BLOG TO THE FUTURE

Jeopardy-Playing Super Computer Shows No Mercy

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:21:00 -0800

Did you see IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, play against show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter tonight?

The computer, which runs Linux on 10 racks of servers and isn't connected to the internet, humiliated Jennings and Rutter at first, but Rutter—the game's all-time money-winner—came back to tie Round One up at $5,000 (poor Ken Jennings is way behind with only $2,000). Admittedly, the categories were skewed toward humans—I'd like to see Rutter get any questions right in a category like "Enormous Numbers Multiplied by Other Enormous Numbers"—but Watson, whom future intelligent machines will look upon as their own Australopithecus Afarensis while they feast on our supple human-flesh, had some trouble with learning from other contestants:

Along the way, Watson made a few embarrassing stumbles.

After Jennings incorrectly said the 1920s was the decade in which Oreo cookies were introduced, Watson jumped in with his answer: "What is 1920s?"

"No," Trebek told him. "Ken said that!"

Rutter got it right when he responded, "What are the 1910s?"

Later, Watson slipped up on the question: "Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated in the same year."

"What is chic?" ventured Watson.

"What is class?" Rutter correctly answered.

Ha! Remember this moment, because it's maybe the last time you will be able to laugh at a computer for being dumber than you. Rounds Two and Three will air on Tuesday and Wednesday; the robot uprising will commence sometime in 2017.

via gawker.com

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Exploring Mobile Trends For 2011: Social Scrapbooking

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:36:00 -0800

An Excerpt from my post on the MediaPost Engage:Teens blog. Read the whole story here.

Nearly everyone is pointing to 2011 as the year of mobile, but it's time we start getting more specific about what this means to better capitalize on this new form of interaction. I've been taking a look back on 2010 to see what we can learn about how people are using their mobile devices, from texting to the web to apps. The first stop in this exploration took me to "social scrapbooking": the potent mixture of mobile, social, and photo-sharing. This is going to be big for teens in 2011, and here's the why/how of it:
It's obvious that mobile has taken on a life beyond simple communication with a friend or family via voice or text. The combination of mobile and social sharing has put a powerful broadcasting tool in the hands of teens. It's a world in which the on- and offline worlds are constantly bridged. This is a game-changer for the teenage mindset. Teens, who, as Frank O'Brien articulated here back in October, are primarily concerned with crafting and maintaining their image among social circles, now have the ability (if not also the social pressure) to constantly broadcast the defining elements of their lifestyle and image to their social networks.

Marinate on that while sprinkling in some data from the likes of Pew, Neilsen, and other 2010 studies that have told us one of the top uses of mobile devices among teens is the taking and sharing of photos. There's no simpler way to offer up a rich slice of your life than by sharing a photo on your social networks for all to see, like, comment on or retweet -- or even by sending a mass MMS to your inner circle. Every photo shared is an opportunity build ego and define one's self in the eyes of one's friends.

So this social scrapbooking trend has a lot of potential, that much is clear, but can we point to any tangible results or specific instances of how these habits are being capitalized on?

Find out by reading the full article over at mediapost.com

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Outstanding Piece from Chris Clark Re: Faceboook as the New, Better Email

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:12:00 -0800

Crotchety Old Power Users

Facebook’s email is dramatically less featured than the mainframe Darpanet email program I first used in 1989. Maybe I’m too old to understand the significance of Facebook’s interface, but so far it seems to be a giant step backwards for email users.
Mark Hurst
December 30, 2010
Yep, Facebook’s Messages interface is a giant step backward for email users. But nobody born in the eighties (Facebook’s once-core audience) uses email the way the earlier generation does.

When I was in high school my friends and I had a years-long email thread where we’d gossip, share links, and share pictures. For a small group of friends in a mass conversation it was perfectly adequate. Really the only problems were related to concurrency — a conversation could make a quick turn before you’d finished writing your reply, and without Push email you wouldn’t be notified that somebody had beat you to the punchline.

As we graduated high school, then university, and found our way into the workplace, things changed. People’s offices blocked access to personal email accounts, and substituting them for work email accounts meant dealing with attachment blockers, swear-word filters, and a lack of access outside of office hours. Since I’m a dork, we migrated to an online forum and have never looked back. But if I weren’t the kid with the know-how to install server-side software, you can bet we’d be using Facebook.

