IFTF's Future Now

links for 2007-10-31

• In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism - New York Times
  (tags: India technology poverty)
• Why the Web 2.0 Bubble Doesn't Bother Silicon Valley -- New York Magazine
  (tags: futureofcities Silicon_Valley NYC venture_capital web2.0 economy)
• UnderwaterTimes | Unprecedented Global Measurement Network Achieves Full Coverage Of Oceans; 'Beginning Of The Observation Period'
  The Argo network of sensor-bearing profiling floats measures ocean water temperature, salinity and velocity to a degree never before possible. The Argo Steering Committee, the international panel of scientists that manage the network, has designated Nov.
  (tags: blue_economy sensing oceans oceanography)
• US-Africa Materials Institute - History
  "The USAMI is a virtual institute that was crated in 2003 with sponsorship from the Division of Materials Research of the National Science Foundation. Since then we have organized over 40 visits by African materials researchers to... the U.S."
  (tags: africa science research brain_circulation X2)
• Future of Manufcturing in the EU
  (tags: EU manufacturing policy)
• SRI: The Future of Manufacturing
  SRI conducted a series of analyses for the Futures Group of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to provide a better understanding of these major shifts and to help MEP/NIST al
  (tags: SRI manufacturing US policy)
• DTI : The Future for Manufacturing Industry
  2002 speech by Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt at MErrill Lynch in London on the future of UK manufacturing.
  (tags: manufacturing UK policy economic_development)
• The Factory of the Future | Metropolis Magazine | August/September 2002
  by Bruce Sterling
  (tags: manufacturing mass_customization)
• Manufacturing Business Technology - Home Page
  IT trade mag for manufacturing industry.
  (tags: manufacturing IT computing sensing)
• Floating factory could change future of LNG - The Boston Globe
  Offshore LNG processing plant keeps hazmats away from population.
  (tags: security manufacturing blue_economy)
• fabbers.com > fabbers.com: Your Digital Fabrication Portal
  (tags: design manufacturing prototyping rapid_prototyping)

Small quake

We had a small earthquake here in the Bay Area this evening. On the Peninsula, where the Institute is located, it probably lasted about 30 seconds or so, and buildings shook a little; but nothing fell over.

Seconds after it was over, I started getting IMs from colleagues, asking if I'd felt the quake too, and how long it had lasted. It was my kids' first earthquake, and so naturally I wanted to explain what an earthquake is (though without the part about the near inevitability of the Bay Area eventually being hit hard by a Hayward Fault quake); so naturally, I fired up Google Earth, found the USGS report (5.6, not so small), and showed them where the epicenter was:

The red star is the epicenter, and the yellow pin is where we live.

A little later, I was curious to see what fault it was on, so I went back online, grabbed a KMZ file from the USGS showing the locations of Bay Area fault lines, and added it into the mix:

Now I could see it was on the Calaveras Fault, not the Hayward, as I'd assumed.

We at IFTF write a lot about how visualization tools create new interpretive possibilities, and how the existence of substantial, free data sets creates new opportunities for amateur science. Turns out we're right.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, Google Earth, menlo park, visualization

links for 2007-10-30

• A Wireless Revolution in India
  (tags: mobility india)
• Technology Review: Moving Freely between Virtual Worlds
  (tags: metaverse diaspora)
• Russell Sage Foundation: Future of Work
  (tags: work future_work social science sociology economics)
• GM to Set Up Research Center in Shanghai
  General Motors Corp. said Monday it will set up a $250 million alternative-fuel research center in Shanghai amid efforts by global automakers to produce commercially viable alternatives to gasoline engines.
  (tags: biofuels energy mobility R&D china)
• Poverty Action Lab
  The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) serves as a focal point for development and poverty research based on randomized trials
  (tags: mit development economics policy poverty research social science)
• Reason Magazine - Betting on Climate Change
  "[I]t would be far more interesting and valuable to the climate debate if major figures in the climate change debate would negotiate a bet about the future of global temperature trends."
  (tags: prediction_markets climate_change environment science)
• Betting on Climate Change
  "Probabilistic climate forecasting is not easy.... How can we form these estimates in such a way as to reduce the risk of researcher bias? This page presents one possibility, based on a futures market for the Earth's climate."
  (tags: prediction_markets climate_change environment science)
• UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PARKS CONTRIBUTE TO ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS OF REGIONS, STATES AND NATIONS
  New comprehensive report outlines emerging impact of park
  (tags: R&D science cities science_cities higher_ed)
• Digital Transformation of Urban Experience
  Our workshop on Nov 1-3, 2007 will be the first in a series of activities that will bring together leading academics and practitioners from various disciplines to identify, analyze, design and describe ways in which we can transform urban communities.
  (tags: urban information technology media ubicomp)
• New Insights From Creatures' Perspective - washingtonpost.com
  On Greg Marshall's "Crittercam, which evolved into a remote-imaging program" that "capture[s] images, sound and data from the perspective of a variety of animals," and has been used on "more than 50 species of marine, terrestrial and flying creatures."
  (tags: remote biology mobility X2 sensors tagging)
• Structured Procrastination
  "I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong... I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. "
  (tags: creativity learning psychology productivity)

