TomScrace

Defending Ann Coulter

2008-05-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

To anybody even approaching a human standard of intelligence it should be clear that Ann Coulter is nothing more than a bigoted lackwit media whore, so why would one even take the trouble to pay her heed, much less write an article defending her? To explain, it is necessary to go back to an interview she gave on Donny Deutsch's CNBC show 'The Big Idea' in which she claimed that it would be better if we were all Christians, and that Christians were 'perfected Jews'.

Rather predictably this caused something of a commotion, and Coulter has since been criticised as being anti-semitic, intolerant, and generally a big meanie. Deutsch himself immediately responded with incredulity, and accused her of being hateful and anti-semitic, and complained that he was personally offended by the remarks. The National Jewish Democratic Council has called for media organisations to stop using her as a commentator.

But this is not the correct response (although it probably is the one that Coulter was hoping for). Coulter's comments were not anti-semitic, and they are perfectly rational, and really quite unremarkable and modest, if your thinking is grounded in Christian dogma.

First, it is clear that she was referring to religious Jews, rather than racial Jews, so it makes no sense at all to say that she was being racist or anti-semitic. Religion is not the same thing as race; a fact that people who accuse critics of Islam of racism would do well to remember. Second, if you believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus died on the cross to save us, and that he was the son of God, then it is perfectly rational to desire all people to convert to Christianity. In fact the Bible commands believers to 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations'. Apart from that, it is natural to think that the world would be a better place if other people thought more like you do. Coulter also said, in the same interview, that she thought America would be better if all Americans were Republicans, but there has been no righteous condemnation of that comment.

This whole fandango is just another symptom of the taboo over criticising religion. It is clear that nobody would have condemned Coulter for wishing other people to agree with her over political, economic, historical, or scientific opinions. It is hard to imagine the Adam Smith Institute demanding that somebody not be used as a commentator after advocating widespread adoption of Keynesian economics. But when it comes to religion, everybody is immediately indignant. This must change.

Links:

News Words

2008-05-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

mis-speak

One of the rules of Orwellian Newspeak is that wherever an antonym can be removed from the language it ought to be removed. For example, since we have the word light, the word dark is redundant, because unlight serves just as well. By eliminating unnecessary opposites, the founding principle of Newspeak - to diminish the vocabulary as much as possible - is served.

Whereas in Oldspeak we might have used the word lie, we can now use the much better word mis-speak. This elimination of redundancy serves the laudable goal of removing heretical words from the language, and therefore also removing their associated concepts from our thought (or rather think). The foundation of all Newspeak is that if a we cannot say something we also cannot think it. Thus if we cannot use the word lie we also cannot think about the concept of lying, since it no longer exists. This has considerable benefits for those forced toaccount for themselves in public life.

bigot

In a rather splenetic piece from the current issue of Human Events, Gary Bauer forms a neat little syllogism concluding that Bill Maher is a bigot. He quotes Merriam Webster's definition of bigot: 'One who regards or treats the members of a group with hatred and intolerance', then Maher: 'I have hated the church way before anyone else', and comes to the inevitable conclusion that Maher is by definition a bigot. And, of course, everybody knows that bigots are evil.

Impeccable logic, Mr Bauer, but sadly false premises. By this reasoning we would have to indict almost everybody in America, to say nothing of the rest of the world, on the charge of bigotry. What clear thinking person does not hate groups like al-Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan? By Mr Bauer's definition one would have to be positively morally remiss not to be a bigot.

Of course, his error lies with the definition. The Merriam Webster quote was accurate, but not complete; he neglected to include the previous sentence: 'a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices'. The important words being obstinately and prejudices, meaning pre-judgments, or judgments in absence of facts. A better definition comes from Chambers: 'a person blindly and obstinately devoted to a particular set of ideas, creed or political party, and dismissive towards others'.

Since Mr Bauer can plainly read, and since he clearly has a copy of the dictionary, I can only attribute his error to wilful obfuscation of the truth in service of a pre-formed conclusion. Now that's what I call bigotry.

elitist

Does anybody know what this word means? An elite is a group of people who are, in some way, better than other people. It could be that they are better educated, or better able to take on some task, or some other superiority. What, then, could an elitist be? In one sense anti-elitism is at the foundation of the democratic movement. We no longer award positions of leadership and authority based solely on membership of an elite, but through popular elections.