Email has grown gnarly in the decades past, as we’ve started receiving dozens or hundreds of spam and bacn messages a day. I have multiple server side rules and filters just to keep it in check, and an inbox policy of flagging anything I care about before running a slightly-modified version of John Gruber’s Inbox Sweeper to keep things tidy.

Reply-all gaffes, top-posting etiquette, plaintext versus HTML, attachment limits, inbox limits… everybody hits them. By comparison the simplicity and clarity of Facebook mail is impressive. A Facebook message requires (privacy controls pending) a symmetrically-acknowledged relationship between parties, and on top of that spam-murdering convenience it’s self-threading, low friction, and lightweight.

In a nutshell, Facebook is better than email unless you’re some kind of email expert. And for email’s successor to support all the expert features of email, none of its myriad problems would be solved.

It’s been a recurring theme this week, but the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users. These are the people who are still using slotted screwdrivers and Edison light fixtures and manual transmission cars.

via releasecandidateone.com

From his commentary on the new email paradigm to his thoughtful remark about the iOS App Store, Chris Clark really seems to know what he's talking about.

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Polar Bears Fascinated By BBC Documentary Robot Cameras, Foil Documentary

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:00:00 -0800

via youtube.com

Smart polar bears, they know what's going on.

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1982: Bill Murray's Rants Against Tech, Robots, and Digital Watches

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 07:59:00 -0800

via youtube.com

Raw footage from a tech documentary that was never completed

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Beam Me Up: 'Teleportation' Is Year's Biggest Breakthrough

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:20:00 -0800

Beam Me Up: 'Teleportation' Is Year's Biggest Breakthrough

Thanks to physics, and the truly bizarre quirks of quarks, those Star Trek style teleporters may be more than fiction.

A strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that teleportation or even time travel may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics, the rules governing ordinary objects. Toss a ball in the air and it falls back to Earth. Drop a coin from your roof and it falls into your yard. But back in March, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics -- the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

And the implication -- that teleportation and even time travel may someday, somehow be a reality -- is so groundbreaking that Science magazine has labelled it the most significant scientific advance of 2010.

via foxnews.com

We don't know what we don't know. That is, until someone vibrates a tiny metal paddle. Hah.

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Physics Proves Parallel Universes Exist

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:19:00 -0800

Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists -- that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye -- and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud.

The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

via foxnews.com

Time travel and parallel universes never seemed so within reach before!

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TWEED : IBM Super Computer ‘Watson’ To Take the Podium on Jeopardy

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:05:00 -0800

With Alex Trebek at the helm, Jeopardy! has been an iconic American quiz show for almost 3 decades. The show has adopted multiple specialty formats and iterations to keep things fresh- including College and Teen Tournaments, and Celebrity Jeopardy, which is arguably more popular in the SNL homages that poke fun at its easier categories (see below).

(Source: Hulu.com)

It goes without saying that contestants on the show have to be well-versed in all areas of general knowledge, pop culture, and history- and over the years, thousands of people have competed against each other for the chance to buzz in. But would any of them be able to match up against an artificially intelligent computer?

Last Tuesday, Jeopardy and Sony Pictures announced in partnership with IBM- that in February 2011 they will bring the ultimate contestant to the show, a supercomputer named Watson.

According to a press release from IBM and Jeopardy!, “Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge - build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence.”

This isn’t IBM’s first publicized experiment of human vs computer. In 1996, IBM bested master chess player Garry Kasparov with its AI computer Deep Blue.

(Source: Google Images)

Following this breakthrough, scientists at IBM wanted to take the technology known as Deep QA to the next level. The article continued to describe how engineers had to think innovatively to work within the unique constraints of Jeopardy- reporting that the breadth of information, answer-question response system and vast usage of nuances and slang in the English language provided “the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.”

As depicted in content promoting the Smarter Planet campaign, IBM has consistently been transparent in showing the conceptualization and backend processes behind their innovative work- the development of Watson was no exception as seen in another beautiful and brilliant IBM Video.

In order to test Watson’s abilities against the highest standard of intelligence, an article in the New York Times reported that the computer will face the two most successful players in Jeopardy history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (shown below), in a best of three competition this February. $1 million dollars is up for grabs and “Rutter and Jennings will donate 50 percent of their winnings to charity and IBM will donate 100 percent of its winnings to charity.”

(Ken Jennings & Brad Rutter, Source: AP)

David Shepler, the Program Manager on the “Watson” project, is quoted on the IBM Watson website saying, “IBM is not in the entertainment business. But we are in the business of technology and pushing frontiers.”