Nations favoring tax breaks over direct subsidies for R&D

The OECD's latest Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard reports:

More and more OECD governments are giving firms tax breaks to drive innovation while cutting their direct spending on business research and development (R&D), and are also encouraging public research organisations to commercialise their inventions.... two thirds of the 30 OECD member countries offered businesses tax subsidies in 2006, up from 12 in 1995, and most have tended to make it more generous over the years. Direct government funding financed an average of 7% of business R&D in 2005, down from 11% in 1995.

OECD countries take new approach to fostering innovation

Technorati Tags: economic development, science, research

Generation Mesh: Working at Wi-Fi Hotspots

My friend and colleague Laura Forlano has just had a great piece published in Vodafone's Receiver, which provides a view on her ongoing dissertation research into how public Wi-Fi is reshaping work and collaboration:

Here are some excerpts, though I highly suggest a full read.

Vodafone Receiver » #19 | Generation Mesh

For Generation Mesh, Starbucks – as well as independent cafés, parks and other public spaces where it is possible to access the wireless internet – is a vital site for social interaction, professional support, collaboration and, even, community. I use this term in reference to mesh networks, sometimes called ad hoc networks, which are decentralized wireless networks in which every node can both send and receive information. They are dynamic, flexible and self-organizing.....

Seeking to create an officelike atmosphere – in contrast to the prospect of working at home in their pajamas – pioneers have founded collaborative office spaces... In essence, these new, ad hoc organizational forms that rely on clustering, in a "smart mob"-like fashion, around WiFi hotspots are simulating the office environment that they lack as remote workers, telecommuters, freelancers or self-employed workers.....

Cafés, parks and other public spaces, when appropriated as mobile workplaces are still public or semi-public places. As such, they blur, and often reverse or contradict, traditional dichotomies such as employee and employer, work and play, online and offline, public and private, presence and co-presence, individual and community, and local and global. For example, since a significant number of mobile professionals are freelancers, self-employed workers and entrepreneurs, the distinction between employee and employer is not well-defined....

Mobile workplaces are sites in which online and offline activities coexist. This includes the coexistence of knowledge-work, service-work and unemployment....

Full article

Technorati Tags: information technology, work, ubicomp, urban

links for 2007-10-28

• Biofuels 'crime against humanity'
  A United Nations expert has condemned the growing use of crops to produce biofuels as a replacement for petrol as a crime against humanity
  (tags: biofuel environment food globalization sustainability transportation)

links for 2007-10-27

• Who owns the Arctic? - Slate Magazine
  (tags: blue_economy)
• UC Davis: Institute of Transportation Studies: Institute of Transportation Studies
  (tags: academic policy transportation research environment infrastructure)
• Technology Review: Decoding the Human Eye
  Superdense arrays of silicon electrodes will bring scientists closer to an artificial retina that approximates normal vision.
  (tags: extended_self vision sensing disability)
• SiliconValley.com - Microsoft wants to add Silicon Valley as a friend
  "Time was that Silicon Valley loved to hate Microsoft, casting it as a ruthless monopoly whose tactics richly merited antitrust lawsuits from the Justice Department, state attorneys general and rivals like Sun Microsystems... But things change."
  (tags: silicon_valley microsoft google)
• Password-cracking chip causes security concerns - tech - 24 October 2007 - New Scientist Tech
  A technique for cracking computer passwords using inexpensive off-the-shelf computer graphics hardware is causing a stir in the computer security community.
  (tags: abundant_computing)
• New code of contact: Dial BB for biwi, DD for didi-India-The Times of India
  (tags: mobility India)

David Brooks, cyborg

David Brooks is now augmenting. The piece is over the top, but is one of those "if he's doing it, it's either really big or is really over" data-points.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S....

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves....

Memory? I’ve externalized it.... [I]f I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins....

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, end of cyberspace, geoweb, memory, mobility

IBM Seeks to Thwart IP Bandits

Ever since hedge funds started getting into the IP game, big companies have seen greater and greater risks associated with patent infringement. Put simply, the funds - either directly or indirectly - amass piles of patents and then look for firms with deep pockets to sue. It's a real and lucrative threat.

That's why, ironically, IBM is now proposing to patent a new processs for rapid licensing of patents to provide companies with defenses against these tactics. The irony is that IBM has been one of the most vocal sticklers against business process patents.

