Human 2.0 - Part 7

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Technology changes you man.

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Featured Items

Lytro – Start of a photography revolution?

An innovative new type of camera being developed in Silicon Valley offers the potential to refocus and explore photos in 3D after they are taken.

Read more » Lytro's light-field camera can refocus images after they are taken

Can computers help us remember?

With more and more things to remember every day, will we trust computers to back up our brains? Find out in this interview with Sunil Vemuri, e-memory enthusiast and founder of reQall, the digital memory aid.

Periodicity

We apply sentiment analysis to social networks to understand what communities think about a particular brand. What if we applied it to a person? Could we tell when they’re in a good mood, or angry, or ready to buy?

Behavioral Analysis and the Age of Metrics

Product design has always involved watching people. But now, armed with detailed real-world data, researchers can understand and visualize human behavior (such as gameplay) better than ever before. But what will happen when we analyse our everyday lives in this way?

Tablets, unions, and education – part one

Tablet computing could save our educational system. But tablets aren’t just a digital textbook — when you learn from a tablet, it learns from you. What if it learns that your teacher is bad? This four-part series looks at the coming war between teachers’ unions and the digital classroom.

Balancing taste and novelty: The spaghetti fetish problem

When our communities are online, our tribal brains get tricked into thinking we’re all in the moral majority. If we’re going to find common ground, we need to start thinking about the moral minority instead.

Bitnorth 2010: The Human 2.0 Weekend

On August 27th to 29th, the third annual Bitnorth event in Quebec adopted Human 2.0 as its theme – resulting in some great ideas, presentations and discussions about the ways in which technology is changing society, for better and for worse.

Is photography a human right?

There is growing fear over the photographing of police by citizens and journalists. Should such recording be criminalized? Or should we re-assert our fundamental right to capture anything we experience?

Who owns your voice online?

If I want to “friend” you, I can only do so if we both use Facebook. New digital forms of communication that did not exist before the Internet are now controlled by corporations and the messages you send with them are restricted in audience and reach. We are in a poor state for a free, open exchange of ideas.

Recent Items

Hey, I know: let’s build the Matrix!

by Alistair Croll ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 9th, 2010

Existentialists will have a field day with this one: According to ScienceDaily, an EU research initiative called FuturIcT (a “knowledge accelerator” funded by, among others, billionaire investor George Soros) aims to create a really accurate version of Simearth. By mining many sources of data and simulating them in a supercomputer, the project hopes to understand financial, social, and economic forces in the real world. They call it a “knowledge collider.”

One use for such data is to anticipate and mitigate economic melt-downs, something that’s increasingly likely with real-time trading engines that amplify mistakes and market fluctuations. But why stop at economies? A simulator like this could predict political outcomes, something that’s long been speculated in science fiction, from the Delphis in Shockwave Rider to the real-time polling in Neal Stephenson’s frighteningly prescient Interface.

Did Google kill the phone book?

by Alex Bowyer (

@ ) on June 8th, 2010

A stack of Yellow Pages, unopened because nobody needs them

A few months ago I noticed a stack of Yellow Pages directories delivered to my apartment block had laid unopened for months on end in our porch, and I realized, people don’t need phonebooks any more. We all use Google to find business contact information now.

According to the Globe and Mail, the Yellow Pages Group have announced that they will no longer deliver their directory in Canada’s seven largest cities unless it is requested. This seems to confirm that the phone book’s days are numbered, it is now a relic from a time when we didn’t have the world’s information at our fingertips, on our phones and on our desktops. No longer do we need to cut down forests just to stay informed. Besides, if you’re missing the Yellow Pages, you can always download the iPhone app!

There’s more discussion of the story on Slashdot.

When just one camera won’t do

by Alistair Croll ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 5th, 2010

John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” And when people are connected via the Internet, it’s hard to put obstacles in their path, too. Take this case of a Latvian photographer prevented by security guards from taking pictures of a building.

A few tweets and one 40-person Flashmob later, we have more photographs — and probably many more people aware of the situation — than we ever did before.

(BTW, the server is slow at best, so you may have to be patient.)

An interview with James Burke

by Alistair Croll ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 4th, 2010

When I was very young, a TV series called Connections changed my life. It was an ADHD-filled ride through history and science, showing us how everything we took for granted stood on the shoulders of giants.

I just found this interview with the author and narrator of that series, James Burke, conducted by Gartner. It’s a great read; if anything, Burke has underestimated the pace of change.

