No man is an island, but some interesting projects are

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.”

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.

Biotech meets demography meets (as always) finance

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

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

From the "shouldn't be surprising" department

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.

The future looks like Canada. I hope.

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.

Misc is always the most interesting category

A chimp personhood trial in Austria. Some commenters note, usefully, that we already grant personhood to some nonhumans (corporations).

Chicago wants automated flagging of 'suspicious behavior' by surveillance cameras (... and a pony; AFAIK, we are still far away from that in terms of actual technological capability - as with electronic voting, though, I'm more worried about a defective system than I'd be about a working one).

Google and Microsoft invest on an online genetic profiling company Seems pretty obvious to me as a business move - they are both in the business of managing information. BTW, I've given up on any sort of ownership or privacy of my genetic code long ago. We give away copies all the time: in medical procedures, shedding skin, whatever, and the whole MP3 issue should have taught us that if something can be ripped and copied, it will be, no matter how many laws you pass against it.