Technology Review has full coverage:
"IBM says it has a new way to profit from patents -- and wants to patent the idea"

Technorati Tags: innovation, patents, intellectual property, puppy

links for 2007-10-26

• Biology | All systems go | Economist.com
  (tags: biology science simulation)
• Technology Review: Trivial Pursuits
  [N]ew-media intellectuals have coined a term to describe the new social behavior they say microblogging encourages: they talk of "presence," a shorthand for the idea that by using such tools, we can enjoy an "always on" virtual omnipresence."
  (tags: social_software media blogging)
• Technology Review: Virus-Built Electronics
  "[R]esearchers have demonstrated a completely new way of making nanomaterials, one that uses viruses as microscopic building blocks."
  (tags: nanotechnology manufacturing clothing research technology nanofabrication materials MIT)
• i d e a n t: Movable Distance: Technology, Nearness and Farness
  "[T]echnology's much celebrated victory over distance fails to deliver everything it promised... [for] much more than technology is required to bridge the existential gap between the knower and the known. Distancelessness... is not the same as nearness."
  (tags: endofcyberspace mobility place-space)
• Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert - New York Times
  Saudi King Abdullah "is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion."
  (tags: university education Saudi_Arabia middle_east)
• KAUST - King Abdullah University of Science & Technology
  Graduate university in Saudi Arabia. Under construction.
  (tags: x2 university saudi_arabia)
• East meets west in the 'global classroom' | Worldwide | EducationGuardian.co.uk
  "The UK's first Malaysian university opened its doors this month on London's Picadilly.... It's the moment when the empire strikes back - in a good way."
  (tags: UK university education higher_ed Malaysia)

Going to a place called Lim Kok Wing / Gonna get a big bowl of beef chow mein

The Guardian covered the opening of London's newest university-- a branch of Limkokwing University, which is based in Kuala Lumpur and has campuses in Beijing, Jakarta, and Gabarone (the capital of Botswana).

It's the moment when the empire strikes back - in a good way. For generations, Malaysians have been educated by the old colonial power - either coming to UK universities and colleges or following British-style degree courses at home.

This month, the first Malaysian university to return the favour opened its doors in London's Piccadilly. The grand Victorian edifice on one of the capital's most expensive streets shows that Limkokwing University is determined to make a splash.

There are lots of European and American universities, educational corporations, consultants, etc. involved in joint ventures with Asian universities, or setting up foreign branch campuses. But this is no longer entirely a one-way process.

It may have been inevitable that Limkokwing would move into the European market, given the already-global character of its main campus:

The 6,000 students at Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in Kuala Lumpur come from 150 countries, mostly from the developing world, but increasingly from Europe, where governments like those of Denmark and Germany are keen to expose young people to the culture and business of Asia.

So the strategy of creating branch campuses is part brand extension, part growth opportunity, and part attempt to expand opportunities for global study-- something that schools like this see as particularly important.

All this is neat, in the way that counterintuitive trends can be. But what really sticks with me is something Lim says near the end of the article:

British higher education goes back hundreds of years and Malaysian universities can never match the strong traditions in academic scholarship built up by the British.

However, as a developing country, Malaysia is better able to understand the needs of other developing nations. It is therefore in a better position to deliver British education to the developing world.

In future, British education will be delivered in China and Malaysia and wherever. I don't think that can be stopped and I think it is a good thing for the UK.

"British education" as a model of education, not as something that happens in (or emanates from) a specific geographical location, and can thus be treated as a monopoly. This is disruptive thinking. Or as Kris Olds and Susan Robertson comment,

So a Malaysian university, providing a Malaysian education in London, and a British education in Botswana (to students from over 100 countries)…the global higher ed landscape is indeed changing…

Technorati Tags: business, education, higher education, Malaysia, UK, university

More on global trends in universities

A promising-looking source on globalization and higher education: GlobalHigherEd, a blog started by University of Wisconsin geographer Kris Olds, and Bristol professor Susan Robertson. They explain:

We are interested in how and why new knowledge and new spaces (including socio-technical networks) are being developed in association with the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’, and what the implications of this complex development process are. Three examples of relatively territorialized knowledge spaces are Qatar Education City, Singapore’s ‘Global Schoolhouse’, and the European Higher Education Area, though even in these cases they are fundamentally dependent upon extra-territorial relations and linkages (e.g., see the Singapore-MIT Alliance). Examples of relatively more networked spaces of knowledge production include the Erasmus Mundus programme, and university consortia like the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) or the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). There are also a myriad of fascinating and rarely examined spaces of knowledge production (e.g., non-profit think tanks, private research centres and universities).

A bit on the academic side, but that's perfectly appropriate for a blog about... academia.

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, education, university

Building universities in Saudi Arabia

There's a university-building boom in Saudi Arabia. Given that the kingdom has a growing population and even faster-growing demand for higher education, is raking in vast amounts of money thanks to high oil prices, and is starting to think about its place in a post-oil world (or at least a world in which its reserves are no longer vast enough to give it a dominant position in world the oil market), this development isn't entirely surprising. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that

The higher-education ministry's budget has nearly tripled since 2004, to $15-billion, much of which has been spent on opening more than 100 new colleges and universities.... And the government has lifted a decades-old ban on private institutions, offering free land and more than $10-million toward scholarships and building costs.