But anti-elitism has come recently, I think, to mean something else. It refers to a belief that in some areas there is no meaningful measure of goodness outside subjective opinion. We ought not to be claiming that Mozart is better than rap, or that a history professor has any greater insight into the causes of World War II than the common man on the street. This sort of elitism is a far more profound rejection of the very concept of superiority. It has infected popular thinking to such an extent - in America at least - that we are now suspicious of anybody who professes superior knowledge or expertise about anything. Political elections in the US have become not so much a contest to convince the public that candidates can better do the job for which they are running, but a race to show people that they are just one of the people. This seems to have had some bad results.

This new concept of elitism has gone unchallenged because it is not understood. The word is used casually without any agreed definition, and therefore serves more to confuse than to enlighten. We would be better off without it.

Treating organisations like the Al-Mahadi Army as legitimate is absurd

2008-04-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

The more attentive among you may remember a short conflict in July of 2006 between Israel and the Hezbollah terrorist militia in Lebanon. Although the war lasted only 33 days it inflicted heavy casualties on both the Israeli and Lebanese sides of the border. It has been estimated that more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians died, and that more than 4,000 Israeli civilians were wounded as a direct result of the war.

It all started when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israeli military targets to act as a diversion for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The plan was to force Israel to trade a number of Lebanese prisoners for the soldiers. Israel's reaction was to promise a 'very painful and far-reaching response' and to begin to attack targets within Lebanon with artillery and air strikes . In the following days there was considerable confusion about who the main combatant parties in the war were. The Lebanese prime minister vacillated between supporting Hezbollah, and disavowing them. The Israelis began by declaring Hezbollah's aggression 'an act of war' on the part of the Lebanese state, but later changed its mind, stating that 'Israel is not fighting Lebanon but the terrorist element there'.

All this should be taken as a cautionary tale against the power of independent militias operating outside the control of state governments. One does not have to work very hard to think of other examples of the destruction that can result from tolerance of armed partisan groups. Whether they genuinely operate without state influence, or whether they are merely acting as proxies for veiled state aggression - as in the case of Sudan's Janjaweed group - these bodies are always a destabilising influence. That Hezbollah, an organisation with no official government support, was able to engage the Israeli army on equal terms is testament to the power that such rogue groups can attain, and how dangerous they can be.

In the past few days we have been reading reports from Iraq of the ongoing dispute between the Iraqi government and Muqtada al-Sadr's Al-Mahdi Army. al-Sadr - who remains safely hidden within Iran - has claimed that despite his attempts at a cease-fire, the government has been targeting his militia for political reasons. He has now threatened the government with open war in the event that they fail to discontinue military operations against his people. He has also claimed that the attacks against his group are an attempt to eliminate any opposition to the Shi'ite parties in government before the October elections.

There are striking similarities between the Al-Mahadi Army and Hezbollah. Both are non-government groups with strong paramilitary wings. Both claim to engage in humanitarian work as well as military activity. Both are Shi'a Muslim bodies allegedly funded by Iran, and both have the potential to ignite deadly conflicts. Both ought to be disbanded, or at the very least disarmed as soon as possible.

That we even entertain a dialogue between these groups and their host nations as legitimate is revealing of our lack of perspective. If such a militia were to emerge in the US or an EU country it would seem absurd for anybody to defend the group with claims that they also provide health services, or that they are trying to achieve a cease fire and should not be attacked. The very existence of such an organisation in a first world nation would never be tolerated, and we ought to apply the same standards to the middle east.

It is not possible to achieve lasting stability in Iraq, or any nation, unless groups like al-Sadr's are disarmed. It is a fundamental principle of nationhood that the state must have exclusive control over military power, and that such power must be subject to the rule of law.

It is heartening that the Iraqi army, backed by the US and UK forces in the area, is beginning to make inroads against al-Sadr's people in Basra. It is further heartening that the leader himself has retreated to the security of Iran to pursue 'study'. Let us hope that the credibility and strength of this organisation, and others like it, continues to decline.

References

The July War

Janjaweed

As tool of the state

Al-Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr

On recent developments

Why We Shouldn't Be Doing Anything (Much) About Global Warming (Yet)

2008-03-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

Re-watching Bjorn Lomborg's talk about the Copenhagen Consensus got me to thinking a bit more about global warming and what we should be doing about it.

