IFTF's Future Now

UAV navigation

The UC Berkeley Lab Notes has an article on a project to give UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) the capability to perform automated tasks for civilian use. UAVs have been used by the U.S. military-- they played a prominent role in the Afghanistan campaign, and when equipped with air-to-ground missiles are able to attack ground targets-- and their potential for civilian applications is obvious. They're relatively small, cheap (about $20k will buy you a good one), and can navigate using GPS. They also are pretty flexible systems, in that you can hack one together using off-the-shelf technology: the Predator, for example, is powered by a four-cylinder snowmobile engine.

The problem is that they haven't been very good at doing some simple things, like following roads. Military UAVs have pilots, for obvious reasons: you need someone to make the decision to fire on a target, or to take evasive action against enemy fire. In fact-- if memory serves-- the military has had to make sure that time logged "flying" UAV missions would be counted towards promotion, just like flying in a real plane.

But in the civilian world, there are lots of cases where you'd want the UAV to basically work like a flying surveillance camera: to take a route and look for anything out of the ordinary. As Berkeley professor Raja Sengupta realized,

"I realized that it's very difficult for a UAV to follow a road. GPS errors can cause a UAV to veer off its path quite easily."

The Berkeley team's approach is to augment GPS with machine vision software and a $120 off-the-shelf video camera. The challenge, Sengupta explains, is for the computer to discern the road from the rest of the terrain from altitudes up to several hundred feet.

The solution is a two-step process devised by Zu Kim, a researcher with the UC Berkeley-based PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways) program. First, the software distinguishes the road from the surrounding area based on differences in contrast. In the desert, for instance, the asphalt is much darker than the sand. Next, the lane boundaries are identified based on the lightness of lane markings as compared to the asphalt. Once the boundaries are located, the plane follows the lane from above.

"GPS will get the plane in the vicinity and once our system locks onto the road, the plane can adjust itself regardless of what the GPS says," Sengupta explains.

There's also a biomimicry component to the story.

The final prong in the Berkeley UAV research is focused on what Sengupta calls the "canyon problem." While monitoring traffic in an urban setting, a UAV may be forced to fly between buildings lining the road it's tracking. One intriguing solution was inspired by the navigation of bees. The insects are able to fly down a corridor without bouncing between the walls by determining if they seem to be moving past both walls at the same rate. If there's a discrepancy between walls, the bee adjusts its trajectory. Sengupta hopes that borrowing this biological principle behind bee flight will lead to a computationally quick way to deal with "urban canyons."

It'll be interesting to see if there develop applications in which you'd want UAVs to fly in flocks.

Berkeley nanomotor

BBC News reports that

Researchers at Berkeley at the University of California created the world's smallest electrical device earlier this year - one hundred million of which could fit on the end of a pin....

The motors - the work of Berkeley researchers Alex Zettl and Adam Fennimore - were built using a atom-fine point of a nano-probe, inserting the circuits into place on a silicon chip.

The motor sits in the middle of a silicon chip four millimetres square. The motor itself is much, much smaller - the shaft is a half a tenth of a thousandth of a millimetre thick.

One thing that's striking about this-- and this one of those oddities that tells you something about the character of nanotechnology, and the challenges researchers face when working at this level-- is that

the motor is so small that the researchers do not yet know exactly how it behaves.

"It's hard to image whether it's flipping or spinning, and we're still working on trying to resolve that," he said.

"We know that it flips back and forth faster than 33 milliseconds because that's the frame rate that we're able to grab them at.

"But we still haven't conclusively shown what's going on at the nanoscale."

Personal server gets closer

New Scientist reports that

A full-featured PC that is small enough to slip into a shirt pocket is being hailed by its makers as the world's first modular computer. The machine can perform as both a PC and a handheld computer, but it remains to be seen if consumers are willing to pay for such a hybrid device.

The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by Antelope Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres (5 x 3 x 3/4 inches), the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards.

This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable "shell" with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer. "Modular computers will change the way people use their computer," claims Kenneth Geyer, president of Antelope Technologies.

Inside the MCC is a 1GHz microprocessor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Microsoft's XP operating system, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.

This is a small, albeit somewhat costly ($4000) step towards the "personal server" concept, discussed here earlier.

Street vending IT

BBC News reports on a student project to develop means for bringing Internet access to public areas.

"I looked at ways of having people at the centre of the infrastructure where digital services could be offered like fruit and veg."

She sees this as providing a much more personal and fluid service than static internet cafes or web points.

From this, Ms Tulusan developed the "webpacker".

The concept is very simple. Disguise a touch screen computer, attach it someone and have them walk around with it, linked to a wireless network.

"Anyone can just go there and ask for a bit of internet or can you give me some data," she explained.

The project, named wandervogel (German for "migrating bird"), looked at Internet kisosks and mobile phone services in South Asia and Latin America. The resulting prototype is part street vendor, part Blade Runner.

[via smart mobs]

Smart dust articles

Two noteworthy recent articles on smart dust and RFID:

• Get ready for the smart shopping basket, BBC News, with a focus on RFID and the smart shopping cart;
• Smart Dust Collecting in the Enterprise, on Siliconvalley.internet.com, on recent work on smart dust.

One interesting thing in both is a certain note of exasperation on the part of developers over privacy issues. Accenture's Glover Ferguson is quoted in the BBC piece as saying, "It is like nuclear energy, you can't uninvent it. We're going to have to learn to live with it. The genie is out of the bottle." Given the history of nuclear energy, this is not a comparison that would warm my heart, if I were an RFID manufacturer. And smart dust guru Kris Pister is described as "quick to dismiss" privacy issues. "Yes, personal privacy is getting harder and harder to come by. Every technology has a dark side-- deal with it." All in all, not the best day for RFID PR.

Design for Wellbeing

Last week I met Larry Leifer, founder of the Smart Products program at Stanford. As anyone who follows technology trends already knows, there's a lot of talk about "smart objects," "smartifacts" (a term that I'd just as soon we all forgot), and "smart environments," among other terms. It was sobering to realize that Leifer founded the Stanford program 25 years ago, and that attempts to invest objects with rudimentary decision-making, sensing, and actuating capacity are actually into their second generation.

Leifer is now working on a new multinational project on "Design for Wellbeing" with colleagues in Scandanavia and Japan. The project "redirects the focus of product development from technology-based development, via needs-based development, to participative product development." Its initially focused on assistive technologies, but there's a lot more to it than that.

Leifer will be a speaker at the Institute's Technology Horizons conference this Wednesday, which is shaping up to be very good couple days.

Are friends electric?*

(*With apologies to Gary Numan.)

NTT researchers recently presented their ElectAura-Net technology, which uses humans' natural electrical fields (those things that mystics and New Agers think of as auras) to move information. They explain how it works in a SIGGRAPH publication:

ElectAura-Net is a novel indoor broadband networking and positioning system. A wireless(-like) communication is enabled by electric-fields (electric aura) emanated from the human body and the floor. The result: the world's first broadband (10Mbps) intrabody communication. ElectAura-Net also provides indoor positioning, which is urgently needed for "ubiquitous" communication.

