Oh man. Google Insights for Search is good fun. I’m supposed to spend this week finishing a number of writing projects. But I spent almost all today running different searches and being basically stunned at how much data’s available through the interface.
I mentioned earlier today that Google makes “related” search information available - there’s much deeper information available through the CSV interface, giving fifty associated terms for most searches. I have high hopes of playing with this data to revive my clustering tools, trying to explore the “freudian web” of associations between search terms.
My friend and research partner Hal Roberts has been playing with the trending functions of Insights - similar to those offered by Blogpulse,...
By Paul Mackay
Editor's Note: We encourage "Reader Reports" -- submissions from members of Worldchanging's global audience who volunteer to write up their notes from conferences, workshops and other worldchanging happenings they participate in. If you'd like to contribute your own report, please email editor@worldchanging.com.
OSCON, the Open Source Conference by O'Reilly, celebrated its 10th anniversary last month with a week-long conference in Portland, Ore. Now that open source software has become a firmly established movement, the most notable development this year was the increasing involvement of large companies, highlighted by Microsoft becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation and Sun's purchase of MySQL earlier this year.
David Recordon talked about the...
ETech -- the excellent O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, where I spoke last year (video here, though not my finest talk, unfortunately, as I had an airplane flu) -- has released their call for proposals, and it kicks butt:
Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints
We live in two worlds: one filled with abundance and the other with constraints. Each has its own favorite—or essential to survival—inventions and directions. Each has been deeply affected by technology.
The abundant world has access to the Internet and other educational tools, to the latest advances in medicine, to culinary choices from around the globe, and up until recently, access to "plenty of" energy. This abundance can lead to waste since most everyday objects are easier and...
In the spirit of attending OPCs - “other people’s conferences”, conferences where you’re invited, but not part of the demographic/professional group the conference is aimed at - I’m now at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. I’m not a computer scientist, not university teaching faculty, and I’m not doing any research sponsored by Microsoft… all of which turns out to be okay, as it’s a pretty interesting gathering looking at current research topics in computer science, with a strong emphasis on the study of social networks… something that interest me, even if I’m not doing a ton of active work on the topic.
This emphasis on social network studies helps explain why I’m currently sitting in a packed...
One of the forces facilitating the possibility of a bright green economic transformation is insight into the systems around us, particularly the kind of insight we gain through making visible the invisible and manifesting backstories.
As the price of using technology to sample, monitor, sense, aggregate and communicate data continues to drop rapidly, we face a rift between the sheer dumbness of the built world and industrial systems we've inherited, and our rapidly-expanding insight into how those systems work. Along that faultline lie a million opportunities for not only making those systems more efficient and our lives more sustainable, but for whole new systems and wholly new lives within those systems. This will be a major theme in our next book.
Of course, all sorts of...
The documentary i was dying to see at the Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition at LABoral in Gijon was Gold Farmers, by Ge Jin.
Image courtesy of Ge Jin
Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire ("farm") items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.
They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they've harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get "real" money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.
World of Warcraft, image gameslander
Many...
It's Monday and although everyone else is probably thanking Easter break for providing them with an opportunity to lay in bed until lunch time, i've been up early to give the final touch of my presentation about RFID and art at the RFID workshop that iMAL organizes this week in Brussels as part of its series of New Brave World events.
With Hidden Numbers, Meghan Trainor
Just a parenthesis: tomorrow at 8,30 pm Atau Tanaka will give a talk at iMAL about Mobile Music and his other locative media based projects. I wouldn't miss it if i were in a 200-mile radius.
Because rfid had kind of moved away from my radar over the past couple of years, i decided to sex up a bit the preparation of my presentation and share a part of the results with you.
Instead of my usual routine of...
I arrived in San Diego for etech08 after a 25 hour trip. The morning after i was sitting in the main conference room wondering why on earth i was doing that to myself. I could have stayed quietly in Europe, avoided the jetlag and the artificial food enriched with extra-anti-oxidants and extra-vitamins.
... Until Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of Stamen Design, took the floor and gave his waaaay too short talk on Information Visualization is a Medium. He highlighted a couple of the works they've developed, threw in some interesting thoughts and saved my severely jetlagged morning.
Worldchanging readers may already be familiar with the work of Stamen, especially with the visualizations they created for Digg.com (Swarm and Stack) or the brilliant cabspotting, which...
Mike Treder looks back over the first five years of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology's work, and draws some conclusions about where we are and where we're going in the field of nanotechnology:
There is a huge difference between saying that nanofactories will be developed someday and saying that they will be developed soon. We have based our appeals to policy makers and to the public on the idea that immediate action was needed. Originally, we claimed that the technology “might become a reality by 2010, likely will by 2015, and almost certainly will by 2020.” Recently we revised that projection to say “might become a reality by 2010 to 2015, more plausibly will by 2015 to 2020, and almost certainly will by 2020 to 2025.”
It’s interesting to note that while...
Our own Alex Steffen is a keynote speaker at ETech 2008, O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 3-6 in San Diego. ETech is an excellent jam session on technology innovation, also exploring the implications, ethical and otherwise, of new technology developments - worldchanging stuff. The social web of today pretty much had its gestation at Etech gatherings in the early 2000s.