The subject of climate change is one of those 'issues' that tends to divide people into two discrete camps. On the one hand there are those who think that global warming is the biggest problem we are facing, and that we should be devoting a sizable chunk of our resources and attention to solving it as soon as possible. On the other hand there are those who either deny that the problem exists at all, or deny that it is going to significantly affect us.

As with so many things, this extreme polarisation of the subject has had a detrimental effect on the debate surrounding it by shutting out any shades of argument in between the two dominant positions.

And that's unfortunate, because climate change is a complicated issue and I believe that the correct approach to it lies in between the polar extremes. Let me explain why.

First of all, there's no reasonable doubt that global warming is both real, and a significant existential problem for our species. If you don't believe me, read the summary of the fourth assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concludes that 'warming of the climate system is unequivocal', and that the cause of such warming is 'very likely' anthropogenic in nature.

Given this fact, the reasonable response seems to be to take decisive action to avert a global catastrophe. Indeed, this move seems to be assumed by most commentators. Once you have been convinced that the problem is real and serious, advocacy of immediate evasive measures seems to be automatic. This, I think, is a mistake.

Let us examine the various solutions that have been proposed. The most well known is the Kyoto Protocol, which is the agreed result of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. This protocol has the aim of reducing emission of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. As a result of signing up to the protocol thirty-six developed countries are now required to reduce their greenhouse emissions to levels specified in the treaty. Notably, the United States has been the target of considerable criticism for not ratifying the treaty.

Another oft-discussed approach to the problem is a 'carbon tax'. This solution proposes taxing emissions of carbon dioxide in order to encourage reduction in the quantity of greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere. Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK have all imposed some form of carbon taxing.

Finally, there is the increasingly popular notion of 'emissions trading' (sometimes known as 'cap and trade'), which is both an administrative and an economic approach. Under this system the government sets a limit on the amount of CO2 that can be emitted, and issues emissions credits (whose total market value is equal to the governmental limit) to companies that need to pollute. These companies are then able to buy and sell the credits if they need to pollute more, or if they want to trade their credits for cash. The idea is that a market in emissions credits will emerge, thus ensuring that those companies that can most cheaply reduce emissions will do so. This ensures the most economically efficient reduction in CO2 pollution.

These aren't the only proposed solutions, but they are some of the most popular and most discussed. They all fall into a category of solutions that I want to call 'passive'. They are passive in the sense that they all aim to reduce the amount of carbon that we are putting into the atmosphere, rather than trying to actively reverse the process of global warming that is already in motion.

The problem with passive solutions is two fold. First, they are expensive. A number of studies have explored to cost of Kyoto compliance. A meta-study conducted by the US Energy Information Administration put the cost of compliance, in 1996 dollars, at between $102B and $437B a year in 2010 and between $120B and $311B in 2020. Even taking into account the savings that may be possible through carbon trading, offsets and other efficiencies, it seems safe to say that reducing our carbon emissions will have a significant and detrimental impact on the global economy.

The second problem with passive solutions is that the potential upside is relatively small. As Bjorn Lomborg points out in Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, full compliance with Kyoto for all time would only slow the rate of warming by 5% over the next century. The momentum in the global climate system is already too great for a mere reduction of emissions to have much effect. In other words, the result of spending trillions of dollars would only be to push back a global catastrophe for a few years.

Bu there are alternatives to the passive approaches. By actively seeking to remove carbon from the atmosphere we could have a realistic prospect of not just delaying global warming, but of putting an end to it altogether. A number of techniques have been proposed that might enable artificial sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere. None, though, have as much promise as nanotechnology.

The birth of nanotechnology can be traced to Richard Feynman's famous 'plenty of room at the bottom' speech in 1959, but it was Eric Drexler who was the first to lay out a high-level design for what has become known as a 'molecular assembler'. Sometimes known as a 'Drexler Assembler', this device has the potential to manufacture anything at all that is consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry.

