IFTF's Future Now

World 66

For some time, I've been thinking that one of the most popular uses of pervasive computing technology would be in travel. Anyone who had to plan a trip before the Web will remember how far the Internet lowered the bar for finding information-- in particular, weather and news, which aren't in last year's travel gude-- about your destination. The density of useful information you can find when moving is even more dramatic: when I moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s, I had to have a friend send me copies of the newspaper apartment listings; today, that kind of extremely detailed inside information is often available online.

One thing every traveller does is acquire a lot of weird, but useful, information about places they visit-- everything from what public places have clean bathrooms, to where to get good dim sum after midnight. I recently came across an experiment in turning that private (and highly local) knowledge into a public resource, at a site called World66.

World66 is a collaborative project to create an open content travel guide. This means that virtually anyone can edit our articles.

Members have authorial and editorial privileges, and can add articles, and update existing ones. Essentially, it's a travel wiki. After a little poking around, I found it's a little uneven-- I created an "eating out" section for Philadelphia, a city with a lot of interesting restaurants, and incredibly, there are no restaurant or cafe listings for the San Francisco Bay Area-- but it's definitely the kind of project that will become more valuable as the number of contributors increases.

Now if I could only access it in real-space as well as real-time-- look up its Washington DC restaurant listings when I'm there, and hungry-- we'd really be getting somewhere.

[via Halavais]

Robot road markers

Robotic vehicles are a staple of science fiction, but I'm not sure I've ever read a book in which the highway itself, or some piece of readway infrastructure, is operated by robots. Partly this reflects an assumption that robots would be surrogates for humans; but it also reflects the fact that in our preoccupation with driving, we tend not to notice all the other things that happen on highways, or give much thought to who does it.

This occured to me after reading a New Scientist report on a project to develop robotic traffic cones:

Herds of robotic traffic cones could soon be swarming onto a highway, closing down lanes and slowing the traffic....

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones.... The markers are delivered to the roadside by a specially equipped truck, from which an operator controls their deployment using a laptop computer. Each fleet of robots is made up of a lead robot or "shepherd", which is equipped with a Global Positioning System satellite navigation receiver, plus a number of less expensive "dumb" units.

The laptop screen displays an image of the road, captured by a camera mounted on top of the truck. Using software developed by [University of Nebraska-Lincoln roboticist Shane] Farritor's team, the operator marks on the screen where the barrels should be placed.

From this the software calculates the GPS coordinates of the point where the shepherd should be placed, and this is sent to the shepherd via a radio link. The shepherd takes up its position, and also tells the other markers, by radio, where to go. They then use dead reckoning - counting how many times their wheels turn, for instance - to work out their position....

The shepherd checks its "sheep" are in the right place using a laser-based radar (or "lidar") system to correct any positional errors. The lidar also has a safety role. If a marker is detected consistently straying out of position, the shepherd moves it out of harm's way and shuts it down.

Wi Fi on the farm

Early this afternoon, the wireless network in my office went down. Rather than wait for it to come back up, I left, and headed for a nearby library that has free Wi-Fi. (Okay, it's also a nice day, and the library has a pleasant little courtyard.) While I now think of being connected as essential to getting anything done, Wi-Fi Planet has a piece on research to integrate wireless into farming.

[F]armers need access to a range of data. They need to monitor pumps and other equipment, operate unmanned tractors and even download satellite data showing the condition of their fields. As things stand today, they have to make the long track back to the farmhouse each time they want to hook up with this information.

Researcher say Wi-Fi could make a big difference in the efficiency and accuracy with which growers can get to their information.

One interesting aspect of this is that-- in the article, at least-- it's pitched as being useful to small farmers, not the giant agribusiness concerns.

Tagging kids

Wi-Fi Planet reports that Legoland is deploying an RFID-enabled device that parents can use to locate their children. (Legoland's Web site also has a brief notice about it.)

Here's Lego's description of how it works:

On entering the park, the wristband is placed on the child's arm. If parents lose sight of their child, they can send an SMS message to the Kidspotter system during their entire visit. They will then automatically receive a return message stating the name of the park area and the map coordinate of their child's position in the park. On their special Kidspotter map of the park, parents can easily see where to find their child. The Kidspotter kit consists of a small wristband with a tiny sender, plus a special Kidspotter map of the park.