Earlier this year, the kingdom announced a "government plan to open 11 new universities in the next three years... located throughout the kingdom, [which] will focus on applied sciences."

Today, the New York Times had an article on the ground-breaking of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a graduate university on the Red Sea. There are several interesting things about the way the university is developing, and how it'll be organized.

Technorati Tags: education, R&D, research, Saudi Arabia, science, university

links for 2007-10-25

• Finpro and Technolpolis open innovation center in St. Petersburg
  A Finnish-Russian innovation center will commence operations in St. Petersburg, Russia this November. The center will strengthen collaboration and relations between the participating Finnish businesses and public entities and the evolving Russian innovati
  (tags: finland russia incubator startup venture_capital science_cities)

links for 2007-10-24

• An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play - New York Times
  (tags: neuroscience health)
• Jaron Lanier, "What cephalopods can teach us about language," Discover Magazine (April 2006)
  "[C]ephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials... might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own species."
  (tags: squid communication science X2)
• BBC NEWS | Health | Obesity 'epidemic' turns global
  (tags: health global obesity statistics)
• Tales From Mouse Ward : outlookindia.com
  (tags: health IT India)

"Twittering while California burns": Social Media and Disasters

I'm fascinated by the use of telecommunications during crises. Rafe Needleman's Webware blog has a great post on the use of Twitter during the fires in San Diego:

Disasters are social: They affect large groups of people, all thrown together by circumstance or location. So when I was at a dinner with Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale two weeks ago and he said, "The next disaster will be Twittered," I thought he was spot on. What better use could there be for a social media site like Twitter than to support people with a dire need to connect to each other and share information? (Full story: Twittering while California burns)

During Katrina, there were all kinds of fascinating uses of new telecom tools - probably the most interesting was the real-time transcription of Louisana State Police scanner traffic by an ad hoc group of IRC chatters (someone had patched their scanner over to an Internet audio stream).

Telecommuting in the US was born after the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge earthquakes. I'm sure we'll see lots of bottom-up ad hoc innovation during this disaster as well.

Here are some of my old papers - Telecommunications Infrastructure in Disasters: Preparing Cities for Crisis Communications and Disaster Forensics: Leveraging Crisis Information Systems for Social Science and a video of a talk I did with Bill Mitchell at MIT on "Trauma and Rebuilding in the Digital Electronic Era".

The Future of Presence

I spent a few days last week in Newcastle, England - a real gem of a town for tech history enthusiasts and urbanists. Newcastle is where the first steam trains and railways were built at the dawn of the industrial revolution. It was the demonstration of Robert Stephenson's Rocket in 1829 (built in Newcastle) that you might mark as the beginning of mass mechanical mobility. Less famously, but relevant to our Future of Work theme, there is also a building on the quayside, that my friend Professor Andy Gillespie pointed out was one of the first office-only commercial buildings ever built.

I was there for the Design of the Times (Dott) 07 festival, a year-long event sponsored by England's Design Council, and organized by John Thackara (of Doors of Perception fame). It was an amazing exhibition at the remarkably restored Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, an old flour mill cum gallery. This year's Dott was organized around understanding sustainability, and featured a number of funded project that had been running throughout Northeast England all year.

My talk was the keynote for the first of a series of Dott 07 debates, on Movement. (others include Food, Health, and School). The topic I took up - "Must we keep moving?", as I thought more and more about it, became about the Future of Presence. As you'll see in the text of my speech below, I was trying to unpack some of our hopes and fears about the prospects of emerging immersive telecommunications technologies to displace high-energy, high-impact air travel.

Full text after the jump....

links for 2007-10-23

• Carbon Hero
  GPS-based carbon lifestyle tracking system
  (tags: sustainability mobile geoweb context_awareness)
• From Casinos to Counterterrorism: Surveilance in Las Vegas
  This city, famous for being America's playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than a
  (tags: counterterrorism crime intelligence surveillance)
• China's future: a nation of single men? - Los Angeles Times
  (tags: china future aging gender)
• Chasing the Chinese Dream
  For a growing number of the world's emigrants, China -- not the United States -- is the land where opportunities are endless, individual enterprise is rewarded and tolerance is universal.
  (tags: china immigration islam)
• College Costs Rising Rapidly - New York Times
  Tuition and fees at public and private colleges and universities rose at more than double the rate of inflation, the College Board said in reports released this morning.
  (tags: education higher_ed inflation economics)
• Interoperability in Virtual Worlds: Experts Discuss Possible Futures
  (tags: virtual diaspora)

And with this post, I'm going to sleep

I've recently been dipping into the literature on the neuroscience of memory and futures thinking, trying to figure out if there are insights from this work that can help futurists do their work better. After a few months of reading about inter-temporal decision-making, the tangled relationship between memory and imagination, and why we make bad decisions, my eye finds brain-related news pretty quickly. Like this piece on sleep research from the New York Times:

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems.