Current exponentially increasing trends in miniaturisation, and the price-performance of computing point to a realisation of these techniques in the 2020s. Once we have harnessed the power of the very small we will have the technology to manipulate the environment at the molecular level, allowing us to re-design the world around us. The implications for global warming are that we will have the means to cheaply, and on a global scale, remove carbon from the atmosphere, thus reversing the current climate trends. Ray Kurzweil notes that we will in fact have to be careful not to go too far in this endeavor, lest we instigate a global cooling trend.

The choice before us is clear. We can either act now, which will cost trillions of dollars and have little impact on the problem, or we can act in 10-15 years' time, which will cost relatively little, and will bring about a complete end to the problem. A simple cost-benefit analysis seems to make the correct choice clear.

And yet we are making the wrong choice. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that the world is still blighted, as Kurzweil notes, by the historical-linear view of the pace of technology advancement. It is still the case that most of the world does not take into account the exponentially increasing speed of advances in information technologies when planning for the future. Because of this, it is hard for most commentators and decision makers to envisage a near-future with such astonishing technological power, and thus they fail to take such power into account when making plans for the future.

The second reason is that, as a species, we seem to have a predilection for action. Simply by doing something, no matter how ineffective it might be, we feel better. The idea that we should wait, and that the best course of action might be patience, is anathema to most leaders, and indeed strikes many observers as positively immoral. This is a patently self-indulgent attitude.

It will be essential that we shed these prevailing attitudes if we are to avoid damaging the global economy by piling untold burden on the very wealth-creation powerhouses that will drive the coming technological revolutions. As I have noted before on this blog, it is always better to put something off until tomorrow if doing so gives us a better chance of success.

Is the Robot War Nigh?

2008-03-04T19:15:00.000-08:00

from: xkcd

10 Must-See TED Talks - Part II

2008-03-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay on this folks. The truth is that I just happened upon a little game called Eve Online, which has sucked up a lot of my time. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if you see a blog post about this in the future after I've got a better grip on what it's all about.

Anyway, back to the TED list.

6. Craig Venter: A voyage of DNA, genes and the sea

We have mastered the techniques of reading DNA. Craig Venter is now pioneering our efforts to start writing DNA. In this talk Venter describes the astonishing things that are being discovered from his around-the-word expedition to sequence the DNA of ocean-going microbes.

He goes on to address the concerns of those who fear designer viruses, and sets out a roadmap for the creation of engineered life. He predicts that human manufactured bacteria are only a couple of years away. Early this year - about 3 years after he gave this talk - the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had manufactured the genome of a bacterium.

He finishes by noting that engineered life has the potential to profoundly change the world by providing abundant food, solving our energy problems, and curing disease.

Watch it

7. Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world

Bjorn Lomborg asks, in a world with limited resources for solving world problems, what should we be addressing first? We must, of course, choose those projects that will do the most amount of good for the least money. In other worlds, the good projects are those that are the most efficient.

Looked at this way, obvious priorities like solving global warming do not seem like such good investments. Lomborg points out that the best case scenario for the Kyoto Protocol - that we push back the catastrophic consequences of global warming by 6 years - is not an efficient way to spend $15o Billion a year. Spending that money on other priorities like curing Aids/HIV and Malaria would have more positive outcomes for much less money.

Lomborg doesn't go into the possible role that nanotechnology will play in solving our climate change problems, but in about 10 - 15 years' time we should have the means to combat global warming for significantly less money than $150 billion dollars a year. Using nanobots we will be able to effectively remove the excess CO2 from our atmosphere. This will bring about a complete end to the climate problem without spending anything like the cost of the Kyoto Protocol. We should not do something today if putting it off until tomorrow will give us a greater chance of success.

Watch it

8. Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware"

Hod Lipson uses a talk based around demonstrations of some of his experimental robots to ask questions about how living creatures learn and evolve, and how we can engineer robots to do the same thing.

Lipson has created robots that create themselves. His robots decide for themselves how they want to walk, develop an understanding of what they look like, and can even construct other robots.

Watch it

9. David Bolinsky: Fantastic voyage inside a cell

David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator. In this talk he presents a 3-minute clip from his project to animate the inside of a cell. This stunningly beautiful animation gives an insight into the true complexity of the internal life of a cell, and shows just how simplistic the traditional line drawings that we are shown in school really are.

Bolinsky's animation illustrates how technology can be used to give educators the tools to really engage their students, and to provide a visual model on which students can hang everything else that they are learning.