ElectAura-Net provides both broadband wireless(-like) networks and a meter-accuracy positioning system for indoor use. It is a kind of "intrabody communication" system that uses electric fields as transmission media, and the human body and floor as an Ethernet cable. In this system, a "communication-cell" (carpet size) can be shrunk down to one meter or less, and simultaneous access by many users can be realized. Ordinary intrabody communication systems cannot achieve long-distance communication between components such as body-worn devices and the floor. ElectAura-Net provides extra-high-sensitivity and high-speed capability.

This is an extension of the Personal Area Network (PAN) research done at MIT in the 1990s by Tom Zimmerman (the subject of his 1995 MA thesis), and later picked up at IBM. That technology exploited the fact that the

natural salinity of the human body makes it an excellent conductor of electrical current. PAN technology takes advantage of this conductivity by creating an external electric field that passes an incredibly tiny current through the body, over which data is carried.

The current used is one-billionth of an amp (one nanoamp), which is lower than the natural currents already in the body. In fact, the electrical field created by running a comb through hair is more than 1,000 times greater than that being used by PAN technology.

The difference here is that this new technology isn't aimed at linking people together, but at connecting people (and all their devices) to a network, and using that same technology to sense people's locations.

The NTT technology sounds like it's a long way from hitting the streets, but the notion of using our bodies-- and touch-- as a way to share information is one that I find kind of breathtaking: wonderful in its simplicity, deep in its conceptual potential.

We already have a pretty good protocol for sharing information via PDAs: I can beam something to another person with a PDA, but they have to accept it before it gets stored on their device. Sharing a picture, or a message, or a piece of music with someone by holding their hand-- or touching their shoulder, or tapping them on the arm-- is at once both high-tech and intimate. If it adopted some features of the PDA method-- that a file has to be actively accepted by the recipient, or it's discarded-- this method would also provide a means of sharing information that was as transparent as handing someone a Polaroid or business card: you'd know who it was coming from, you'd have to choose to accept it, and the transaction would take place within the context of a social exchange.

Imagine, for example, that you're at a wedding. At the reception, you take a lot of pictures, as does everyone else. The bride and groom have a great time, the guests have a great time; and at the end of the evening, one of the things you do for the happy couple-- the course of shaking hands with him or hugging her-- is share those pictures with them. Or, you and your teenage friends are at an amusement park, and you have a passerby take a group picture with your camera. After getting the camera back, you'd cue up the picture, then hand a copy of the picture to each one of your friends. Information-sharing turns into a genuinely social activity. Pushing bits becomes an exercise in gift-giving. Data becomes a social artifact.

It would be the ultimate example of social navigation, of an information technology that drew upon existing methods and media for digital communication. This interpretation runs completely opposite to an IBM article from a few years ago that declared that described Zimmerman's work as showing "how a touch can also be used to communicate unemotional digital information." Today, what seems interesting is how the PAN could place the communication of digital information in an emotional and social context.

Finally, it would be an exemplar of a trend we're actively exploring at the Institute: how the growth of ubiquitous or pervasive technologies promises to remove computers and communications technologies as obstacles to social interaction.

Other sources:

• Eric Smalley, "Body network gains speed," Technology Research News (October 2003).
  
• "A Truly Organic Network," Wired News (December 15, 1997).
  
• "Personal Area Network enables intrabody communication," Design News (1998).
  
• Bruce Schechter, "The Body Electric," Think Research (1997).
  

[via Smart Mobs]

New research on IT and productivity

From The Economist (subscription required):

Computing the gains: The economic benefits of the IT revolution are now visible in Europe and Japan

AFTER years of debate about the virtues or vices of the so-called “new economy”, most economists now agree that America has, indeed, enjoyed stronger productivity growth since 1995, thanks largely to investment in information technology (IT). However, many also agree that Japan and Europe, for some reason, seem to have missed out on computer-driven productivity gains. The growth of labour productivity in Japan and most European countries has actually slowed since the mid-1990s. New research, however, suggests that the economic rewards from IT have spread outside America, but have not been measured correctly.

Wired on utility and privacy

Wired News reports from Ubicomp 2003 on the balance researchers in ubiquitous computing are trying to strike between the utility of having smart objects, and the privacy implications. It's less interesting as a summary of the conference, then as a data-point in the way we're talking about these issues: they're almost always cast in the language of trade-offs and balancing of rights vs. conveniences.

There's got to be a more sophisticated way to think about these things. I recently asked Andy Clark, author of Natural Born Cyborgs and a very deep thinker on issues of human-technology relationships, whether he thought there were more useful ways of thinking about the impact of information technologies on our minds and brains than to ask, "is it good or bad?" His reply is apposite here:

I think there are. Every technology, tool, and notation has it’s own pattern of pros and cons. Roman numerals actually (though many people are surprised by this) made certain calculations easier, though in general the Arabic system wins out. Rather than thinking in terms of black and white, good and bad, we should try to spot the strengths and weaknesses, and then attempt to balance them with other tools or actions. Making a point of browsing a physical bookshop now and then is, for example, a sensible way of counteracting the tendency of collaborative filtering systems to offer us more and more of what we already buy and like.

Balancing active exploration with reliance on semi-intelligent trail-sensing software is probably one of the most important new skills we will have to teach and learn.*

To build on this, I think it's not so useful to think of privacy in terms of a specific set of conditions, or a thing that's defined by the presence of absence of certain technologies; as I think most of us will realize, the boundaries of privacy are many and fluid. Our spouses or parents see parts of our lives that our children do not; our families get to know things that the government doesn't; we entrust certain kinds of information to doctors that we don't to marketers (or our families). As adults, we become pretty good at working out those boundaries, and setting rules for what gets shared with whom. (As Dahlia Lithwick points out, these boundaries are recognized by the law to determine that spouses act as surrogate decision-makers for one another: "the law assumes that your spouse knows you intimately and shares with you a sphere of legal privacy into which even your parents and siblings may not intrude.")

Personally, I think the concerns about technology-enabled loss of privacy aren't as big a deal as some make them out to be. For one thing, the kinds of information you can gather from devices will be so trivial as to be worthless: any agency that sets a broad filter will be overwhelmed with data. For another, many kinds of information are available through multiple channels. Reading the RFID tags in my Gap sweater, Levis jeans, and Nike shoes, you'll pretty much pick up the same information that you would if... you just looked at me. We broadcast information about our buying habits just by going outside. Finally, as I note elsewhere, it's already possible to create some pretty intrusive surveillance systems using the videocameras that increasingly are a standard part of public spaces.

The challenge in the future will not be to preserve privacy, but to negotiate it; to understand what technologies broadcast about us, what they allow us to broadcast, and how to use them in the multiple social contexts in which we operate every day.