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation.

Yet the new research underscores a vast transformation in the way scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a blank screen, a metaphor for death, it has emerged as an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play — and to work — during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms

Technorati Tags: memory, neuroscience, psychology, science

DIY Biology

We do a lot of stuff here at the Institute on user-driven innovation. As one of the first nodes on the ARPANet-- the original "users are driving innovation" playground-- and a place that's followed the evolution of online collaboration pretty much since Day 1, it's been interesting to see the concept go mainstream in the last couple years. Now it's clearly spreading from IT and the Web to other areas, including biology. Attila Csordás encouraged bio-DIYers, "do not hesitate:"

[I]n the not so distant future, self-aware citizens may manage their own stem cells, grow them in the garage, and store them in the fridge. It could be a form of autonomous medical self-insurance.

Incredible as it may sound, the basics of molecular biology - what is DNA, how genetic information is coded, how it turns to RNA, which base triplets fits to which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that make up your body - can be learnt within 2 hours. Another intensive two weeks in an official lab with an instructor and you can work with them.

Csordás argues that if you can learn the basics of PCR and in vitro cell culture-- both of which are now relatively cheap, well-known technologies-- you can do it. Baris Karadogan (at From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road) draws out some implications:

Welcome to open source science, welcome to do it yourself biology.... With so much information on the Internet and such ready access to scientific data, what Attila wrote about could very well be commonplace in 5-10 years. This is a world where people could be "playing around" with their own biology. I see two big impacts right away.

First, tinkering is the best way to invent things, and this would really push the envelope in scientific and practical discovery. Second, if you think governments are having a hard time figuring out the laws to govern file sharing, let's see how they'll deal with "amateur genetic engineering". This will be a huge issue. Imagine people coming up with "user generated biotechnology".

Update: Attila points me to a recent interview he conducted with biotech startup founder Jim Hardy. "Make no mistake," he argues: "biotech is the next IT."

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, users

links for 2007-10-22

• NC Science Blogging Conference
  Join us for our second annual day of discussions, readings and demonstrations about science and blogging Saturday, January 19, 2008 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
  (tags: science blogging conference)
• A Blog Around The Clock
  Science blog by Bora Zivkovic, "the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science)." There, his job is "to try to motivate you to comment on the papers there."
  (tags: biology blogging science X2)
• Timbuktu Chronicles
  "Timbuktu Chronicles seeks to spur dialogue in areas of entrepreneurship, technology and the scientific method as it impacts Africa."
  (tags: blogging science Africa technology X2)
• Can the scientific diaspora save African science? - SciDev.Net
  "Jacques and Anne Marie Gaillard argue that there are serious limitations in the diaspora model that suggest it should not be seen as the principal panacea for African science."
  (tags: science africa brain_circulation development)
• IFS - International Foundation for Science
  "IFS is a research council with international operations and the mission to build the scientific capacity of developing countries in sciences related to the sustainable management of biological and water resources."
  (tags: development science brain_circulation sweden)
• Research Remix (Heather Piwowar)
  "Blogging about the science, engineering, and human factors of biomedical research data reuse."
  (tags: science biology blogging X2 open_access data medicine)
• Newsvine - Biotech DIYers, do not hesitate
  "Welcome to the coming world of personal biotech. All you need is a short course in biotech basics, a few thousands of bucks, some tinkering capability, and enough spare time."
  (tags: biotech diy science)
• ICSU - International Council for Science
  Promotes global scientific collaboration.
  (tags: science brain_circulation collaboration x2 society)
• ICSU 75th Anniversary
  "142 young scientists, from 71 countries, met in Lindau, Germany on 4-6 April for a Conference... on “Global Scientific Challenges: Perspectives from Young Scientists” ... [which focused] on the changing global context for the conduct of science."
  (tags: science X2 conference globalization brain_circulation)
• ICSU 75th Anniversary
  Presentations from the "Global Scientific Challenges: Perspectives from Young Scientists" conference.
  (tags: science conference X2)

Chronology

I've recently been absorbed in been Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and so perhaps have been more prepared to catch notice of really curious theories. Via Baris Karadogan's From Instabul to Sand Hill Road, I came across this argument: by Russian mathematician Anatoly T. Fomenko that

the timing of historical events, Chronology, as we know it is wrong (Sir Isaac Newton makes this claim in a paper too). Fomenko asserts that history is off by about 1000 years. Cultures we think to have existed say 200BC is actually 800 AD.