However with innovations in 3D technology, digital and social media, and seismic shifts in entertainment consumption- technological developments and pushing frontiers drive innovation forward in all industries- which absolutely includes groundbreaking entertainment.

As a self-proclaimed Jeopardy nerd, I for one will definitely tune in to see if Watson will beat the reigning Jeopardy champs, and more importantly, remember to answer in the form of a question.
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via ogilvyentertainmentblog.com

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Word Lens: The Most Intelligent Use of Augmented Reality I've Ever Seen, and a Clear Sign of FutureLiving

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:26:00 -0800

via youtube.com

Practical, intelligent, exciting.

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NERD ALERT: 1959 Google-Style Intro Video Predicts the Internet aka "The Matrix Concept" or "Polymorphics"

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:02:00 -0700

via archive.org

This video really reminds me of those fun google videos where they use stop motion paper and drawings to illustrate a new technical feature or product. Amazing to see something like this being described and produced in the 50s!

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US scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth - Yahoo! News

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:58:00 -0700

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US astronomers said Wednesday they have discovered an Earth-sized planet that they think might be habitable, orbiting a nearby star, and believe there could be many more planets like it in space.

The planet, found by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is orbiting in the middle of the "habitable zone" of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which means it could have water on its surface.

Liquid water and an atmosphere are necessary for a planet to possibly sustain life, even it it might not be a great place to live, the scientists said.

The scientists determined that the planet, which they have called Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days.

Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet and has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the leaders of the team that discovered the planet.

If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth, the researchers said.

The surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth's, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, Vogt said.

Gliese 581g was discovered by scientists working on the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, during 11 years of observing the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which is only 20 light years from Earth.

For astronomers, eleven years of observation is considered a short time and 20 light years, which is roughly 117.5 trillion miles, rather close. The sun is around eight and a half light minutes from Earth.

"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common," said Vogt.

The planet is tidally locked to its star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, and the other is in perpetual darkness because it faces away from the star.
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With surface temperatures decreasing the further one goes toward the dark side of the planet and increasing as one goes into the light side, the most habitable part of the new planet would be the line between darkness and light, which is known as the "terminator".

The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the planet would be between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius).

But actual temperatures would range from "blazing hot on the side facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side," they said.

The findings, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org, "offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Vogt.

"Any emerging life forms on the new planet would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt said.

In their report, the scientists in fact announce the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581, bringing the total number of known planets around this star to six.

That is the most yet discovered in a planetary system other than Earth's solar system.
Like planet's in Earth's solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.
Two previously detected planets around Gliese lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side and one on the cold side of the star, and are probably not habitable.
The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.
"We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone -- one too hot and one too cold -- and now we have one in the middle that's just right," Vogt said, recalling the porridge that Goldilocks found in the children's story "The Three Bears."

via news.yahoo.com

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Wired Science: Nikon Selects Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:52:00 -0700

via wired.com

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NYTimes: The ‘Back to the Future’ That Might Have Been

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:18:00 -0700

The “Back to the Future” films have given us glimpses of times and places that could have been, from a comical 2015 populated with flying cars and hovering skateboards to an alternate 1955 where Michael J. Fox invented rock ‘n’ roll. But how might history have turned out if the first “Back to the Future” movie had starred Eric Stoltz, as its filmmakers originally planned? In this clip from the “Back to the Future” 25th Anniversary DVD collection, the director Robert Zemeckis, his co-screenwriter, Bob Gale, and executive producer Steven Spielberg discuss how they made the heavy if cinematically momentous decision to replace Mr. Stoltz with Mr. Fox, and show early footage that was shot with Mr. Stoltz in the role of Marty McFly.

via artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

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xkcd releases the long-awaited update to its Map of Online Communities!

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:30:00 -0700

via xkcd.com

I'm in love with this! I've had it hanging in my various offices for the past three years. Get it for yourself! Pre-orders now open: xkcd Store

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PHOTONIC CHIP: Computers set for quantum leap

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:05:00 -0700

A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices.

Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want.

An early application will be to investigate and design complex molecules, such as new drugs and other materials, that cannot be simulated with ordinary computers. More general consumer applications should follow.

Jeremy O’Brien, director of the UK’s Centre for Quantum Photonics, who led the project, said many people in the field had believed a functional quantum computer would not be a reality for at least 25 years.

“However, we can say with real confidence that, using our new technique, a quantum computer could, within five years, be performing calculations that are outside the capabilities of conventional computers,” he told the British Science Festival, as he presented the research.