[via Anne Galloway]

*This is, incidentally, part of a much larger interview that we'll be publishing in its entirety.

Stealth computers

The New York Times (registration requred) has a somewhat whimsical, but still illuminating, article on stealth somputers-- DIY machines built around the mini-ITX, a low-power, low-heat motherboard that allows hackers to build computers into all kinds of imaginative enclosures-- old toasters, vintage radios, Ikea breadboxes, even plush toys.

The tone of the piece is a little "aren't these geeks a nutty bunch," but there's a serious side to this phenomenon. It's a kind of bottom-up, soldered-together ubiquitous computing: many of these devices are designed to blend in with their environments, to look like anything but a computer. And the users are making it happen. As Richard Brown, marketing VP at Via (which makes the mini-ITX) puts it, "The hobbyists are actually the ones leading the way. They're very serious mechanical and technical projects."

If you want to see where technology is going, it's worth watching what skilled enthusiasts do. Had you attended meetings of Macintosh user groups in the mid-1980s, you would have seen demos of what would later become networking products and software packages; at a place like BMUG, people who would become technology journalists, Mac evangelists, and entrepreneurs; and a culture that assumed that it was possible to do some profoundly interesting things with the personal computer. The future of computing was visible at those meetings. A piece of it may be visible in mini-ITX machines.

[Update, 24 October 2003: Anne Galloway discusses the value of end-user configuration.]

Moore's Law for MMOGs

According to Terra Nova, it appears that synthetic worlds are doubling in size (or more specifically, membership) every 18 months or so-- a Moore's Law-like curve.

A full account of the research is, of course, also available online.

Window on the world

I find something really compelling about this plan for 'window on the world' attraction:

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk could make its debut in Britain next year.

Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

Its designers hope to see one of the first two in the world become a new tourist attraction in the centre of London.

The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in Vienna. Through them, people in both cities will be able to see and hear each other in real time.

Maybe it's the notion of a tourist attraction that consists of a place where you look at another city. Maybe it's the thought of going to place to look at another city, and seeing people who've come to look at you. Like a zoo where everyone's on both sides of the cage at once.

[via Halavais]

Location sensing and music sharing

The latest Samsung MP3 player, the YP-910GS (it's cobranded with the newly-revived Napster service), has a built-in FM transmitter. Not a tuner, to let you get FM stations; a transmitter, so you can broadcast what you're listening to. (Actually, it has a tuner, too.) The Apple iPod, which is many ways is the social innovator in digital music these days (full disclosure: I'm an iPod fan), has a plug-in FM transmitter (called, inevitably, iTrip). They use FM a bit like Bluetooth: to wirelessly connect devices together and pass information between them. But there's a lot more going on here.

I don't recall FM transmitters ever being something that were a part of the Sony Walkman, or portable CD players. Indeed, as Chris Lunch notes, the logic of the devices made such a feature unlikely because

The history of portable technology has emphatically shown a desire towards inwardness rather than outwardness. From the Walkman to the iPod, the Game 'n Watch to the Gameboy, all succesful personal technology has succeded by allowing the user to create their own personal world that disconnects them from the external world they travel through.

This is changing. The social practice of collecting and listening to MP3s, however, is taking place-- for better or worse-- in a cultural context that assumes that sharing music is a good thing. This is starting to be reflected in the design of personal players: they're beginning to turn into something more like a local-area broadcast unit. The Radio Station of Me.

One interesting recent experiment is the tunA system, developed by Media Lab Europe (an MIT Media Lab spinoff). tunA, as cityofsound explains is

is a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can "tune in" to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to. Developed on iPaqs and connected via 802.11b in ad-hoc mode, the application displays a list of people using tunA that are in range, gives access to their profile and playlist information, and enables synchronized peer-to-peer audio streaming.

tunA could accommodate a number of scenarios in which people gather during the course of the day. For example, while riding the bus or subway to and from work, people could discover what other commuters are listening to nearby and perhaps get to know each other over time. Or while spending an afternoon in a park or on the beach, people could tune in to the music their friends are listening while relaxing under the sun and have a shared music experience without disturbing others nearby who don't wish to listen to music.

It's a very interesting concept, not so much for the specific scenarios it presents, than for the underlying idea that if you put this capability in people's hands, they'll do interesting things with it. I'm not sure I'll like the music that my fellow train passengers like, just because we all take the train; sharing a public space doesn't mean we share musical tastes. Matt Jones, for example, proposes an alternative scenario, featuring stable, rather than ad-hoc, location-based music sharing:

Prototyping "locational" rather than "personal" Tuna might be not only easier and cheaper, but also a more satisfying experience, in that your choices of environment might well give you more luck in discovering music you actually want than walking past total strangers.

Fashion stores, record shops and watering holes are perhaps the most obvious: "People who have been in this bar also liked..."

You'd perhaps get interesting feedback loops - the most liberal or cutting edge libraries amassing in certain shops or bars, giving them a fleeting reputation or cachet amongst musiclovers or information sharers. Perhaps becoming places where new artists flock, or creativity and delamaking flourish like the Coffeehouses of Pepys' London.

The cool thing about-- or one cool thing about it-- is that it creates a kind of voluntary boom box effect: you can play your music as loud as you want (on your headphones), and others can listen to it, but only if they want to. The music also becomes part of the brand of the space, and portable in a way that it is not currently: it takes the Starbucks-Hear Music CD concept, and makes it more dynamic. In Matt's scheme, you no longer buy a CD that's playing: you capture a little piece of an experience.

There are various technical issues that would have to be worked out to make this work, but there would also be social protocols that would have to evolve. cityofsound wonders how they would work:

Turn on Bluetooth scanning in a social space (pub) these days and you pick up nearby devices (phones) labelled "Dave's 7650", "Stef's mobile", "Keith Watson P800" etc.... tunA and the like will enable a series of benevolent transactions with strangers, friend, anyone with the right gear. Do we want to make this visible? tunA's image of sharing on the bus is nice. Do we want to make that sharing akin to a physical, social transaction? Would a visual nod of recognition - of receipt - add meaning to the otherwise invisible, inaudible digital transaction?

As Chris Heathcote elegantly put it, "It's not about downloading any more, it's about synching." Synching with friends, with places, with (given some collaborative filtering) smart mobs.

The Samsung-Napster MP3 player, iTrip, tunA, and the comments around them-- as well as various other imagined music sharing devices-- suggest to me that the real long-term importance of the Napster-Gnutella era will not be the erosion of music companies, but the rise of technologies that allow responsible music sharing, and have the secondary purpose of building social connections. Inded, the latter follows from the former. People like to share music. People like to sing together. Indeed, the collective production of music is fundamental to social life in virtually every society that doesn't have CDs. Given this, systems for social sharing of recorded music are virtually inevitable.