Watch it

10. David Deutsch: What is our place in the cosmos?

This final talk is not about any particular piece of science or technology, but rather about our place in the cosmos and what it means for our ability to overcome problems.

Deutsch argues compellingly that due to our unusual position in the universe we have the pre-requisites - matter, energy, and evidence - to accumulate knowledge, and therefore we have the power to solve problems.

Despite our ability to gain knowledge, though, there are some things that we don't know. This means that some things will happen that we cannot predict, and that there will be problems that we have not anticipated. Deutsch argues that in light of these twin truths - that we can solve problems and that there are some problems that we cannot anticipate - the correct stance is not one that seeks to avoid problems, but one that attempts to solve them.

Watch it

Bonus Talk: Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

This talk doesn't really have anything to do with technology, and so is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I wanted to include it as a bonus because it is one of the best presentations of any kind that I have seen.

Hans Rosling uses statistics, and an ingenious method of presenting them, to deeply explore the phenomenon of poverty in the world, and how it is changing.

Watch it

I hope that this list has opened up the world of TED to you if you weren't previously aware of it. I am almost never let down by these talks, and there are many, many more of them at the TED website. TED 2008 has just finished, so we can look forward to more fascinating presentations in the coming months.

10 Must-See TED Talks - Part I

2008-02-29T18:41:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't heard of it, TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual multi-disciplinary conference held in Monterey, California. Its subject matter is wide-ranging, and includes technology, culture, global affairs, design, architecture, art, healthcare and much more. The unifying theme is that TED wants to harness the power of ideas to change the world.

For about the last year and a half TED has been putting video of its talks up on the web for public consumption, with the result that I became a TED addict. The talks are almost invariably fascinating, and the speakers are authoritative and inspiring. I have watched a good number of these now, and so I thought it might be a good idea to share with you ten examples that I think everybody should see. In no particular order, they are:

1. Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us

Anybody who has been reading this blog recently surely won't be surprised to see Ray Kurzweil's talk in this list. If you haven't yet been introduced to the power of exponential growth to transform our species then you should watch this talk. If you have heard of Kurzweil's ideas before, and thought they sounded rather outlandish, you should give him another chance by watching this brilliant presentation.

Kurzweil explains in detail, and with abundant painstakingly-gathered data, why exponentially accelerating progress in information technology will enable us to re-engineer our biology, re-build the world with nanotechnology, and ultimately fill the universe with hyper-intelligent AI.

If you're trying to understand the future, and how best to plan for it, you owe it to yourself to take the time to properly understand these ideas.

Watch it

2. Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it

Aubrey de Grey has become something of a celebrity in recent years. His eccentric appearance and bold claims about the aging process have made him the darling of many a science editor looking for an entertaining story. But this Cambridge computer scientist is far from just a curious oddity. His research into biogerontology has proved something of a shock to the conventional wisdom, but de Grey's compelling intelligence and calmly reasoned arguments have garnered him increasing support from the scientific community.

In this presentation de Grey explains that humanity has the potential to extend the lifespan of its members by centuries if we could only approach aging as an engineering problem to be solved. de Grey has identified seven causes of aging and has put together a detailed roadmap to solve each one of them.

Watch it

3. Nick Bostrom: Humanity's biggest problems aren't what you think they are

In this engaging presentation Nick Bostrom argues that sometimes our problems are too familiar or too big for us to notice. He notes, for example, that almost everybody who has ever lived is now dead. This, Bostrom argues, is a big problem, from a humanitarian and an economic perspective. Although we have not conventionally regarded death as a problem, but rather as a natural part of life, Bostrom argues that the time has come for us to recognise this incredibly wasteful phenomenon for what it is.

He goes on to note that a number of thinkers have assigned some worryingly low probabilities to the survival of our species, and that life isn't always as wonderful as it could be. Most of the talk is then given over to a fascinating and penetrating discussion of a number of approaches to solving these problems, and enhancing life.

Nick Bostrom is the best person I know for clarifying, and classifying, the problems that humanity is facing.

Watch it

4. Juan Enriquez: Decoding the future with genomics

Genomics is the intersection of information and biology. Juan Enriquez explains how this revolution will transform our understanding of life from almost nonexistent into a mature information science.