The initial idea comes from analyzing lunar eclipses. There are working laws of physics that allow astronomers to predict exactly when and where on the world an eclipse will happen. We get news of this all the time. They can go backwards in time as well, and match all the recorded eclipses to what the theory predicts. But Fomenko notices (in the works of astronomer Robert Newton) a serious mismatch. Eclipses that were recorded to have happened between 700-1300 AD show lunar behavior that vastly differs from theory and could only be explained by a mysterious non-gravitational force applied on the earth-moon system. However, this mysterious force completely disappears, and everything matches theory, if the dates of the eclipses were wrong and each one actually about 1000 years later than claimed. This surprises Fomenko and he gets obsessed with analyzing chronology.

But he’s a lot smarter than many of us, and devises a statistical method that can determine whether two pieces of text are written in the same time period. Now this is very important, and touches the crux of what I am talking about. Language changes over time. The words we use change. New words are added and some words disappear. The kinds of sentences we construct change over time, and all those changes can be quantified. In a way, the syntax of a document, not its semantics, can be used to determine when it is written. This sounds reasonable and acceptable mathematically. As a result, Fomenko takes a documents said to be written in the times of ancient Rome, and compares it to a documents many years later and concludes that they are statistically from the same time period. There are chapters and chapters comparing kings of ancient Rome to kings of Germany, saying that these two kings were actually the same person.

Fomenko claims,

Unbelievable as it may seem, there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artefact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century. Classical history is firmly based on copies made in the XV-XVII centuries of 'unfortunately lost' originals.

Our theory simply returns the Chronology of World History to the realm of applied mathematics from which it was sequestrated by the clergy in the XVI-XVII centuries. We have developed a valid and verifiable method of historical research based on statistics, astronomy and logic.

For example, computer assisted recalculation of eclipses with detailed descriptions allegedly belonging to Antiquity shows that they either occurred in the Middle Ages or didn't occur at all. A simple application of computational astronomy to the rules of calculation of Easter according to the Easter Book introduced by the Nicean council of alleged 325 AD shows that it definitely could not have taken place before 784 AD.

As an historian, I'm hardly about to buy into the theory; on the other hand, it's an interesting argument.

Technorati Tags: history

links for 2007-10-21

• e-Social Science Conference 2007
  (tags: social science methodology)

links for 2007-10-20

• Shanghaiist: Tudou now bigger than Youtube?
  cites VC post on TVLinks
  (tags: China Internet TV film copyright IP p2p web2.0)
• Stanford School of Engineering - Student Organizations: Get Involved
  Engineering student organizations at Stanford.
  (tags: X2 technology engineering students student_associations)
• Graduate Student Associations in the US — PhDs.org: Science, Math, and Engineering Career Resources
  (tags: X2 student_associations science engineering)
• Evolution of Communication: From Email to Twitter and Beyond
  from twitter blog
  (tags: media blogging collaboration future)

links for 2007-10-19

• Mapping the Necklace...
  (tags: mapping uk tourism space sustainability)
• Stem Cells Printed in 3-D with Inkjet Devices - Yahoo! News
  "Scientists already use ink-jet cartridges to "print" stem cells into exacting patterns, and now engineers are taking the technology to a whole new dimension—quite literally—by exploring ways to print 3-D structures of cells."
  (tags: manufacturing printing biomedical stem_cells)
• The Futurists - Forbes.com
  "[T]he career path of the future just might be ... forecasting and analyzing the future. At least, that's what professional futurists seem to think."
  (tags: future futurists)
• Crowdsourcing The Crystal Ball - Forbes.com
  "[T]he problem with forecasting really is: Is it how we're trying to predict the future? Or is it that we're trying to predict the future at all?"
  (tags: future prediction_markets)
• The History Of The Future - Forbes.com
  "The future, as a concept, was born in ancient Mesopotamia, when people began studying the heavens for clues to impending events."
  (tags: future history)

iPods Causing Crime Wave??

According to a study by the Urban Institute, iPods and cell phones may be triggering a rise in violent crime.  From the study press release:

The gadgets are not just entertaining and convenient; their high value, visibility, and versatility make them "criminogenic"—or "crime-creating," in the vocabulary of criminologists. And their power to distract users can give thieves an advantage.

In the first three months of 2005, major felonies rose 18 percent on New York City's subways; but if iPod and cell phone thefts are excluded, felonies actually declined by 3 percent.

Whether or not it is true, "criminogenic" is a very cool word. 

Update:  MSNBC released a broader story on this today.

Why MySpace Music Matters

Before joining the Institute, I did some work with a small publication called MacTribe. One of the pieces I wrote for the site/magazine was about MySpace Music and its effect on the music industry. That article has recently been posted on MacTribe in two parts and I wanted to post the first part of the article here (most of it is after the jump—click on "Continue reading 'Why MySpace Music Matters'" to get to it). Part 2 of the article can be read here.