Future of blogging (2)

In a comment to yesterday's post on the future of blogs, Rikard Linde recommended David Weinberger's predictions on "When blogs get really popular." Weinberger sees the notion of the "blog" expanding to fill all available space: it'll include "any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once;" and fold in elements of discussion groups and email. Group blogs will become more popular, and some blogs will also become more temporally bounded-- organized around specific projects or events. Meanwhile, A-list bloggers will become a different species altogether.

Weinberger is always worth reading, but I think that Halavais' point about the difficulty of writing and the technical savvy required to create a serious blog, may be harder to overcome than Weinberger assumes. (A quick Google search suggests that Linde himself is a regular commenter on others' blogs, but more erratic in maintaining his own. This isn't a criticism-- I have to set aside a serious block of time each day to blogging-- but is just a data-point.)

It also occurs to me that business blogging-- whether for internal purposes, as a form of guerrila marketing, or as a means of leveraging intellectual capital that otherwise would go unsold (which is what this blog will try to do)-- will also have an effect on the practice of blogging, and our broader sense of what blogging is. At the very least, it'll influence the evolution of blogging tools and features.

Bricklin on Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator's Solution

Dan Bricklin, who knows a thing or two about innovation (he wrote VisiCalc, arguably the first great killer app for the personal computer, and certainly one of a handful of programs that demonstated the PC's utility in business), has a glowing review of Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor's latest book, The innovator's Solution.

Warchalking as advertising

Warchalking reports that a London restaurant is using warchalking symbols to advertise itself as a WiFi-enabled space:

The Benugo chain of delis has opened a new branch on great Portland street in London - just north of Oxford Circus. They offer free wireless access for anybody spending £2 in their restaurant....

And the poster advertising this service encorporates the )( warchalk symbol.

Anne Galloway at Hybrid Reality 03

Last week I noted the upcoming Hybrid Reality 03 conference. Anne Galloway, a graduate student working on digital culture, posts a report on her session.

To me, conference blogging is starting to look like one of the new, unique uses of blogging. Blogs like Instapundit point to and comment on published news reports; conference blogging, in contrast, takes the roof off what can be very interesting events, but which until now have been effectively closed to everyone but attendees.

The future of blogging

Alex Halavais, a professor at SUNY Buffalo who studies the Internet and blogging, reports from the Internet Research conference on a discussion on the future of blogging.

My guess is that when AOL, MS, and the others open up blogging to Joe and Jane Sixpack, folks will be surprised to find no blogging gold rush. Yes, many new bloggers will enter, and there will be some growth, but we will not see half of America blogging in the same way as we see half of America on the Web.

Why?

Alex gives three big reasons:

1. Blogging competes with other kinds of work, entertainment, or communication;
   
2. Most people don't write for fun;
   
3. Blogs require too much technical expertise.

The post is worth reading in full, as some enthusiasts now talk about blogging's capacity to transform everything from journalism to medicine, and Alex makes a good case for why this won't happen. It's a good reminder of something Paul Saffo likes to say: we tend to overestimate the short-term impacts of new technologies, and underestimate their long-term impacts.

Xeroxing nanoparticles

Technology Review reports on a new method for printing tiny structures using nanoparticles:

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have coaxed tiny particles of gold, silver and carbon to assemble into patterns on silicon wafers over areas as large as a square centimeter by using electrical charge patterns to attract and position the nanoparticles.

The process, which uses the same principle as photocopying, can eventually be used to form wires, circuits and even nanoscale devices like transistors and lasers, according to the researchers.

The researchers were able to print 10- to 100-nanometer particles into patterns with features as fine as 200 nanometers using a process that started with the nanoparticles suspended in liquid. They were able to print features as fine as 100 nanometers by directing particles towards the charged surface using gas.

The work is described in Chad R Barry, Michael G Steward, Nyein Z Lwin and Heiko O Jacobs, "Printing nanoparticles from the liquid and gas phases using nanoxerography," Nanotechnology 14:10 (October 2003), 1057-1063. (In a move that bucks the trend of using electronic publication to restrict access to scientific research, Institute of Physics Publishing says that the article should be available to the public, should you want to read it yourself.)

This is interesting because a number of printing technologies are being used to manufacture microscale and nanoscale structures. Berkeley professor Vivek Subramanian is leading a group that is using inkjet printing to make cheap RFID tags; MIT's Joe Jacobsen has developed a process for printing electronics, digital paper, and machines. (Wired Magazine had an article on his electronic paper work.) (Inkjet printing is also being applied to biomedical research: you can make a cheap bioassay molecule detector with an old printer.)

Now, there are a couple reasons researchers have used inkjet printing to print things, rather than text and images. For one thing, inkjet printing is pretty cheap: a good printer is just a couple hundred dollars. For another, inkjet is a very well-understood technology, pretty precise, and relatively easy to hack.

Travel today

I'm on the road today, and so not blogging. Back tomorrow.

RFID and the social life of objects

I'm at a conference in San Francisco today, and not blogging.

However, I wanted to note a very stimulating entry at Foe Romeo on the social life of objects.

A lot of talk about RFID has centered around 1) business uses, and 2) resulting privacy concerns. Foe Romeo's notion of using RFID as a tool for voluntarily documenting the social life of objects-- how often they've been used, how they've been read, and so on-- is stimulating for it suggests how smart players could create user-centered services that make RFID more familiar, and help deal with the privacy worries:

I'm very keen on the idea of user-initiated RFIDs for objects with emotional investment (like books and vinyl LPs) that can be killed or blocked by a recipient if they value their privacy more than the game.... Particularly if it allowed them to connect with future and past owners/collectors of that object, track its travels and recall forgotten details or annotations some time later. They are interested in the social life of objects.

Imagine a book that can say ‘I have been read by 36 people before you - in 3 cities (London, Sydney and Helsinki) - and all of them paused on page 132. I once spent 5 days in the lift at the British Library, just travelling up and down, after being released by a BookCrosser.’

Imagine a book that can tell its own story as well as the one contained within its pages.

This notion of using tags to voluntarily document the life of an object-- to turn ownership and use into a kind of collective game-- is one that we've already seen take off with geocaching, and Where's George, a game in which you use the serial numbers on dollar bills to track where they've been spent. There's already a system called BookCrossing that works like Where's George. (Both systems are completely voluntary.)

This idea of books that tell their own stories also connects to the world of social navigation, about which more later.

Agents, grids, and astronomy

One of the pleasures of being an historian of science - turned - futurist is that my past and present lives often meet in unexpected ways. This recently happened with the announcement of the eSTAR project, an effort that uses grid computing and intelligent agents to identify and track unexpected astronomical events. As a news release explained,

"Intelligent Agent" computer programs are roaming the Internet and watching the skies. It may sound like science fiction, but these programs, using Grid computing technology, will help astronomers detect some of the most dramatic events in the universe, such as massive supernova explosions....

