Future

[Prospective] A remote control for your life

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A bit update but still interesting, "A remote control for your life" by Charles Mann in Technology Review (subscription needed).

The plan will go into gear this summer, when DoCoMo introduces a new and radically more versatile type of phone. Like a regular cell phone, it will make and receive telephone calls. Like a regular i-mode device, it will let you send and receive e-mail, play online games, and access any one of the 78,000 i-mode-compatible websites around the world. And like other DoCoMo phones, it will take photographs, read bar codes, and play downloaded music over headphones or tiny but surprisingly good speakers. But it will also contain a special chip made by Sony that lets it pay for groceries, serve as personal identification, unlock doors, operate appliances, buy movie and subway tickets, and perform dozens of other tasks.

[Prospective] Alan Moore still on the edge

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Alan Moore on Salon.com. Very smart.

I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from.

This remind me the quote from Marshall McLuhan:

« Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors »

[Prospective] A remote control to stop cars

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Read in the guardian:

A hi-tech device that can bring speeding cars to a halt at the flick of a switch is set to become the latest weapon in the fight against crime. Police forces in Britain and the US have ordered tests of the new system that delivers a blast of radio waves powerful enough to knock out vital engine electronics, making the targeted vehicle stall and slowly come to a stop.

Is this the future: simpsons-like cops eating muffins and clicking on button to stop cars? Funny. But it is a pity the cars slowly stop, it would be better with a brutal ejection of the evil guys...

[Prospective] SciFi inspiration as usual

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RedHerring about this interesting fact:

How many management fads have their origins in science fiction or mysticism? There's at least one: the notion of collective intelligence, a good idea that has some very weird origins.(...) A few aisles over in science fiction, you can find a second notion of collective intelligence. This one envisions an actual autonomous intelligence that arises (through some mysterious process) within computer networks, just as individual consciousness arises (through some mysterious process) from neurons. Think of the consciousness that speaks to Case at the end of William Gibson's Neuromancer, or the voodoo deities that haunt the Net in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

[Prospective] How to lure scientists

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The International Herald Tribune about how to call scientists back home. This is still a hot topic!

The world's scientists are like a flock of flamingos that migrates from briny lakes when they dry up and returns only when the lagoons are replenished. (...) A few years ago, gatherings like these offered ample opportunity to bemoan the flight of bright researchers to enticing jobs across the Atlantic in the United States. Yet now the debate has clearly shifted from worrying about brain drain to brainstorming about practical strategies to "circulate" researchers between nations.

[Prospective] The 21st Century at Work

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Another RAND Corp report worth to check: The 21st Century at Work:Forces Shaping the Future Workforce and Workplace in the United States by Lynn A. Karoly, Constantijn W. A. Panis. Chapter 3 (Chapter Three:THE INFORMATION AGE AND BEYOND: THE REACH OF TECHNOLOGY) and 5 (IMPLICATIONS FOR WORK IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY) are the most informative even though it is not so rocket science...

What are the forces that will continue to shape the U.S. workforce and workplace over the next 10 to 15 years? With its eye on forming sound policy and helping stakeholders in the private and public sectors make informed decisions, the U.S. Department of Labor asked RAND to look at the future of work. The authors analyze trends in and the implications of shifting demographic patterns, the pace of technological change, and the path of economic globalization.

[Prospective] Seminal paper about NetWar

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Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, a report for RAND Corporation:

Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better. This paper is largely drawn (with updates added) from Chapter 10 of our forthcoming book,

[Prospective] Yet Another Silicon Valley-Based Thing

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Clustering innovative institutions is always based on the same model: Silicon Valley... In France, the minister of economy wants to extend the success of Crolles 2 (where Philips, Motorola and ST Microelectronics invested $1,4bn) to other areas. I am not sure the Silicon Valley model could be extended. La tribune:

Par pôle de compétitivité, il entend "la mise en synergie d'un tissu d'entreprises, d'une part, de capacités de recherche et de formation, d'autre part, sur la base d'une vision stratégique partagée du développement d'un territoire et d'un secteur d'activité dominant". (...) une franchise fiscale et des allégements de charges sociales pour les activités localisées à l'intérieur d'une zone délimitée du pôle ; et des subventions aux projets élaborés et mis en oeuvre dans le cadre de ces pôles." Reste aussi à dresser la liste de ces futurs pôles de compétitivité sans se fâcher avec personne : d'où l'idée d'un "appel à projets". Selon Nicolas Sarkozy, la France pourrait avoir 4 ou 5 pôles de compétence technologiques, mais aussi un dizaine, voire une vingtaine de pôle de compétitivité destinés à soutenir des secteurs plus traditionnels, comme le textile ou la chaussure.

[Prospective] A mobile phone web different from the computer web?

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Interesting paper in the International Herald Tribune about the reluctance of developers to make Web pages for mobile phones adhere to the same principles as those for computers.

