Evening Distribution

The article of the week

2008-04-09T19:40:00.001-07:00

A medley of extemporanea

2008-04-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

Open-source intel is gaining space in the government's agenda, rightly so, I think, as the trick is not only to collect information, but to make sense of it. Meanwhile, car-patrols aren't nearly as effective as foot-patrols, a fact that some in the US Army are beginning to understand and apply in Iraq, that -as all fourth generation conflicts- is neither war nor policing, but a mixture of both.

Oh, and Latin America is vulnerable to climate change, but we all knew that already. Considering that the region is pretty much near an energy crisis today, I don't think the prospect for the coming decades is very good, despite the relative wealth of natural resources.

Ok, time to re-open the blog

2008-04-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

The nice thing about RSS is that it makes possible low-frequency blogs; still, what's the point of keeping this up if I'm not going to post anything?

Let's see where the future leads us.

Alright, alright, so I let the blog fall by the side

2008-02-06T08:03:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, scientists create three-parent embryos. Medical applications aside, in a world of complex sexual and relationship politics, the more tools we have at hand, the better.

When food becomes an issue

2007-12-17T11:31:00.001-08:00

The UN is concerned about global food supplies, prices, and the effect of climate disruptions. It's not a trivial question, whether you worry about the impact in human suffering, or about the resulting political instabilities. Right now the main factor behind rising prices seems to be higher demand (in particular from China), so this should lead to rising supplies [*] and hence a new equilibrium. However, climate change will also affect supplies; should the global agricultural system fail to adapt to the changing climate conditions, we'll be looking into a very messy situation.

[*] A caveat here: it depends on specific fiscal and trade policies - few countries have deregulated or economically efficient agricultural sectors, so milleages might and will vary.

BCI, closer than you think

2007-12-13T11:16:00.001-08:00

Brain-Computer Interfaces rapidly approaching medical and commercial use, reports a panel of neuroscientists.

The consequences of this will be incredible; we are talking basically of a new relationship between humans and our machines (not to mention each other, as we are very fond of communicating using machines as intermediaries). This will eventually change how we work, enjoy our free time, communicate, play, etc.

Remember, this isn't science fiction, this is almost product design.

No man is an island, but some interesting projects are

2007-12-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

The Dutch are looking into building a 50km artificial island, both for its land value and as a technological showcase. What I find most interesting is not the project itself, but the fact that the Dutch are already looking at increased demand for their water management skills as a result of global warming. I bet it won't be the only such skill in demand during the coming decades.

(Hat tip to Guido at Globally Connected)

“It’s not your imagination.”

2007-12-10T07:14:00.000-08:00

For-your-ears-only sonic street ads. I don't use an MP3 player while walking, I prefer reading, but I think that might not going to be an option in the future.

Sex, lies, and credit card numbers

2007-12-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

Russian chatbots disguise themselves as women to gather financial information. It's not a new scam from a criminalistic POV, but using software makes it much more scalable. I expect this will only grow; from advertising to customer relationships to scams (note how I made no joke about the difference being a matter of degree and technicalities) it doesn't make sense to send a human to do whatever a program can do.

Open government

2007-12-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

We have the technological tools to redefine and enhance the relationship between the government and citizens. But I'm not sure there's a demand for them, and without a strong link to election results, the incentives just aren't there.

What I've been doing. Plus, killer robots.

2007-12-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

Startup work, mostly; as fun as it is to talk about the future, it's much more fun to work on it. But I plan to pay more attention to this blog, if nothing else, as a sort of scrapbook for interesting bits.

Like the fact that relatively cheap remotelly controlled warfighting robots have already made it to the CNN. I don't think you can do effective counterinsurgency or nation building with those, but that has seldom stopped military procurement systems in the near past.

Hat tip to the IEET

Global cell phone use at 50 percent

2007-11-30T13:07:00.001-08:00

It's not a trivial waypoint. We are very, very connected, and technology adaption is very, very fast. And it's going to get faster.

Global cell phone use at 50 percent

2007-11-30T13:07:00.000-08:00

It's not a trivial waypoint.

Biotech meets demography meets (as always) finance

2007-11-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

Brandon Kein initiates the discussion about the possible costs of future life-extending therapies. Add to that the grim outlook of fiscal and pension systems even assuming no revolutionary breakthroughs in biotech, and you have the recipe for interesting times ahead.