Dr. Alasdair Allan, on the eSTAR team at the University of Exeter, said "The universe currently does things faster than we can respond to them. To study the most rapid and violent events in the universe, we need to be able to follow them quickly."

As well as supernova explosions, many other astronomical events happen suddenly and unpredictably. These include the detection of near-Earth asteroids as they move across the sky, rapid changes in the swirling gases being swallowed by black holes, and the subtle changes in the brightness of stars which may indicate planets in orbit around them.

The Intelligent Agent programs communicate with telescopes and each other using technology designed for the Grid - the "next generation Internet". They make observations with the telescopes, which they can analyse and immediately follow up with further observations, without the need for human intervention.

Prof. Tim Naylor, who led the eSTAR team and is also at the University of Exeter, said "We're creating a network of telescopes which can respond automatically to objects of great astronomical importance."

eSTAR currently is only running on one telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, but the hope is to be able to connect a number of telescopes to eSTAR in the next few years. They're even considering "a Java based interface which could run on the user's mobile phone" that would "provide up to the minute information for an astronomer who is out of the office, but still wants to monitor their observations."

This is only the latest chapter in astronomy's long history of dealing with information overload. The Babylonians, who performed what are probably the first systematic, quantitative observations of celestial events, generated thousands of tablets of data; ever since, astronomers have often had too much information at their disposal.

One strategy has been to pursue what we would describe as collaborative, open-source work. In the nineteenth century, the discipline's agenda was crowded with international projects to create star catalogs, standards for photometric and spectroscopic research, and to attack important problems.

Likewise, astronomy has long been a distributed science-- that is, the data-collection and analysis have taken place in a variety of places. Astronomers would farm out photographs or spectrographs to former students for analysis. Young scientists at schools that didn't have research facilities got access to data and the chance to remain scientifically productive, while observatories got to ease some of their backlogs of data. Astronomers weren't the only ones who did this. For example, T. H. Morgan's laboratory, which was renowned for its research on the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies), was the center of a large network that shared strains of flies and experimental data with high-school teachers and professors at small colleges. (There's a brilliant book on this network called Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, written by Robert Kohler.) Arguably, though, the portability of astronomical data-- tables of star positions, photographs, and spectrographs-- made it easier for them to distribute their research.

A third strategy was to create what essentially little factories for analyzing data. The growth in the nineteenth century of factory-like systems for analyzing masses of data. The Greenwich Observatory under George Airy was famous for the methodical, disciplined way it handled its celestial mechanics data; likewise the Harvard College Observatory under Edward Pickering built a staff (nicknamed "Pickering's harem" because it consisted entirely of women) to analyze its spectroscopic data. (It was in places like this that the term "computers" came to be used-- but not for machines, for people.)

So the digitization of astronomical research in the twentieth century-- the replacement of photographic plates with CCDs and digital cameras, the replacement of atlases and tables with computer files, and the emergence of radio astronomy-- didn't so much upset the discipline, as made it possible for them to adapt or update traditional ways of working. Astronomers had been sharing data and organizing long-distance collaborations for a long time; the Internet made it easier to do that work. Automated systems for detecting anomalies or taking measurements had also been around for decades, and computers allowed astronomers to increase the volume of data they could analyze this way. In a curious way, computers and networks appealed to both the open source and factory traditions in astronomy. (In a sense, observatories were merely exchanging one kind of "computer" for another, though of course the reality was quite a bit more complex.)

There are two new things here, though.

First is the emphasis on pace. Older distributed, collaborative systems in astronomical research were mainly designed to deal with backlogs of data, while eSTAR's purpose is to respond to quickly-moving events. There is a tradition within astronomy of collective action around unique events like solar eclipses or Transits of Venus, but even those are often known in advance. The aim here, as Allen put it, is to observe the "most rapid and violent events in the universe"-- and the unexpected.

Second, eSTAR invests a degree of intelligence and decision-making power in the network itself. As Allen told the BBC,

"What is so important here is that we have developed an intelligent observing system.... It thinks and reacts for itself, deciding whether something it has discovered is interesting enough to need more observations. If more observations are needed, it just goes ahead and gets them."

One final, broader observation. eSTAR is a great example of how a technological system can be innovative not because it contains a large amount of completely new technology, but because it combines existing technologies in new ways. eSTAR's tremendous potential depends on the fact that it creatively recombines a heterogeneous assortment of existing technologies. It uses existing telescopes, computer networks, even cell phones; the agents and telescopes communicate using RTML (remote Telescope Markup Language, an XML dialect). It treats the Internet and global telescope networks as a gigantic commons, the kind that Lawrence Lessig discusses in The Future of Ideas; and it won't work without a system that recognizes how deeply innovative technologies and services are indebted to their predecessors.

Grid Computing for Astronomers [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
Grid technology helps astronomers keep pace with the Universe [EurekAlert]
Smart software watches the skies [BBC]
Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (University of Chicago Press, 1994) [Amazon link]

Global phones, local culture

Technologies never stand alone. Their design, the way they're marketed and sold, and especially their user are all shaped-- to a greater or lesser degree-- by culture, economics, and history. This is extremely clear with mobile devices, which are often customized by individual users, and whose useage patterns evolve differently in different countries and societies.

This came to mind this morning when I read a report on the Smart Mobs blog that

Muslim faithful have used a short messaging service for years as a digital muezzin, texting them to prayer five times a day from the cellular towers instead of minarets.

Now, taking the concept further and pointing Muslims towards Mecca, LG Electronics (LGE) has developped a GPRS mobile phone equipped with a compass and programmed to indicate direction.

According to an article in eTechKorea, the phone is

equipped with a compass and programmed to indicate direction. This cell phone can point towards Mecca (Quiblah), a service that will prove very useful for Muslims. The company has launched the product on the market already.

Muslims perform Salat (prayers) to Allah in their prescribed ritual five times a day - at sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and midnight. They have to face the direction of Kaaba (the House of Allah) in Mecca, but they have difficulty locating the direction in the desert.

By setting the -5300-compass to the north and inputting their location information, Muslims can now easily find the direction of Mecca. With this feature, the handset positions itself as a specialized functional phone in the Middle East market. In particular, it is expected to spur a boom in the region because the compass may be used even where GPS services are unavailable.

In addition to the Arab nations, LGE is set to expand the compass phone market to target the 1.1 billion Muslims all over the world, including those in Asian nations such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Arguably, makers of what you could think of as intimate technologies-- devices that you carry around with you all the time, that are always on, and that you use to manage personal information, contacts and communication-- have to think more about the contexts in which their devices will be used than other industries, for at least two reasons.

First, the line between a home run and a base hit can be very thin: a centimeter or half-ounce difference on a small product can change its feel and attractiveness.

Second, many devices require people to change their habits to conform to the technology; but products intended for a mass market can't do that. They need to be easily integrated into users' daily lives with an absolute minimum of fuss or adoption. They should be like a good kids' toy: you pick it up, you see immediately how it works, and you start playing with it.