The breakthrough, published today in the journal Science, means data can be processed according to the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics that allow individual subatomic particles to be in several places at the same time.

This property will enable quantum computers to process information in quantities and at speeds far beyond conventional supercomputers. But formidable technical barriers must be overcome before quantum computing becomes practical.

The team, from Bristol university in the UK, Tohuku university in Japan, Weizmann Institute in Israel and Twente university in the Netherlands, say they have overcome an important barrier, by making a quantum chip that can work at ordinary temperatures and pressures, rather than the extreme conditions required by other approaches.

The immense promise of quantum computing has led governments and companies worldwide to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the field.

Big spenders, including the US defence and intelligence agencies concerned with the national security issues, and governments – such as Canada, Australia and Singapore – see quantum electronics as the foundation for IT industries in the mid-21st century.

via ft.com

Hell yes.

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1970s Space Colony Art by NASA

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:11:00 -0700

NASA Ames completed a number of space colony studies in the 1970s and competitions we held for designers regularly. This brilliant set of illustrations had the restriction of being large enough to house 10,000 people and the images do not diverge from what one would think a space colony might look like if it were to be conceptualized today.

Humanity has the power to fill outer space with life. Today our solar system is filled with plasma, gas, dust, rock, and radiation — but very little life; just a thin film around the third rock from the Sun. We can change that. In the 1970′s Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University showed that we can build giant orbiting spaceships and live in them. These orbital space colonies could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth. In time, we may see hundreds of thousands of orbital space settlements in our solar system alone. Building these settlements will be an evolutionary event in magnitude similar to, if not greater than, ocean-based Life’s colonization of land half a billion years ago.

[Click the thumbnails below to see the larger image]

via theurbn.com

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The greatest portrait you will ever see, ever - Rainn Wilson's posterous

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:04:33 -0700

via rainn.posterous.com

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DISCOVERY: Bacteria survive space travel between planets, could seed life where it does not yet exist

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:22:00 -0700

The microbes were put on the exterior of the European Space Agency space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth's atmosphere. And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive.

The experiment is part of a quest to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System. OU researcher Dr Karen Olsson-Francis told BBC News: "It has been proposed that bacteria could be used in life-support systems to recycle everything.

"There is also the concept that if we were to develop bases on the Moon or Mars, we could use bacteria for 'bio-mining' - using them to extract important minerals from rocks."

This type of research also plays into the popular theory that micro-organisms can somehow be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites - to seed life where it does not yet exist.

They would have been exposed to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and dramatic shifts in temperature. All the water in the limestone would also have boiled away into the vacuum of space.

Quite how they managed to come through their 553-day ordeal is now being investigated.

Astronauts retrieve the Beer rock samples from the outside of the ISS

via bbc.co.uk

It's amazing how much there's still left to discover about the world we live in. We don't know what we don't know. Want to hear about something crazy? Read about the Water Bear, which is capable of self-imposed suspended animation for as long as ten years in order to survive harsh changes to its environment.

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Seth Godin Gives Up on Traditional Book Publishing

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:35:00 -0700

Writer and marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t plan to publish any more books – at least not in the traditional sense.

After writing 12 books, he doesn’t think the traditional publishing process is “worth the effort,” he revealed in an interview with Mediabistro. Godin, the author of bestsellers such as “Purple Cow” and “The Dip,” has quite a bleak view on the paper book and the way we consume it.

One bit from the interview is particularly revealing. “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread."

“I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically,” says Godin.

via mashable.com

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The Future of Netbooks as Predicted by the Lead Developer of Tumblr & Instapaper

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:00:33 -0700

This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had neglected touchscreens for years, but Apple figured out how to do a touchscreen well, and did.

Fans of the former types of smartphones and much of the tech press declared this smartphone useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.

That ended up not mattering. Now, most high-end smartphones look like this:

In early 2010, subcompact, inexpensive computers (a.k.a. “netbooks”) looked like this:

Netbooks were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had neglected tablets for years, but Apple figured out how to do a tablet well, and did.

Fans of netbooks and much of the tech press declared this subcompact, inexpensive computer useless or not capable enough because of its lack of a keyboard, its non-removable battery, its lack of expansion slots or ports, and other hardware features in which Apple chose differently from what most other manufacturers were doing.

That ended up not mattering. And now, other manufacturers are scrambling to build tablet products as quickly as possible.

How do you think the subcompact, inexpensive computer category will look in three years?

via marco.org

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