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(Posted by Jon Lebkowsky in Emerging Technologies at 7:42 AM)...
I love Carnival of the Mobilists, a weekly digest of the best blogging on all things mobile (as in mobile phones and related communications technology). Each week's entry is compiled and written by a different contributor, guaranteeing great variety in the chosen highlights. This week's digest, Carnival of the Mobilists #96, was produced by Rudy de Waele of the m-trends.org blog, who the past several days "one of the most dense and exciting periods in mobile of the year." And that's borne out by the choice links Rudy provides, from the release of Google Docs Mobile to the recent Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The writers of CotM don't neglect intersections of culture and politics with mobile tech; Rudy highlights this with links to discussions about mobiles and privacy:...
BoGo means "Buy One, Give One." For each of these solar-powered flashlights you purchase, one is donated to an organization that will distribute it in the developing world. BoGo lights use standard rechargable AA batteries that last 750-1000 cycles of charge/discarge or up to two years. The batteries are charged by the onboard solar panel which lasts for up to 20 years, charges in 8 hours and provides 4-5 hours of illumination. 6 LEDs provide enough light to read at night. BoGo lights are useful for outdoor adventures, emergencies and anything else you'd use a flashlight for. You save money on batteries and are contributing less harmful waste than you would with a standard battery-powered flashlight. For people in developing countries, BoGo lights are even more useful. Safe and easy...
Over the past year, i've spent an impressive amount of time ogling a blog called Variable_environment. It had all the key ingredients that get my attention: pictures (many, lavish, big, most of them snapped by Milo Keller), inspiring collaborators (including architect Philippe Rahm, multimedia designer Ben Hooker, researcher and designer Rachel Wingfield and architect Christophe Guignard), mini robotic guest stars, and great content. The blog posts document a fascinating research project called Variable environment/ mobility, interaction city & crossovers. The project starting point is the fact that our living environment and the way we live have tremendously changed over the past few decades. The postmodern city made of signs and infrastructures that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott...
Last week Wired ran two articles about the wonders the have befallen us since the advent (and through the evolution) of Google Earth and Google Maps. A feature by Evan Ratliff explores the exploding population of citizen cartographers. Even after the advent of commercial satellite and aerial photography, the ability to make maps remained largely in the hands of specialists. Now, suddenly, mapmaking power is within the grasp of a 12-year-old. A host of collaborative annotation projects have appeared — not to mention tens of thousands of personal map mashups — that plot text, links, data, and even sounds onto every available blank space on the digital globe. It's become a sprawling, networked atlas — a "geoweb" that's expanding so quickly its outer edges are impossible to pin...
At tonight’s Harvard Law School cocktail party, before Nicholas Negroponte arrived to give a talk about One Laptop Per Child, a friend asked me why I continue to attend Negroponte’s talks. “Given how many of these you’ve heard, what are you going to get out of this?” The truth is, I learn something new every time Negroponte talks about the project. Even before he began talking, it was interesting to discover that he’s come equipped with almost a dozen “B2″ prototype machines. They’re open and live on tables around the room, for people to play with - that’s a big improvement from the last time I played with the machine, when the machines were still being hand-built, were in scarce supply and you needed someone to walk you...
Worldchanging ally Charlie Stross is not only a science fiction writer of some reknown, but one of our best thinkers about technology and the future as well. Recently he published the following speech on his blog. It's a sharp piece of thinking, which informs in new ways all sorts of subjects we've covered here before, and he's graciously given us permission to post it here as well. -Alex Shaping the future Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you're expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us, how far technology will go, how people will use the net, and whether big shoulder pads and food pills will be fashionable. Personally, I'm still waiting for my personal jet car — I've been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention...
VIA is a Taiwanese chipmaker that makes very power-efficient processors for computers and mobile devices. According to their numbers, their chips use less than a sixth the energy of an Intel Pentium, and less than a quarter the energy an AMD Athlon uses. In addition to efficiency, VIA has started a program called "carbon-free computing", where they offset the carbon that will be produced by the manufacturing and lifetime energy use of their CPU's. They do these offsets by building renewable power generation in developing countries, restoring forest and wetlands, and doing energy conservation.
I recently had the chance to talk with Scott Phipps, the international relations manager at VIA. Here's the interview. We discuss both VIA and the Solar Computing Community Centers that...
When the South Asian tsunami hit in 2004, socially networked organizers scrambled to set up online systems for broadcasting news and offering resources to victims in need.
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(Posted by Sarah Rich in Emerging Technologies at 11:02 AM)...
Lift07 day two is long and extremely stimulating. There are just too many great talks by super smart people. If you'd like to follow what's going on at Lift in french, le team de InternetActu is blogging the event en français. Christophe Guignard, one of the founding members of fabric | ch, an architecture studio based in Lausanne, Switzerland, gave one of the talks that interested me most. Titled Architectural Contemporary Space(s), it was an introduction from an architectural point of view on how space is transformed by technology and other processes. He illustrated the point very simply with a picture he had taken on holiday. On the same image there was the Parthenon, traces of airplanes passing through the sky, people taking pictures or fiddling with their mobile phone. The...