RFID and privacy

Newsfactor.com has a good overview of the current state of the RFID use/privacy controversy. (This earlier post also discussed the argument over privacy issues.)

[via Tech Review blog]

Cyborg monkeys and post-humans

For the last several years, Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his research group have been working on creating a closed-loop brain-machine interface between primates (specifically macaques) and a robotic arm. This work has gotten a lot of press recently, with the announcement that the monkeys involved in the research had learned not only to operate their robot arms, but to use them independently of their real arms. This is highly significant for a couple reasons.

First, and most obviously, this suggests the possibility of eventually giving people who've been paralyzed the means to move about and interact with the world (using, say, an exoskeleton like the one described in William Gibson's short story "The Winter Market"). This is still some time off, but this most recent development suggests that people-- or their brains-- could learn to operate such technologies.

As I mentioned, this research has been going on for several years, but as Wired News reported, the real breakthrough came when

changes in the way the monkey's brain cells worked suggested the brain was physically adjusting to the device.... "The monkey suddenly realized that she didn't need to move her arm at all," Nicolelis said.... "Her arm muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback."

In other words, the monkey learned to treat the robot arm as just another part of her body.

As for the possibility of applying the technology to humans,

"We hope the brain will learn to adapt to the devices and incorporate them as if they were the patient's own limbs," Nicolelis said.... "There is certainly a great deal of science and engineering to be done to develop this technology and to create systems that can be used safely in humans.... However, the results so far lead us to believe that these brain-machine interfaces hold enormous promise for restoring function to paralyzed people."

The New York Times reports that "he hoped to begin human trials in the next two years at the newly formed Natal International Neuroscience Institute in Brazil." (Dr. Nicolelis is Brazilian, but I wonder if this is also a way to avoid some of the difficulties of managing human subjects research in the United States. This is not to suggest anything untoward in the research, but to recognize the complexities of doing any kind of research on people here in the U.S.)

This discovery also has some broader implications for understanding the way the mind works, and the way it works with-- and helps construct or sense of-- our bodies. Several of us at the Institute have been quite impressed with Andy Clark's recent book Natural Born Cyborgs, and its arguments regarding the deep relationships that develop between people and technologies. Briefly, it argues that humans have a tremendous innate capacity to develop complex, transformative relationships with technologies-- relationships that extend beyond dependence based on mere convenience. We are all cyborgs, and that's what makes us human. (A fuller summary of the book's thesis is available here.)

One of the foundations for his argument rests in neuroscience and psychology, and depends on establishing that our brains have a considerable degree of flexibility in both making sense of the world at large, and incorporating new devices into our picture of our selves. As I wrote,

[W]hile we have stable senses of the world around us, and believe that our bodies have clear boundaries that separate "us" from that world, the truth is more complex. The information we gather about the world is opportunistic, and pretty much created on the fly. For example, we retain far less visual information about our surroundings than we expect; our focus is pretty narrowly confined most of the time, and if we need to check on something at the periphery of our vision, we refresh that information (look over for an instant), rather than try to recall it.

Further, you can pretty radically alter the ways we perceive the world, and our brains eventually can readjust. There are famous experiments in which people are made to wear glasses that turn the world upside-down; after a couple weeks, something switches in the brain, and the wearers stop noticing the effect. What's particularly interesting about this is that experiments with manipulating vision show that people can adapt to new systems-- but not if they don't act them out.

The Nicolelis group's work, it seems to me, provides spot-on confirmation that Clark's model of mind-body interaction, and his notion of a mind-body-scaffolding relationship, is a strong one. I've e-mailed Clark asking what he thinks of this work, and hope to have a response shortly.

Finally, the publisher is significant. The article [warning: this is a large file; a summary is also available] that describes this work is coming out in a journal called Public Library of Science. The PLoS Web site explains its mission:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Immediate unrestricted access to scientific ideas, methods, results, and conclusions will speed the progress of science and medicine, and will more directly bring the benefits of research to the public.

Anyone familiar with the astronomically high cost of scientific journals will appreciate how radical an idea this is, and how much it runs counter to current trends to limit electronic access to research. (For those who do not, I outline some of the significance of the Public Library of Science project in this blog entry, and the trends to restriction of access here and here.)

Distributed Library Project

One of the most powerful aspects of smart mob technologies-- things like peer-to-peer, social software, etc.-- is that they can turn what were private goods into public resources. The latest example of this is the Distributed Library Project. According to its Web site,

The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction.

In a sense, this is the Napster model, but with atoms rather than bits. It pools resources; it encourages interaction; it is subject to Reed's Law scaling effects (e.g., the value of the network = 2^N, where N = number of users). An important additional factor is that users can review each other, as they do on eBay, creating public reputations that can serve as a foundation for trust-building within the network.

This basic model is one that could be extended to any number of different types of goods, where you have 1) private ownership of goods, 2) portability or the possibility of open access, 3) non-exclusive use (i.e., I'm not using the object all the time, or don't need to have access to it all the time-- something that John Thackara spun out in an interesting direction in his "Post-Spectacular City" piece), and 4) the means to review the performance/reliability of participants.

Where else could it reasonably be extended? I suspect it will work best with things that people are accustomed to loaning to friends, and are relatively cheap. Books are a great start, and movies and music also obvious early entrants. Then there are some kinds of objects that are traded in informal networks and markets, but which aren't loaned out for longer periods. There's an active informal trade in baby clothes among parents with children of similiar ages, but that tends to operate on a "permanent loan" model: I don't borrow a few sleepers from a friend, and return them the next week, but use them for months.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, cars would be relatively hard to loan out in this way. But you might be able to create a system that marries smart mob technology with ride-sharing networks, allowing users to maintain control of their vehicles.

It'll be interesting to see how these distributed sharing systems evolve, and what kinds of things get shared.

[via Smart Mobs]

Clay Shirky's "File-sharing Goes Social"

Clay Shirky has posted a great essay, "File-sharing Goes Social," on the coevolution of file-sharing systems and RIAA legal strategies to destroy them:

In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA's waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack.

The RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting.

Napster's problem, of course, was that although Napster nodes acted as both client and server, the central database still gave the RIAA a single target. Seeing this, Gnutella and Kazaa shifted to a mesh of nodes that could each act as client, server, and router. These networks are self-assembling and self-reconfiguring with a minimum of bootstrapping, and decentralize even addresses and pointers to files.

The RIAA is now attacking these networks using a strategy that could be called Crush the Connectors. A number of recent books on networks, such as Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Barabasi's Linked, and Watts' Six Degrees, have noted that large, loosely connected networks derive their effectiveness from a small number of highly connected nodes, a pattern called a Small World network. As a result, random attacks, even massive ones, typically leave the network only modestly damaged.