The Rise of the Virtual Demo: How MySpace Connects Artists, Labels, and Fans

Teenagers adore it. Young adults use it to pass the time at lame desk jobs and track down people from their past. Predators use it to zero in on potential victims. Parents fear it more than any parent feared the Beatles and Elvis's gyrating hips combined, and other people just think it's a stupid waste of time and energy. So what could possibly make MySpace useful beyond worldwide Internet distraction?

Music, that's what.

Before the dawn of the Internet age, when everybody suddenly fancied themselves an expert in web site design, musicians looking to promote their work had to do so through analog means: demo tapes, flyers, performances at artist showcases, etc. And just because they got a gig or found an A&R exec who’d bite doesn’t mean they’d have the one thing that can keep a musician’s career going for a long time: fans.

The digital revolution made it easy to upload tracks to a server and put them on the Internet, where everybody has access to them. But band web pages required at least rudimentary HTML skills, and not everyone broke down and bought a copy of HTML for Dummies. Now, anybody with a few tracks, a computer, and an Internet connection can create a self-promotion music page thanks to the controversial juggernaut of a social networking site, MySpace.

links for 2007-10-18

• Masahiro Mori, "The Uncanny Valley," Energy (1970)
  Classic article outlining the concept of the "uncanny valley" in robotics.
  (tags: cyborg design robotics robots simulation)
• Why do game characters look so creepy? - By Clive Thompson - Slate Magazine
  2004 article on "the uncanny valley" in video games, "the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad."
  (tags: design future robots games simulation)
• Dispatches From Brazil
  "Daily dispatches of news and observations from Brazil about biofuels research from ES&T's Erika D. Engelhaupt and C&EN's Stephen K. Ritter."
  (tags: biofuel brazil blog science research r&d)
• Biotech Brasil
  "The Biotech Brasil blog is published by Luciana di Ciero."
  (tags: blogging science x2 brazil)
• Silicon Hutong
  Blog about IT and China.
  (tags: china blog X2 technology)
• China Law Blog: a blog about Chinese law and the legal issues of doing business in China.
  (tags: China law blogging X2)
• Chinese Science Outpost
  Science, Culture and Journalism in China
  (tags: blogging China X2 science technology environment)
• Yan Feng
  Chinese applied physicist and blogger.
  (tags: blogging China X2 science)
• Big science and China hold future promise - Physics World - physicsworld.com
  "The next 10 years will see the launch of a number of large and impressive physics experiments that will push the limits of vacuum technology."
  (tags: physics China science vacuum technology)
• Peter Cochrane - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com
  (tags: blogging future technology)
• FT.com / Business Life / Science & environment - The dragon's lab - how China is rising through the innovation ranks
  "Having spent two decades muscling in on one manufacturing sector after another, China wants to spend the next two decades moving from "Made in China" to "Invented in China"."
  (tags: china brain_circulation innovation education)
• Tom W. Bell's Writings
  "As a professor of law and a policy analyst, I've mainly written about copyright, free speech, gambling, and telecommunications." Also authored two articles on science and prediction markets.
  (tags: science X2 prediction prediction_markets future)
• Britain to claim a million square km of Antarctica - Yahoo! News UK
  (tags: climate_change refugees diaspora)
• 'Second Earth' found, 20 light years away | Science | The Guardian
  "Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky "second Earth" circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone. The planet ... is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life."
  (tags: physics space astronomy science planet)
• The Simon Exchange in Science Claims
  "[T]he Simon Exchange will employ economic tools to quantify the current consensus about questions of science, technology, and public policy."
  (tags: prediction prediction_markets science X2 technology)
• Robin Hanson, Idea Futures - The Concept
  "Our policy-makers and media rely too much on the "expert" advice of a self-interested insider's club of pundits and big-shot academics... [who] are rewarded too much for telling good stories, and for supporting each other, rather than for being "right"."
  (tags: prediction prediction_markets future X2)
• Idea Futures Publications
  Robin Hanson's articles on idea futures.
  (tags: prediction_markets future science X2)
• Robin Hanson, "Market-Based Foresight: A Proposal," Foresight Update v. 10 (1990)
  "We need to evolve better fact-finding institutions to speed the growth of foresight. A better way for people to "stake their reputations" might help."
  (tags: prediction prediction_markets science X2)
• Robin Hanson, "Idea Futures," Wired 3.09.
  "consider a radical, market-based alternative for reaching scientific consensus. Imagine a betting pool on disputed science questions, where the current odds are treated as the current intellectual consensus."
  (tags: prediction prediction_markets science future X2)

Future of iTunes

Last week, Universal Music announced that it plans to join forces with other major labels to create an online music store—BMG is already in. Universal decided in July that they would not renew their contract with iTunes and will instead offer music to iTunes basically as they please, allowing them to pull the music when they feel like it. Additionally, thanks to a publicized spat between NBC and iTunes over pricing and piracy control, NBC will not renew its contract with iTunes either.   