...the proposal in March from a handful of mobile phone companies, including Nokia, to create an address for Web pages accessed by cellphones and other portable devices.

In their thinking, the ".mobi" ending of Web addresses would indicate that the site is phone-friendly, just as an ".edu" address indicates that the page comes from an educational institution.

But Berners-Lee doesn't want to divide the Web into sites for some devices and not for others. He argues that most top-level domain names, like .com, .mobi and the others, create different "webs" for different people, counter to the ideas of decentralization and openness at the heart of his creation.

Berners-Lee proposes solutions like using conditional stylesheets (one for the computer web, another one from the mobile web)

[Prospective] Sorry ringtones are just marketing crap

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I am totally amazed by the ability music majors thinks that they can recover thanks to ringtones! This is crazy, this is absolutely not music but a way to choose a new market segment and increase the revenues. Poor guy, the next step is the napsterization of the mobile devices as explained in the guardian:

Ed Kershaw, head of music for Vodafone's global content services, is confident of the future. "Music is predominantly a ringtone business at the moment, but this year is perhaps going to be the most exciting. The Napsterisation of mobile could have happened but ... we learnt a lot from the internet world."

Plastic Bags Ban!

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Plastic bags facts taken from clean up australia:

- Plastic bags are manufactured from non-renewable resources - oil and gas. - Just 8.7 checkout bags contain enough embodied petroleum energy to drive a car 1 km - If plastic is not recycled, this embodied energy is lost from the resource chain.  - Many thousands of marine mammals and seabirds die every year around the world as a result of plastic litter. When the animal dies and decays the plastic is free again to repeat the deadly cycle. - There are 2 reasons that plastic bags are particularly problematic in the litter stream: 1. They last from 20 - 1 000 years. 2. They escape and float easily in air and water, travelling long distances.

[Prospective] The blogroll is indeed YASNS

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It is now trendy to compare the blogroll as a social network software! As attested by this post in many to many. I was right few months ago.:

Did you ever stop to think that blogrolls are awfully similar to YASNS friends? Apparently Tribe.net did too. They just released TribeCast where bloggers and anyone else who owns a website can display their Tribes or Friends. This is a fantastic bridge of two bodies of software that are quite similar.

[Prospective] Google for mobile? Will it be Moogle?

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Via the feature:

Google's search engine, it's Froogle shopping service, and the new Google Local would all be boon to mobile users, but only if Google is able to create an equally simple interface and present the results in a mobile friendly manner. It has a chance to become equally as famous on the mobile phone as they are on the desktop, but it's anyone's race right now. The question for Google as well as for users is who will it be competing against: other desktop portals or the carrier portals.

A reader commented:

I was involved in Google Wireless testing for i-mode three years ago. Google does support mobile searches and even parses the resulting Web sites for mobile display.

The problems is research has shown mobile users prefer directory search over keyword search but no doubt the boffins at Google are working on this. 

[Prospective] Educational Semantic Web

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A special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education on The Educational Semantic Web, May 2004. All online (including PDFs).

The Educational Semantic Web is a developing and futuristic vision. As such, it has many enthusiastic proponents and an equal number of sceptics. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we highlight the promise of these technologies and conclude with the major arguments of the Semantic Web sceptics.

The Educational Semantic Web is based on three fundamental affordances. The first is the capacity for effective information storage and retrieval. The second is the capacity for nonhuman autonomous agents to augment the learning and information retrieval and processing power of human beings. The third affordance is the capacity of the Internet to support, extend and expand communications capabilities of humans in multiple formats across the bounds of time and space. Advocates of the Semantic Web envisage its use to create very powerful new applications in nearly all disciplines, social and economic endeavors. However little has been written to date expanding on the promise and the current progress that applies these powerful affordances to educational contexts, challenges and opportunities. Thus, the rationale for this special issue.

[Prospective] New SomethinJacking: WAPJacking

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Via the feature:

Taking a page from the still popular redialer scam on PCs - where a secretive trojan tries to disconnect your modem (assuming you're using dialup) and reconnect you secretly to a premium rate phone number in some distant country - the WAPjacking scam basically does the same thing. It involves an SMS message that overwrites the WAP settings on your phone, replaces the standard WAP home page with something else - and then switches the call to a premium rate number

[Prospective] After the search engine, Amazon goes to weblogs

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Amazon is still enlarging (this is no spam), after A9, it now goes to weblogs! It is called plog and is a bit different:

The Plog™ Service is a personalized blog. A blog is a straightforward and now widely adopted method of posting a reverse chronological diary on the Internet.(...) Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.

A Plog to "enhance your shopping experience, it sounds a bit weird... Especially the fact that THEY can post on YOUR blog. Well amazon is converting the bottom-up experience of blogs into a top-down experience... They just define blogs by saying that the cornerstone is the reverse chronological order which is crazy. That shows how people retain critical features from a phenomenon ! Especially companies. I am not against the plog project but the connection with blogs is so tiny that I think it's irrelevant.