With dry wit, Enriquez goes on to describe the astonishing consequences that our mastery of DNA will bring. From bringing extinct species back to life, to re-programming our bodies, genomics is going to be the key to making life better throughout the next decade.

And we need to understand it.

Watch it

5. Kevin Kelly: How does technology evolve? Like we did

What is technology? What does technology mean in my life? What value does technology have?

What does technology want?

Kevin Kelly addresses all these questions in this talk about the relationship between humans and machines. By approaching this subject from the perspective of evolutionary theory, Kelly makes the case that the same forces that produced the diversity and ubiquity of life on Earth are also the forces that are pushing technology; and with identical results.

He finishes with a moral imperative. Life and the Universe is an infinite game: one that is played not to win but rather to keep playing. Technology wants to keep playing, and so should we.

I have never encountered anybody who thinks more deeply about technology, and its relationship with humanity, than Kevin Kelly.

Watch it

Tune in tomorrow for Part II.

UPDATE: Part II is here.

Corn Genome Unlocked

2008-02-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

A group of scientists at Washington University has announced that they have completed a draft sequence for the genome of corn. This is the first time that we have had a detailed understanding of the genetic blueprint of corn, which underlies a number of economically important products including milk, meat, breakfast cereals, livestock feed, and ethanol. The genome will form the basis for ongoing research into altering the crop to improve yields, and bring resistance to drought and disease.

The genome of corn consists of about 2 billion DNA bases, which is not too far off the 2.9 billion bases that make up the human genome. It is instructive to note that while the Human Genome Project took 13 years to complete, and cost $3 billion, the effort to sequence corn has taken only 3 years (a finalised sequence will be released later this year) and $29.5 million.

More:

A Carbon Nanotube Bed Sheet

2008-02-28T16:49:00.000-08:00

Nanocomp Technologies, of Concord New Hampshire, has created a sheet of carbon nanotubes measuring approximately 1 metre by 2 metres. These are the largest collections of nanotubes ever created - previously the largest were small ribbons - and contain about a billion billion nanotubes. The company claims that, in principle, there is no limit to the size of their nano sheets.

What are carbon nanotubes?

Carbon nanotubes are very small (about ten atoms across) cylindrical stuctures composed of carbon atoms. They will soon (likely within the next 10-15 years) replace the transistor/integrated circuit paradigm of computing and being the age of three dimensional molecular computing. Nanotubes can be packed at extrememly high densities (due to their small size) and also have the potential to be very fast. Peter Burke of UC Irvine claims that the theoretical speed limits for nanotube transistors should me measured on the order of terahertz. Ray Kurzweil points out that one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry has the potential to provide one hundred million times more computing power than the human brain.

There are many additional applications for nanotunes. Including:

Energy transmission lines that will be far stonger, lighter, and more efficient than copper wires.
Clothing that is extremely tough and light. There are proposals to use nanotubes in bullet- and stab- proof vests.
Displays called Field Emission Displays that will provide cheaper, better, more energy-efficient TVs.
Filters that could remove CO2 from power plant emissions or chloride ions from water.

Why is the Nanocomp development important?

One of the major obstacles to the widespread adoption of this material is that it has been traditionally quite difficult to manufacture nanotubes in large quantities. The new technique developed by Nanocomp will help overcome this hurdle.

More:

A Rough Guide to the Future

2008-02-27T09:43:00.000-08:00

In an effort to better prepare humanity for the challenges that await us in the near future, I present this Guide as a public service. I have provided things to look out for, as well as things to do and not to do for the next four decades.

2010s

Look Out For:

The first computer with the hardware required to emulate human intelligence (with processing power of approximately 10^16 cps). Note, however, that we will not possess the necessary software to accomplish the goal of brain emulation until approximately 2029.
Computers that are essentially invisible, and woven into our clothing and wider environment creating a worldwide mesh of interconnected devices. This will effectively give us constant, always-on, high-speed, high-bandwidth connection to the world's computing resources.
Full immersion visual and auditory virtual reality. We have had effective auditory virtual reality for some time, but at the beginning of the second decade of this century we will have the capability to write images directly onto the retina, creating an immersive virtual world.
RNA Interference tools that will allow us to switch off specific genes, thus allowing us to prevent a wide array of genetic diseases including Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Down Syndrome.
Cell therapies that will allow us to effectively rejuvenate our cells, and even whole organs, thus returning our bodies to youthful versions of themselves.
The realisation of Somatic Gene Therapy, allowing us to change genes, and thereby control the genetic makeup of our species. This technology will allow us not only to block undesirable genes, but also to introduce beneficial ones. This will have a multitude of impacts, including the ability to slow down, or perhaps even reverse, the aging process.
An end to degenerative diseases - through a combination of these and other genetic techniques - including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.
An end to world hunger, through the use of cloned animal tissue. By eating cloned tissue instead of tissue removed from once-living animals we eliminate a number of problems, including high cost of production, scarcity of food, environmental impact, and animal suffering.

Do:

Eat as much meat as you like without any real worries about weight gain or animal suffering.
Invest heavily in anti-viral medication. This will help mitigate the risk of a runaway super pathogen.

Don't:

Go about publishing the genomes of deadly pathogens on the internet. This has the potential to be problematic.

2020s

Look Out For:

Mature nanotechnology that will allow us to design and remake ourselves, and our environment. We will be able to solve the problems of global warming and pollution through the use of nanoscale robots designed to convert CO2 and other pollutants into harmless materials. Nanobots called foglets will allow us to change the appearance of our bodies and our surroundings to whatever we desire, bringing virtual reality into real reality.
The Drexler Assembler, a device that will manipulate matter at the molecular and even atomic scales to manufacture anything we can design within the bounds of physical and chemical laws.
Intravenous nanotechnology. Billions of nanobots will flow through our blood and our brain, keeping us healthy by destroying pathogens, correcting DNA errors, and providing detailed real-time medical data concerning the state of our bodies. The same technology will allow us to scan the brain in unprecedented detail; paving the way for a reverse engineering of the human brain.
Fully immersive virtual reality incorporating all the senses. This will be accomplished by shutting down the signals our senses send to the brain, and replacing them with alternative signals from nanobots within our skulls.
Solar panels, at a cost of approximately $0.01/square metre, that will likely be supplying the bulk of the species' energy needs. Nanotechnology-based manufacturing processes will enable us to manufacture these devices at essentially the cost of raw materials. Given that 10^17 watts of solar power is incident upon the Earth's surface at any given time (approximately 10,000 times the amount required to power humanity) it should not be difficult to solve the world's energy problems.

Do:

Have fun changing the appearance of your friends in virtual reality without them knowing it.
Protect your Intellectual Property. In an age where the value of anything is almost completely taken up by its information content, preventing your information from being stolen will be of paramount economic importance.
Live forever (if you want to). By replacing the frail and suboptimal portions of our biology with more efficient technology, and ultimately by dispensing with our biological bodies altogether, we can make aging irrelevant and live for as long as we please.

Don't:

Try to configure your Drexler Assembler to be self-replicating. This will likely land you in jail, and could lead to the entire planetary bio-mass being converted into a uniform grey goo.
Tell anybody the password to your network of medical nanobots; the prospect of computer viruses passing over into the real world is not a good one.

2030s

Look Out For:

The first computer to pass the Turing Test, rendering itself indistinguishable from a human intellect. Around the end of the 2020s or the beginning of the 2030s we will have both the software and the hardware required to emulate the human brain, ushering in the era of Strong AI. At this point computers will combine the pattern-recognition, and model-making, capacities of the human brain with the speed, accuracy, memory capacity, and interconnectedness of non-biological intelligence.
A merger between your brain and your computer. With the combined revolutions of nanotechnology and strong AI, we will be able to extend our own intelligence and capabilities indefinitely.

Do:

Remember to take care of the people that choose not to merge with non-biological intelligence. There will undoubtedly be many such people, and they will require our care. Just as today we care for our household plants.

Don't:

Annoy the strong AI. It would be best if it didn't decide that we humans ought to be dispensed with.

2040s

Look Out For:

The Singularity. Ray Kurzweil puts the date for the Singularity - the point at which the rate of technological change becomes so extreme that from our current perspective it would appear to be infinite - at 2045.

Do:

Appreciate that you were born in a time that allows you to witness the most exciting and important events, not only in the history of the human species but of the world, and possibly even the Universe itself.