The flipside is that attacks that specifically target the most connected nodes are disproportionately effective. The RIAA's Crush the Connectors strategy will work, not simply because highly publicized legal action will deter some users, but because the value of the system will decay badly if the RIAA succeeds in removing even a small number of the best-provisioned nodes.

However, it will not work as well as the RIAA wants, even ignoring the public relations fallout, for two reasons. The first is that combining client, server, and router in one piece of software is not the last move available to network designers -- there is still the firewall. And the second is simply the math of popular music -- there are more people than songs.

It's well worth reading in its entirety.

[thanks to Lyn Jeffery]

Microsoft, middle age, and mobility

Today's New York Times has a good article outlining the challenges Microsoft faces as it tries to move into the post-PC era:

When Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, gives his keynote address on Monday at the international exhibition here he plans to show off some of the company's latest technology - software that powers mobile phones, online game machines and television services.

Those areas are crucial to the company's long-term strategy, but the initiatives are all bleeding money. And so the industry is watching to see whether Microsoft, as it enters middle age, can be innovative enough to compete effectively in software platforms beyond the personal computer.

No Asian space race (yet)?

Agence France-Presse reports that "India does not foresee Asian space race":

India, which runs a fledgling space program, does not foresee an Asian space race emerging, even though China is about to send a man into orbit for the first time, a top official said Wednesday.

"Not at all, not even remotely," Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal told AFP when asked if he saw a rivalry developing similar to one between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

However, the Indian Air Force does plan to "begin work on anti-satellite weapons and space lasers," according to a recent article in the New India Press.

[via Gyre.org]

Bottom-up mapping

Conferences can provide a useful weather station for what's coming. The upcoming Hybrid Reality 03 conference (Montreal, Oct. 15-17) has a panel on "Locative Media/Collaborative Cartography" that sounds extremely stimulating. The premise:

The democratization of mapping technologies has given amateurs the means to produce their own cartographic data, which, with arrival of wireless networking technologies will make it possible for subjective mental maps to be made objective. Sharing these "headmaps" will enable the development of a non-proprietary data pool of human geography. Unlike State maps, annotated with "official" point of interest, (City Hall, McDonalds, etc), these portable immersive maps will permit users to inscribe space with their individual and collective desire.

This panel discussion will bring together noted researchers in the emerging field of collaborative cartography, all of whom work outside of the traditional GIS sector. Motivated by a common interest in hybridizing geography with computer science and social theory, the participants share the belief that they are creating tactical tools that will help facilitate new, socially beneficial forms of organization.

Essentially, they're arguing that pervasive computing will do for geographical data, and for location-based information, what the Web did for other kinds of information: make it possible for ordinary people to create, distribute, and use a kind of data that had previously been accessible only to professionals.

[via icon's blog]

Nano non-stick surfaces

BBC News reports that:

US nanotechnologists are developing what they think could be the ultimate non-stick surface.

It is covered with nano-scale needles that enable a liquid, for example, to slip straight off it....

Dr [Chang-Jin "CJ"] Kim explained how the technology worked.

"We call it nano-turf - artificial turf with nano-scale crest structures," he said.

"The surface is repelling water. It is densely populated so it will let the water flow against air instead of a solid surface, which makes it very slippery.

"When we roll a drop of water on this surface, we make it 99%, or more, less sticky than the flat surface."

Essentially, the tiny posts are hydrophobic (water-repelling), and liquids just slide over them. This abstract from a 2002 NSF conference explains the work, and also has some useful illustrations.

[via die puny humans]

Personal servers and personal memory

Every futurist does a lot of scanning. I have to (or try to) read a tremendous amount of stuff, in a variety of formats-- things published on the Web, articles in PDF or Word, PowerPoint presentations, old-fashioned words on paper, and articles on the radio. (This blog is essentially an attempt to leverage that work, to turn it from a public resource into a public good.) One of the biggest problems I have comes when I want to track down something I read or heard in passing two or three weeks ago, and which now is relevant to a project I'm working on. We have lots of good tools for managing information that we know is important; the big challenge comes in retrieving something that you thought was irrelevant, but turns out to be an indicator of some emerging trend.

I've often wondered why there isn't a tool to help with this kind of problem-- a kind of Google that would just index everything you've read, rather than everything on the Web. The closest I've come has been a product called iRemember; unfortunately, it only works on the Macintosh, and hasn't been updated for OS X. So I soldier on.

If someone asked me, "Would you want to be able to store and remember everything you've ever read, written, or even seen and said?" I'd say "Yes!" without hesitating. Or I would have. I'm now having second thoughts... just at a point when we can confidently say that such a technology will be available in the next decade.

Cell phone ethnography

I'm working on piece on the uses of ethnography in futures research, and came across this BBC News piece on the latest research of Genevieve Bell, an Intel ethnographer studying the use of mobile technologies in Asia. I'm working on the ethnography and futures piece over the weekend, but wanted to run ahead with the BBC piece:

Technology is often seen in the West as a way of making our lives more efficient or as a way of having fun.

But researchers have found big cultural differences between East and West when it comes to what people actually do with their computers and mobiles phones.

In many Asian countries, technology has become a tool for learning, religion and politics, says Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell....

"We can learn lessons from why the mobile phone has been successful in Asia," Dr Bell told BBC News Online.

"It is relatively robust, relatively small, you don't need a desk, you don't need to be a in particular place.

"And you don't have to be literate to use them or speak English. These are all constraints when it comes to operating a computer," she explains. ...

More importantly, mobile technology has been adapted to reflect the cultural priorities of each nation, such as their religious faith.

In Malaysia you can now get mobiles that come with a built-in directional finder to help Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.

"This is a wonderful way of imagining technology doing something unexpected," says Dr Bell, "so rather than being a tool for work it becomes a tool for someone's religious devotion."...

"These devices are really up for grabs and what people are going to do with them is very different and very unexpected," she says.

Bell has conducted research everywhere but Antarctica, it seems; her Web page has a list of research articles.

More on this kind of research, and what it reveals about technology and people, next week.

Multi-OS chips

Another interesting piece from New Scientist:

Advanced chip opens door to software choice

A computer chip designed to run more than one operating system at a time could break Microsoft's stranglehold on PC software. Plans for the chip were announced last week by Intel, the world's largest maker of processor chips.

Due for launch within five years, the chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously. Analysts are saying it could be one of the decade's most significant breakthroughs in computer technology.

Oil estimates and global warming

New Scientist reports that a group at Uppsala University are arguing that we don't have to worry as much about global warming, because we're going to run out of oil and gas sooner than we expected:

Oil and gas will run out too fast for doomsday global warming scenarios to materialise, according to a controversial analysis presented this week at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. The authors warn that all the fuel will be burnt before there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to realise predictions of melting ice caps and searing temperatures.

Defending their predictions, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say they considered a range of estimates of oil and gas reserves, and point out that coal-burning could easily make up the shortfall....