This is consistent with uses of RFID that the Institute has expected: rather than being used to create a nightmarish police state, RFID would first be used in areas that already have monitoring and tracking systems. As we noted in an earlier post, "some of the most enthusiastic early adopters of RFID for monitoring purposes are industries that are already big on such efforts," like casinos, hospitals-- and amusement parks.

Here's where things get a bit trickier. According to Wi-Fil Planet,

Along with tracking kids, the Bluesoft system helps LegoLand -- and other amusement parks -- know more about visitor traffic patterns and favorite areas.

"This provides us with a better foundation to make the right decisions for placement of new rides and to improve visitation of the areas of the park that are frequently overlooked," said Dorte Tegllund, LegoLand Denmark Marketing Director.

I think there's an reasonable assumption that you surrender a measure of privacy when you go into an amusement park, but it will be interesting to see if any users object to this aspect of the service. My personal suspicion is that they won't: parents will be willing to put up with the park collecting data on traffic patterns and preferences if it means they can find their kids quickly.

iPod and the future of Apple

The Sunday New York Times has an article by John Markoff on Apple and the iPod. For the first time last quarter, Apple sold more iPods than Macintoshes (807k vs. 749k), and revenues from non-Mac products made up 39% of Apple's revenues. Markoff argues that these signal a deeper change:

[Jobs] has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous - hip, even lovable computers - to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life....

With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

The Cult of Mac blog extends the discussion, pointing to some other interesting articles, including this long piece on the iPod's design chain.

Comments posting problem solved

It looks like the comments are now working again. If anyone continues to get error messages, please let me know, at apang at iftf dot org.

Comments posting problem

Something has gone wrong with the comments posting feature of Future Now: it doesn't seem to be accepting any comments. It may be that in the course of battling comment spam I blocked one too many IP addresses, or it could be a deeper problem; I hope to have it figured out shortly.

My apologies to anyone who tried to comment and lost their work.

Baby blogs and privacy

BBC News asks, "Do babyblogs violate children's privacy?"

It is easier than ever before to post family snaps online, and an ideal way for grandparents and friends to stay in touch. But is it fair on the children involved?

With the rise of weblogs and public journals, some of today's children are having their young lives publicly documented in a way that few other children have ever experienced.

So-called babyblogs have sprung up on the web detailing every last moment of a child's life, from the minute it's born. For friends and family far away, sites like these can be a superb way of keeping in touch.

But if, in the future, a prospective partner, friend or employer should type the child's name into Google, will they appreciate having so much of their childhood documented for all to read?

This strikes me as illuminating for a couple reasons. First, it assumes that privacy standards will be the same in the future as they are today. The odds that you'll routinely use Google (or some successor) to find out about someone you're thinking of hiring or marrying (or just having lunch with) strike me as pretty high; I already do it for people I'm meeting, and know that at least a few people I meet do it to me.

Second, it seems to ignore the existence of password protection and meta tags that keep bots from indexing your site.

Third, it does raise a good point, which is that one aspect of privacy is privacy from one's own past-- or at least a degree of control over what's public and what's not. The freedom to not have to explain or defend an ill-considered remark made ten years ago, or to not have your present friends know an embarrassing nickname that you happily left behind in primary school, is an important part of our notion of privacy. It's one we tend to forget about, and one that computers and digital storage do undermine. The ability of humans to selectively, even collectively, forget things is quite valuable; computer memory doesn't (currently) work that way. Computers don't forget things creatively; they forget them catastrophically.

And of course, if parents can't embarrass their children later in life with stories of their babyhood, what's the point of being a parent?

Daniel Dennett

The Guardian has a really terrific profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Writing "The Future"

A moment of shameless self-promotion, for which I apologize. (I guess it's not quite "shameless.") I've started writing a column/bloglike object for Red Herring, called "The Future." It will feature short essays, broken into installments, that run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It's available to subscribers, but registration is free.

The tone is rather different from this blog: when my editor first talked to me about the project, he said he wanted "a cross between Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." I know micropublishing is all the rage, but these instructions set a new record for wacky specificity.

The first essay deals with creative versus productive tools, and is broken into three pieces: "Darwin's notebooks," "Amplifiers," and "Keys and hammers."

I won't be giving up "Future Now," by any means, though I will provide regular links from this blog to the column, and occasionally deeper treatments of subjects I discuss there.