links for 2008-02-28
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social networking sites by country (in French)
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China Mobile's ag info service, can be delivered on mobiles or internet as well
IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.
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Neither I nor the Institute for the Future is endorsing anyone, but mulling through the websites of the final 3 last night (Clinton, Obama, and McCain). Here's what they have to say about innovation and R&D.
Clinton's site lays out a pretty detailed innovation agenda. Highlights include:
Obama's innovation proposals are a bit harder to parse, scattered as they are across various issue categories. His research agenda is much bigger, calling for some $150 billion in energy research funding over the next decade (vs. Hillary's $50 billion and McCain's general lack of any statement on energy policy, let alone research), and doubling the overall federal research budget (vs. Hillary's 50% expansion).
McCain's site has a whole section on "Pro-Innovation Tax Cuts". As far as I can tell, the most relevant proposal is an R&D tax credit. This appears to be a permanent extension of the federal R&E tax credit established in 1981, though McCain only calls for a 10 percent credit, rather than the current 20 percent credit. While I'm not sure that its a lack of spending that is the problem for US R&D right now, rather the declining productivity in lead industries like pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Still, while I suppose this credit is intended as an anti-offshoring effort, it might actually be just the thing to provide a few years of breathing room to figure out some solutions to the stagnation in R&D productivity. (Incidentally, both Clinton and Obama call for permanent extension of the R&E tax credit at the 20 percent level)
How any of this will be paid for, is indeed, something to deal with after the election.
Please point out corrections and omissions - we need to crowdsource this to keep up with the shifting political winds.
Technorati Tags: innovation, politics, public policy, R&D, science and technology
Back in the heady days of the mid 1990s, when we were first starting to understand the linkages between the online world of the Web and the offline world of offices, homes, school, stores and entire cities, a number of scholars started trying to create maps of Internet infrastructure and the flows of data it carried. Martin Dodge, then at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, and now at the University of Manchester, compiled the best collection of these early maps at his Atlas of Cyberspace, now archived.
It seems that we're entering a similar phase of interest in the mapping of online social networks. Technology Review has published a gallery of the state of the art of social network graphs. What's interesting is that they are still largely non-geographic. If you look back at Dodge's Atlas you'll see this was the case with early web and Internet maps too. Only over time, as use diffused and techniques for geo-locating activity were developed, did we see maps of networks get embedded into geographic maps of the real world. Expect to see this soon as geo-data is harvested in these studies of the social web.
Those maps are going to raise a lot more questions than they answer though. A key assumption among a lot of the Silicon Valley crowd is that social networks transcend geography. Yet as people like Keith Hampton at MIT have shown, there's also a tremendous amount of new local, weak social ties growing on top of the Internet. Social theorists like to call these simultaneous, diverging trends "glocalization".
A good place to look for an early view of these maps is the New York Talk Exchange exhibit going on at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Based on AT&T IP network data analyzed and visualized by MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, these images offer a glimpse into the grand-daddy of online social networks - the international telephone system. Glocalization indeed, as the maps illuminate clusters of calls from tightly-knit immigrant communities in Queens reaching across the globe to their homelands.
Look at the gallery in Technology Review: Between Friends
Technorati Tags: New York City, geography, social networks
Visiting Research Fellow,
The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) & China Media Center (CMC), University of Westminst
Some 34.8 percent reported they listened to mobile music every mont
"In other countries, there are other platforms for ordinary people to e
A Canadian and South African research team has studied the "phylogenetic distribution" of the human diet, using a Big Mac meal as a case study:
University of Calgary plant evolutionary ecologist Jana Vamosi, working with a team led by Serban Proches from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, found that humans likely stand alone when it comes to the spectrum of species we consume. Our ability to process food combined with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and international trade systems has also led to food becoming the ultimate product of a globalized society.
“Generally speaking, we eat very broadly from the tree of life,” Vamosi said. “Others have looked at the sheer number of plant species we consume but nobody has ever examined whether the plants we eat are clustered in certain branches. It turns out that they are not.”
In a paper published in the current issue of the scientific journal BioScience, the researchers examined more than 7,000 plant species commonly eaten by people to determine the origins and evolutionary relationships of the various plants that comprise humankind’s menu. In addition to confirming the incredible number of species that are regularly eaten, they found that we chow down on members of a remarkably high number of plant families known to biology.
As a case study, the scientists analyzed the ingredients of a simple fast food meal – a McDonald’s Big Mac, French fries and a cup of coffee – to illustrate how the average human diet in developed nations is more diverse than ever before. From potatoes that were first domesticated in South America to mustard that was developed in India, onions and wheat that originated in the Middle East and coffee from Ethiopia, they found the meal contained approximately 20 different species and ingredients that originated around the world.... This leads to the conclusion that “a Big Mac is an apt symbol of globalization.”
Technorati Tags: food, globalization
I am always looking for new and different ways to use technology to consume media, and today a friend introduced me to a great way to bring together two proprietary technologies from competing companies.
I recently bought an XBOX360 because I wanted to Rock Band, and with the pledge of weekly downloadable content releases, my PS2 just was not going to cut it. So I broke down and made my largest "gaming" purchase in, well, ever. Since then, I've acquired three wireless controllers and a bunch of games, including Burnout Paradise, a driving game that encourages you to smash into things and drive off of ramps at ridiculous speeds. It's great fun and offers pretty fantastic online multiplayer action.
One interesting feature of this game is that while driving around Paradise City, a "radio" plays in the background. You are able to change the track, but the game obviously has a limited number of tracks, and only a handful of them are good. This made me want to find a way to play my own music while tearing up the "city" instead of what the game had to offer me.
I already knew from the first incarnation of XBOX that you can replace the game's music with yours, but the problem is that all of my music lives on a Mac. Microsoft makes it possible to stream from PCs running a Window OS, but not from Apple computers. Since I wouldn't really need to install Windows for any other reason, I thought I was stuck with the included music forever.
Today, however, my friend told me about Connect360, a program from Nullriver that costs $20, lives in System Preferences, and enables streaming from Mac to XBOX360. Quite frankly, it was easier to get the computers connected than using the Windows capabilities with a PC. Now, I'm streaming Bebel Gilberto—I am not playing the game, I'm working, this is not driving music—from my work MacBook on the couch to my XBOX360 connected to the stereo. And it works incredibly well.
Now if I could just send data from my XBOX to Last.FM...
There's a lot of nasty chemical things in our world to be afraid of. We're increasingly aware of the risks from endocrine disruptors, and the toxicity of nanomaterials is a growing concern.
But I never thought I'd be afraid of sunscreen.
Why? Because there is new evidence that ingredients in the thousands of metric tons of sunscreen that washes off swimmers around the world each year is re-activating dormant viruses in the symbiotic bacteria that inhabit coral reefs.
Technorati Tags: aquaculture, unintended consequences
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