The glue of globalization

2007-11-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Migration is so central to Western Union that forecasts of border movements drive the company’s stock. Its researchers outpace the Census Bureau in tracking migrant locations. Long synonymous with Morse code, the company now advertises in Tagalog and Twi and runs promotions for holidays as obscure as Phagwa and Fiji Day. Its executives hail migrants as “heroes” and once tried to oust a congressman because of his push for tougher immigration laws.

Link

When children aren't the future

2007-11-21T07:16:00.001-08:00

Sent by Guido of the always interesting Globally Connected:

Japan has the world's highest proportion of elderly people. More than 20% of the population are now over the age of 65. By 2050, that figure is expected to rise to about 40%.

The year 2050 isn't that far away; for Japan to maintain economic viability (not to mention competitiveness), it will take a huge shift in economic, technological, and fiscal structures. They seem to be aware of the fact, at least.

Link

From the "shouldn't be surprising" department

2007-11-14T10:03:00.000-08:00

Porsche makes more money from options trading than from cars. That's not a car-making company, that's a hedge fund with a funny portfolio.

I don't mean it in any demeaning sense; a financial engineering department is as necessary nowadays as an IT department (and for interestingly similar reasons). Of course, the fact that they are doing it doesn't imply that they are doing it right.

Some navel gazing

2007-11-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

Let's call it the C Criteria: computational feasibility trumps legality. In other words, if something is computationally unfeasible it won't get done, even if the law says it should (a rather obvious assertion), and its more interesting counterpart, that computationally feasible things will get done, regardless of legality. It only takes one person anywhere having both the desire and the knowledge to make it happen, and presto!

I understand it's impossible for laws to predict situations derived from new technology, but unless at some point the political and legislative processes begin to pay attention to feasibility envelopes, we'll end up with legal systems too out of touch with reality to be useful at all, getting them ignored, and us in a terrible fix.

As seen in Batman Beyond

2007-11-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

DARPA is asking Honeywell to develop a way to monitoring analysts' brainwaves to speed up intelligence analysis, an old idea that seems to be getting closer to application. Don't underestimate this and similar efforts: analysing information is the name of the game, be it military intel, market movements, biological data sets, or anything else. There are huge strategic and financial returns on finding out better ways to do these things, and whoever fails to keep up in the effort to understand more data more quickly is going to be at a serious disadvantage.

The future looks like Canada. I hope.

2007-11-11T18:51:00.000-08:00

The RCMP announces that it will stop going after 'personal use' downloaders. In their own words, "It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it."

True enough.

Over in the US, a proposed bill would tie up financial help to colleges to their anti-piracy initiatives.

Paul Graham wrote in his essay How to be Silicon Valley that a cutting-edge economy needs two things: nerds and rich people. The US is a relatively nice place to be rich, but it's certainly losing some of its attractiveness for nerds.

Random

2007-11-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

Civil UAV patrols in the UK, and Putin is gaining popularity in international polls. Maybe it's related to the half-flu I'm going through, but I'm worried.

Right now Russia is one of the most interesting countries to watch; it's probably at the forefront in applied criminal botnet technology, and Putin's handling of the country as basically an energy company with nuclear weapons is... Perhaps inspiring isn't quite the right word. I do worry, in any case, about political stability as the Russian demographic implosion goes on.

A loop in your brain, coming up soon

2007-11-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

At this point, I don't think the future-like aspect of this is the brain-computer interface for Google Earth, but the fact that it was developed in Austria and Slovenia; another indication that this is no longer cutting edge, and perhaps getting closer to wider application.

Anecdotal evidence of the impressive kind

2007-10-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

Vegetables growing in Greenland. Most effects of climate change won't be so nice, though.

Genetics just for you

2007-10-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

Plos Bio on individualized genomics. Ten or twenty years for now, a person's genetic sequence will be the first and most basic piece of personal data; I expect babies to be sequenced in utero, for at least some digest of the sequence to be part of IDs, etc. Note that "basic" doesn't mean "private"; I don't really think it will be possible for genetic information to be kept under control, for more or less the same reasons that make DRM schemes impractical.

This, of course, will open a can of worms.

Speaking of low barriers of entry...

2007-10-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

A hundred very short SF stories from Hectowords (my sometimes slightly more fictional blog), collected as a single pdf here.