of Nation-State →
IEET poll showed that our views about the future of the nation state is not clear at all.
A special report on managing information: Data,... →
An in depth piece on the ongoing data revolution which undoubtably will affect many areas. I agree that this development is really important, but what are the limitations and can all this data have negative effects rather than positive?
Again and again we come to the conclusion that more data rather distance us from knowledge and wisdom rather then the opposite. So how stupid will we become due...
Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! →
infoneer-pulse:
Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. Many people have written about this topic, in EDUCAUSE Review and...
Social Networks Play a Major Part in How We Get... →
The latest study from Pew Internet analyzes the news consumers in America and various different ways of finding news. Based on a sample of 2,259 adults, the study reveals that three fourths of the people (75%) who find news online get it either forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites, and half of them (52%) forward the news through those means.
Another proof of that we are...
