I thought this was a particularly startling look at how fast we are accelerating technologically. A big lesson we can learn from the past is that we have virtually no idea what the future will look like!
I'm almost alone in the building today. Everyone else has gone to Chengde for the weekend. The ITP organises these huge group outings a couple of times a year, but I usually miss the e-mails. It makes for a peaceful day in the office anyway and work is getting done.
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Anyway, this post is a quick tech note. I use Meebo as my instant messenger client. It's entirely web based, so you don't need another program running in the background constantly giving you adverts or using up more memory. It also allows you to integrate various accounts: Hotmail, Yahoo, Google Talk amongst others (not Skype - yet). I use instant messaging as a vital part of my work, talking with my collaborators in various continents.
The one drawback has always been that file transfer was not possible - until now! I always had to switch back to msn in order to send and receive files but now I see no reasons to use msn any more.
Of course if you're bothered by the design of Meebo there are dozens of Greasemonkey scripts you can use to make the interface more to your liking.
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Cory Doctorow, from Boingboing was in Beijing this week and spoke at the Bookworm. Sadly I couldn't make it, but the video is up on Youtube. Cory talks about the future of information dissemination, copywrite, Web 2.0, piracy, social networking and more.
Have a good weekend!
I was going to blog about this later, but I can't wait. I'm currently sitting at home nursing a horrible air-conditioning induced cold, but watching these 20 minute videos online, I'm absolutely mesmerised.
The TED conference (Technology. Entertainment. Design), held every year in Monterey California, gets together the real global innovators in so many areas, from experts in computing, consciousness, architecture, global poverty, future problems and solutions for humanity, ageing, slowness, happiness, and much, much more to talk about where we are today and where we will be in one, five, ten, fifty years down the line.
Many, many videos are online and almost every one I've seen so far has made me excited by the prospects in so many disciplines. A lot of it is speculation, but it's speculation from world experts who have already made a difference. It's inspiring and it's hugely exciting.
The first talk I watched is currently featured on the home page of SciTalks which I spoke about here, and I was immediately hooked.
I should be resting properly and although watching these videos isn't exactly stressful it is really motivating me to get up and get things done, anything, important things, to be a part of all this.
Below I've embedded some of the videos I've watched so far which have impressed me most but please if you find other videos which you are inspired by tell me.
Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty: No more boring data.
Neil Gershenfeld on Fablabs and personal empowerment for individual driven technological developments:
Aubrey De Grey on the future of longevity and the possibilities of living to 1000:
Burt Rutan on the future of space flight:
Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth and the future of imagery on the web:
Dan Dennet on dangerous Memes:
Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing:
I don't know if you can view my profile but I will continue to update my favourites as I watch more which I think are worth a viewing here.
Although I've embedded these by linking to the Youtube videos you can watch them directly from the TED site (link above).
This eight minute video is extremely exciting. I'd come across the ideas behind using semantic links within photos to create a whole much more powerful than the sum of its parts, but this short movie from a recent conference is well worth a look to see the incredible potential from something as simple as tagging. I've written a post a while back on tagging within personal computers because the idea of folders seems completely outdated to me. The post seemed a little dry, so take a look at the movie and realise what power can be gained from this new, but incredibly simple concept.
The link for the video came from Bad Astronomy Blog and you will find more information on this sort of system in Data Mining - one of my favourite tech blogs.
This step seems to be the difference between a random collection of cells to a brain with neurons connected by synapses. The numbers involved with such combinatorics are mindblowing and the emergent phenomena will be fascinating to see.
There's a new toy to the left of the blog which I'm giving a test-drive. I was contacted by Criteo to see if I would like to use this product which they've developed for blogs.
The information they gave me on this auto blog-rolling tool is:
What's it all about?
AutoRoll is the blogroll of your readers. It's a widget that displays links to the blogs that your readers are visiting the most often.
How does it work?
We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.
What are the benefits for you?
First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blogroll since it's based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will attract highly qualified incoming traffic to your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers that have a strong affinity for your blog.
Sounds clever so I'll see if it's useful. I guess it will take some time to collect data about the readers of this blog.
Something very strange is going on today! First my ipod has inexplicably died overnight (inexplicably other than falling onto the tracks at Munich railway station 6 months back). Died as in the hard drive refuses to move. This was always going to be the portent to a slightly odd day and we're only half way through.
My local mail account then packed up, suddenly it says it's too full though I had deleted a large file several days ago, purged it and hadn't received anything unwieldy since.
30 seconds later my hotmail account told me that I had sent the maximum number of messages in a 24 hour period. I've sent less than 10, as far as I'm aware, and I find it hard to believe that this is stretching my bandwidth.
30 seconds after this my gmail account opens but refuses to let me compose a mail. I am now disconnected from the outside world apart from this blog!!! Is the Nanny just having a particularly spiteful day?
Not sure where this is leading to but it's all pretty tiresome.
Anybody with a Pro Flickr account will be pleased to know that subsets of sets has now been implemented. This feature has been a while coming and members have been champing at the bit for it. This is a huge improvement on the previous tools for organisation. Thanks Flickr.
Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes still haven't released their documentation and until they do I'm not going to spend hours trying to do what may be impossible. This technology promises so much but I haven't been particularly impressed by what's been done so far.