I was reading the Economist on my flight to DC this evening and was thrilled to see my old friend Mark Davies featured in an article about his new project, TradeNet. Mark is one of the key figures in Ghana’s IT scene. After retiring from the dotcom world in 2000 (he was one of the founders of Metrobeat, which became part of CitySearch), he poured his energy into the founding of BusyInternet, a remarkable cybercafe and business incubator in downtown Accra. In more recent years, Mark has been helping to build software businesses in Ghana, working with programmers around the world, but especially focusing on African software developers. Given the model I started Geekcorps with - encouraging local IT entrepreneurship - I can’t help but be a fan. TradeNet is designed to take...
I’ve taken to thinking about the One Laptop Per Child project in terms of three tiers: hardware, software/content and usage/support. In describing my enthusiasm for and concerns about the project to both people working on the laptop and people critiquing it, I’ve flippantly offered an observation: there’s been roughly ten times as much thought about the hardware as about the software, and roughly ten times as much thought about software as about the challenges of rolling this device out to schools around the world. (There may well be a fourth tier - disposal and recycling of these machines - and I’m open to the argument that that’s received only a tenth as much thought as the third tier.) This hierarchy of project attention makes a certain amount of...
In the spirit of New Year's Resolutions for 2007 -- here are six applets that I'd like to see developed that would help me change my environmental behavior in 2007. I will leave it to you readers to suggest a seventh. Applets are defined as applications that use limited memory and are portable between operating systems. These little applications are proliferating on my desktop toolbar and as plug-ins in my browser, but they're useful for helping me to keep track of things that I would otherwise forget. WorldChanging readers, I know that some of you have the ability to write these handy little apps, or else I hope that someone at Google is reading this. Finally, if it's not too much to ask, a Mac OS X version would also be great. Cheers! 1. Paper calculator: A nice little toolbar...
When I think of oil and gas drilling, I start with OPEC – especially Saudi Arabia/Nigeria/Venezuela on the oil side and Russia on the natural gas front. What I tend to overlook is the fact that there’s serious petroleum production happening in the United States, often in areas close to major population centers or wildlife refuges. After spending some time this morning exploring SkyTruth, I don’t think I’ll overlook the impact of domestic petroleum production again. SkyTruth uses remote sensing and digital mapping technology to promote environmental awareness and sustainable resource management. With innovative technologies such as Google Earth at its disposal, SkyTruth makes scientifically robust information come alive. To better understand what they do, I spent some time...
GOVERNMENT AGENCY W/ TERABYTES OF UNINDEXED DATA, ISO DYNAMIC SEARCH ENGINE COMPANY TO HELP RECAPTURE MY YOUTH. ENJOY VISITING NEW PLACES, LONG WALKS, REMINISCING. PHOTOS A MUST. by WC NYC blogger and Worldchanging book contributor, Patrick DiJusto In a public/private partnership straight out of Neal Stephenson's 'Snowcrash', NASA is teaming up with Google to search, sort, and index the olympus of information NASA has collected in its first 48 years of existence. The program will start with every photo taken by NASA being added to Google Images. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future. NASA's data has always been public...
When the E.coli spinach scare swept the nation, we talked a bit about the importance of knowing the backstory about the things we eat and buy. The best way most of us have to do this is by purchasing food directly from the grower at farmer's markets and through CSAs.
But in Japan, it's becoming more and more common to be able to trace the history of your food using your cell phone. The Japanese Food Safety Commission, which was established in 2001 after a Mad Cow Disease (BSE) outbreak, has been working to put food safety in the hands of the consumer by tagging products (even fresh farm produce) with RFID or QR codes that can be read with a cell phone (most Japanese phones produced today come equipped with a QR code reader). According to FOODEX JAPAN's Trend & Info page:
Consumers...
Sustainable innovation needs information, and information needs computing. David Douglas, VP of Eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems, reminds us at Sustainable Innovation 06 that virtually nothing we were discussing
- from new design and utility grids to carbon trading and climate modeling - were done without the aid of computing power. 300 million computers are already obsolete, brimming with over 700 esoteric compounds - "a lot of wild stuff goes into them".
The US also still uses 90 billion Kilowatt-hours a year in data centers, which cause between 100 and 200 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. This is a slice of what amounts to more like a billion tonnes of CO2 a year, globally. This impact is partly caused by burning coal - and partly it's a result of enormous...
Chris Anderson - Mr. Long Tail, editor of Wired Magazine - makes a great decision here at Pop!tech: assuming that everyone in the audience has either read The Long Tail or knows the argument, he gives a different talk: What Happens When Things Get Free? (It covers much of the same ground as the book, but draws a different narrative through many of the same examples.)
He starts with a photo of Dr. Carver Mead. Mead started thinking about what happens as semiconductors get cheap to the point where theyre free. The answer is, you should waste them. This insight led to VLSI - Very Large Scale Intergration - chips that included thousands of transitors, not just single ones.
Alan Kay figured out what you might do with these plentiful, free transistors - be wasteful on the screen....