The IPCC's predictions of global meltdown provided the impetus for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an agreement obliging signatory nations to cut CO2 emissions. The IPCC considered a range of future scenarios, from profligate burning of fossil-fuels to a fast transition towards greener energy sources.

The IPCC scenarios assumed consumption of the equivalent of between 8000 billion and 18,000 billion barrels of oil. However, geologists Anders Sivertsson, Kjell Aleklett and Colin Campbell estimate that there are about 3500 billion barrels of oil left.

The Uppsala scientists aren't arguing that global warming isn't something to worry about, but rather that the worst-case scenarios aren't going to happen, unless there's widespread replacement of oil by coal.

Samurai of Norrath

At the risk of looking like I'm engaging in reciprocity for Terra Nova's positive note on this site, I want to recommend their discussion of Southeast Asia, Gaming and the Future of MMORPGS.

For those who don't know much about the world of massive multiplayer games, they're a very big deal in Asia, particularly South Korea and China. By some estimates, about 10% of all Korean men play Lineage. Not only are they very popular, they're big business: one recent report (quoted in the Terra Nova post) claims that the "SK [South Korean] game industry is poised to surpass its automobile industry to become the #1 industry in SK," as game companies export their wares to China and elsewhere.

Once again, the comments are where a lot of the really interesting content can be found.

Bill Joy interview

Fortune has a wide-ranging interview with Bill Joy. A sample:

People still don't recognize the scope of what we have to do [to make software more reliable]. You can't simply write a new, multimillion-line program in C and expect it to be reliable unless you're willing to work on it for 20 years. It takes such a long time because that language doesn't support the easy detection of the kinds of flaws most viruses exploit to bring down systems. Instead, you need to use a programming language with solid rules so that you can have the software equivalent of chemistry: the predictable interaction of code as it runs. But on the network, where part of the software works here and part of it works there, programs also behave in emergent ways that are more biological and difficult to predict. So until you have a science of doing distributed computing, software developers will continue to just throw stuff out there. That's why the Net is not going to be secure.

Also, distributed software systems have to be a lot simpler than they are now for us to have any hope of understanding even the mechanistic consequences, much less the nonlinear, biological consequences. You may not want to print this, but why have we been so fortunate that no one has done a Sobig virus that wipes your hard disk clean? It's just one more line of code. Just one line.

It's worth reading in its entirety.

[via Moore's Lore]

Internet appliances in Asia: A view from the field

Moore's Lore passes on an e-mail from an acquaintance in Pakistan arguing for the possibilities in Internet appliance adoption in South Asia. It's an engaging, oddly vivid piece of writing.

Oyster = Big Brother?

Transport for London (the authority that runs the Underground and buses in London) has rolled out a new smart card system called Oyster. The card contains a microchip and antenna, and is a kind of Fastpass for people: the idea is to get people through the system more quickly.

But since the system requires that cards be personalized, and travel data will be archived for several years, the rollout is raising the now-usual concerns about privacy, according to the BBC:

Under the new system, Transport for London will be able to track a commuter's movements and it plans to retain information on journeys made for "a number of years"

Each card has a unique ID number linked to the registered owner's name, which is recorded together with the location and time of the exchange every time the card is used....

"All too often we have seen data collected for one apparent purpose, only for it to end up being used for something entirely different", said Mark Littlewood, campaign director of civil rights group Liberty....

"If anyone wishes to store information on people's journeys for their own planning purposes, they should at least ensure that travellers are fully informed of this.

"It is also important that people have a right to opt out of the system."

The upside of such systems for customers is that, in addition to getting you through the ticket gate faster, the value of the card doesn't reside on the card itself, but on the server. If a card is lost or stolen, one's account can be transferred to a new card. Transport of London says that travel information will be treated like Web site traffic: as far as they're concerned, the interesting stuff is found by analyzing the aggregated movement of millions, not watching Nigel go from Picadilly to Regents' Park.

Privacy worries are now raised with the deployment of (or even announcement of a plan to deploy) location-sensing technologies, or technologies like RFID that can be used to pinpoint the locations of devices (see for example this recent Wired News piece, and this article in Network World Fusion, on RFID). But travel services are one area where people have tended to demonstrate a willingness to trade potential privacy loss for greater security. Fastpass is a paradigmatic example; so too is OnStar, the GM system that tracks your car's location and provides assistance if you break down. San Francisco taxicabs have been equipped with digital cameras; despite some complaints, the reception generally has been positive. (Passengers aren't the only ones who like the system: cabbies, who are often victims of robberies, also like the added security it provides.)

It will be interesting to see if commuters treat information collection at the more granular level afforded by the subway in the same way.

The Oyster site's FAQ doesn't explain why it's called "Oyster," though.

Chinese to send human into space

According to the New Scientist,

China's first astronaut will attempt to blast off into space on 15 October, according to reports from several different sources. However, officials have refused to confirm the date.

Experts believe the historic flight will see a single "yuhangyuan" circle the Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft. It has also been revealed that the trip will last 90 minutes.

This rumor would be consistent with reports that China wants to put a man on the moon by 2010.

Plasma life?

The New Scientist reports on an experiment that suggests the possibility of gaseous life forms (insert political joke here):

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

[via Arlington Institute newsletter]

Discovery of Global Warming

American Institute of Physics historian Spencer Weart has published a new book, The Discovery of Global Warming. He's also created a Web site that covers much of the same ground. This is a notable project for a couple reasons. First, the site itself is no mere advertisement for the book, as so many book-related Web sites are: it's got a quite a bit more material than the printed version of The Discovery of Global Warming.

Second, the book gives every appearance of being a significant study of how scientists came to the conclusion that human action was now altering the climate. One might disagree with the premise that global warming is happening, or that humans are affecting global climate, or that it's a bad thing; but everyone will benefit from reading what Weart has to say. (If you don't want to read the whole book, you can read the executive summary.) Weart characterizes his own position thus:

My training as a physicist and historian of science has given me some feeling for where scientific claims are reliable and where they are shaky. Of course climate science is full of uncertainties, and nobody claims to know exactly what the climate will do. That very uncertainty is part of what, I am confident, is known beyond doubt — our planet's climate can change, tremendously and unpredictably. Beyond that we can conclude (with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2001 report) that it is very likely that significant global warming is coming in our lifetimes. This surely brings a likelihood of harm, widespread and grave. The few who contest these facts are either ignorant, or so committed to their viewpoint that they will seize on any excuse to deny the danger.

Finally, the project is notable because of the author himself. Spencer (full disclosure: I've met him a couple times at academic conferences, but don't know him well enough to pick him out of a police lineup) is not easily categorizable as a leftist academic: his last two books were Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1998), and Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (2000), the second of which was more admired on the right than left. He's part of that community of historians of science who moved from practicing to studying the history of their fields, and as the quote above suggests, carries some of those scientists' instincts into his historical research. In other words, he's very solid a