In light of these developments, Ivan Askwith at Slate ponders the future of iTunes. Can the iTunes Store survive without the content from major labels and networks? Askwith envisions three different scenarios:
"Apple backs down," "The networks back down," and "No one backs down."

In the no one backs down scenario—in my opinion, the most likely—Apple has the ability to become an alternative to a major label by working directly with artists. It's lucrative: bypass the label and market your music through the most successful online music store to date.

Askwith writes:

Through iTunes, Apple could embrace the growing number of musicians looking to escape the confines of the major labels, a roster that includes Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and Madonna. It's doubtful that most artists would agree to release their work exclusively through Apple, but it's not hard to imagine an artist giving Apple an exclusive advance distribution window in exchange for placement in an iPod commercial, a tour sponsorship, and a higher share of revenues than the labels and networks are willing to offer. And while it's outside of its current business model, Apple could even invest in saving fan-favorite television shows from cancellation: Imagine iTunes as the exclusive distributor for Arrested Development, Firefly, or Veronica Mars.

Historical agreements between Beatles' label Apple Corps. and Apple Inc. hindered Jobs and company's ability to get into the music business. But earlier this year the companies agreed to end the long-running trademark dispute. (Despite a variety of teasers, from Jobs demonstrating the iPhone's music capabilities with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in his 2007 Macworld Keynote to the use of "The Beat Goes On" for a special September event, we're still waiting for the Beatles catalog to hit iTunes.)

Because of their willingness to jump into the legitimate digital music world while label execs were still trying to figure out how to use Soulseek, Apple really has an advantage. And a withdrawal of major labels means that Jobs can finally come through on his promise to release DRM-free music if the labels would allow. It's also worth nothing that the price of DRM-free music from EMI and other willing indie label participants in iTunes Plus has now dropped to 99 cents a song. How much of this has to do with Amazon's MP3 service—which I found to be amazing when I downloaded the entire Nick Drake catalog two weeks ago—will be left to speculation.

links for 2007-10-17

• Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard - New York Times
  high poverty schools struggle to meet requirements of NCLB
  (tags: education, learning, reform, states, school, students, poverty)
• Asia Times Online :: China News - Bourses bring democracy to China
  current data on stock market explosion
  (tags: China, stock_market, democracy, money)
• A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide. | MobileActive.org
  great blog, news feed
  (tags: mobile activism education health participatory)
• Chinese Blogger Conference 2007: Meet Us On Social Application Panel : China Web2.0 Review
  list of ideas for social apps needed, such as for mobiles, etc.
  (tags: China mobile internet blog p2p web2.0)

Web 2.0 Technologies: The New Seekers

In "The New Seekers," The Spectator's David Jennings counters Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen's bleak vision of anarchy resulting from a "dictatorship of idiots." Jennings believes that Web 2.0 technologies are enriching our culture rather than reducing it to a state of chaos, where everyone fancies themselves experts:

Anarchy is not synonymous with chaos—many of nature'€™s most complex and stable systems could be said to be anarchic. On the contrary, it embraces influence and leadership, if not regulation. Order emerges from disorder and diversity by evolution, and the central innovation and beauty of the Web 2.0 family of technologies is that they find ways to harness and accelerate this emergence, digitising Babel so that it can be processed, distilled and structured.

At the center of this is the shift from passive consumer to active critic, driven by discovery:

Discovery itself is an anarchic and unruly activity: it loves to slip through cracks, disappearing down rabbit holes and making associative leaps between material that may not at first appear to be connected. We all know the pleasure of arriving at the work of a new favourite author, composer or film-maker via what seems an incredibly circuitous path or a chance mention from a friend. It is our natural inquisitiveness that leads us to root out these new discoveries, foraging in the areas that appear most fertile in terms of our tastes.

Web 2.0 technologies, regardless of how short-lived some of them may be, allow us to find connections that we hadn't seen before and learn more about our own taste and the tastes of those in our networks. These "taste trails" pave the way for further discovery and encourage us to become active seekers.

One of my favorite examples of these is Last.FM. After creating an account,  you download a plugin for your media player which "scrobbles"—€”sends track metadata—€”to Last.FM. Over time, Last.FM compiles the data to create public charts of your most listened artists and songs. The site recommends "Neighbours," users with similar music taste, and artists that, through the data collected from all users, align with what you like. Last.FM also has a radio feature that allows you to listen to stations based on your data. There are also journal features and all artist information pages are editable by Last.FM members like a wiki.

Last.FM connects artists to artists, artists to people, and more, making it a fantastic discovery engine and personal music dashboard. I've been using it for a while now so I have a lot of information which might make my profile a fun one to poke around if you're not familiar with the system: http://www.last.fm/user/agreatnotion. One of my favorite features is the Events tab, which allows me to list what shows I have attended/will attend.