Read more »

Back to the ’80s: Platform wars all over again

by Alex Bowyer ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 3rd, 2010

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the computing landscape was simple: Everyone used Windows. The Windows PC had become the dominant computer, supplanting the myriad platforms of the 80s: Acorn, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair and others, which caused everyone no end of headaches with incompatibilities. Developers had to choose which platforms to support, as there were too many to support them all, and consumers were left with a difficult choice about which to buy, and often ended up regretting their decisions.

This article by Ben Werdmuller reminds us that we may now be entering a similar age of chaos. We have Windows, OSX and Linux on the desktop, HTML5, Flash and Silverlight in the browser, and Android, Blackberry, iPhone OS, Symbian (Nokia’s platform), Windows Mobile, and many others on the smartphone, not to mention new devices like the iPad or Microsoft Surface and new operating systems like Google’s Chrome Web OS. Ben argues that the most likely outcome is to standardize on the Web, regardless of device, as we did on Windows in the 80s.

Myself, I’m not so sure, at least not until we have web standards for features like multi-touch, location awareness and 3D navigation. But it’s certainly true that we now face those same difficult choices as consumers or developers that we did in the ’80s.

Read the full article

Photofuse: can you trust pictures any more?

by Alistair Croll ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 3rd, 2010

Techcrunch has a writeup on Windows Live Essentials’ new Photofuse technology, which lets you pick from several similar pictures and create a new, optimal one. When revisionist editing gets this simple, poidh doesn’t apply any more.

Complete writeup on Techcrunch.

The slippery slope to a dull, safe Internet

by Alistair Croll (

@ ) on June 2nd, 2010

Got a problem with the way someone thinks? Then you’ll love social networks like Facebook, because they give you easy ways to harass your ideological opposites.

Search makes it easy to find someone you disagree with. Once you’ve found your ideological target, get your friends to report them, and let the automated antispam systems do their work. ReadWriteWeb has an example of groups reporting someone in order to wrongfully shut down their online accounts already.

How did we get here?

Read more »

“Hyper-definition” Cape Town images allow World Cup fans to take a virtual tour

by Alex Bowyer ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on June 1st, 2010

Next week the FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa. We’ve written previously about virtual tourism, the idea that you can explore a place before you go ever physically go there.

Unfortunately Google Street View hasn’t been to Cape Town yet, but map layer specialists Virtual Africa have produced a series of “hyper-definition” images which allow you to zoom from a vista of the whole city right down to the level where you can see construction workers building the Green Point Stadium (this first image was taken last year).

This image pushes the limits of current photographic and processing technology, clocking in at 9 gigapixels and 25 Gigabytes of storage. The source image apparently takes an hour to load! Click the image to zoom and explore Cape Town from the comfort of your own home. If you’re lucky, you might even spot a hidden Wally/Waldo.

Infecting humans with computer viruses

by Alistair Croll ( Follow @ on Twitter

@ ) on May 26th, 2010

Look out Snow Crash and Strange Days: a British researcher says he’s the first person to become infected with a computer virus.

It’s just a proof of concept, but Dr. Marc Gasson of the University of Reading showed that he could infect an implanted chip (used to open doors and activate his phone) and have that virus passed on to other devices.

While the example seems trivial, it does offer some tantalizingly threatening possibilities: what if I infect your pacemaker, then use that to extort money from you in order to keep it working?

Pick a topic:

Transhuman

Futurism

Artificial Intelligence

Audio & Video Highlights

Can computers help us remember?

With more and more things to remember every day, will we trust computers to back up our brains? Find out in this interview with Sunil Vemuri. (read more...)

Download/play audio file

Patently absurd

Patents have spread from products to processes, algorithms and even genes. This documentary examines the dangers to society of patenting everything. (read more...)

Click to view full screen

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Like all images on the site, the topic icons are based on images used under Creative Commons or in the public domain. Originals can be found from the following links. Thanks to wecand, philosophy_rebel, maniya, victornuno, splityarn, barnetcouncil, istio, jeremymates, botheredbybees and leonardodavinci.

Technology changes you man.

Featured Items

Lytro – Start of a photography revolution?

Can computers help us remember?

Periodicity

Behavioral Analysis and the Age of Metrics

Tablets, unions, and education – part one

Balancing taste and novelty: The spaghetti fetish problem

Bitnorth 2010: The Human 2.0 Weekend

Is photography a human right?

Who owns your voice online?

Recent Items

Pick a topic:

Audio & Video Highlights

Can computers help us remember?

Patently absurd

Click to view full screen

Share this page