Don't:

Try to understand the post-singularity world until we actually get there. Its nature precludes a meaningful understanding given our current limited mental apparatus.

If you would like to read more about the exciting developments that await us in the future, I can do no better than recommend Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, which provides extensive details on all the technologies above, as well as discussion on the impacts, promise and peril of the coming technological revolutions.

Buzzword: The Web-based Word Processor We've All Been Waiting For?

2008-02-25T08:50:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote a post arguing that Google Apps isn't the sure-fire winner in the online productivity war. Then, 'Karim' posted a comment on ReadWriteWeb pointing out Google Docs' panoply of failures.

In Q4 2007 Adobe released its own web-based word processor called Buzzword, which it acquired when it bought Virtual Ubiquity. With the announcement that AIR is coming out of beta today, it seems likely that Buzzword will assume a new prominence in the online productivity war, based on the assumption that it will soon leverage the offline power of AIR to bring Buzzword to the desktop.

But how does Buzzword stack up against its competitors? First of all let me say that this is by far the nicest looking word processor on the web. The interface is very slick, and everything behaves much more like a proper desktop app than a kludgey web site/application hybrid. The really important thing, though, is the feature set. I've taken Karim's list of problems with Google Docs as the basis for a comparison.

Karim writes:

you can't Ctrl-C copy, Ctrl-V PASTE an image into a document

Does this work in Buzzword? Well, the familiar keyboard shortcuts certainly work fine with text (and, by the way, the text in this app looks just beautiful), but when I tried to paste an image:

I have a strong feeling that this will be fixed when Buzzword integrates with AIR, but for the moment it looks like we're stuck with the old 'insert' standby.

Karim writes:

Now proportionally resize the image so it retains its aspect ratio. Oh, that's right, you can't. Now crop the image. Oh that's right, you can't.

Well, proportionally resizing is handled absolutely beautifully, and works better than many desktop applications I've used. But sadly cropping is still no go.

Karim writes:

Now insert a table. Now grab the edge of a column and resize the column. Oh wait, you can't. Now delete one of the columns. Oh wait, you can't.

Well, this is an area where Buzzword really shines. Resizing cells is as slick as resizing images, and deleting them is a snap with the contextual menu.

Karim writes:

Now type some text and select it. Choose one of the fonts on your computer instead of the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Oh wait, you can't. Create a new paragraph style. Oh wait, you can't. Change the font color and background on some text. Now copy that formatting to another paragraph. Oh wait, you can't.

Fonts are limited here, and they're also rather obscure. Although I quite like some of the choices on offer, the lack of standard fonts like Arial and Times is going to create major problems for some users. We can only hope that with the AIR integration comes integration with desktop fonts.

It's another disappointment with Paragraph styles, which are non-existent (although frankly I never use them anyway), but it should be noted that changing text colour and background colour is easy enough, and again, the interface is beautiful.

Karim writes:

Now do a find and replace on some text. Hmmm, why is that feature marked as "experimental?" Oh, because you don't get to choose which instances get replaced, it just replaces all of them. And there's no way to undo afterwards.

Find and replace works perfectly in Buzzword. A simple Cmd-F (or Ctrl-F for Windows folk) brings up a nice search bar (that somehow overrides Safari's inbuilt search function) that allows you to choose to replace whatever you want without forcing you to replace things you want to keep. And a simple Cmd-Z is all that's needed to undo.

So, some hits and some misses for Buzzword. But it's definitely moving in the right direction. It also has some interesting collaborative and commenting features, but the thing that really sets it apart is its look and feel, which is outstanding.

I look forward to seeing what Adobe can do when this is released on the AIR platform. Regardless of what might be lacking at the moment, it seems certain that Adobe is becoming a very serious player in this area, and Google and Microsoft would do well to learn some lessons from what they are putting out.

More:

Adobe AIR Breaks Down Barriers to Web Apps Going Mainstream

2008-02-25T06:40:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I wrote about Google Docs, and noted that one major feature still lacking was the ability to work offline. Well, it now seems that Adobe has solved this problem with the release of AIR, its 'Platform for Rich Internet Apps'. AIR will bring web applications to the desktop, allowing them to be run seamlessly whether an internet connection is present or not. This should eliminate a major hurdle to the mainstream adoption of web applications.

This functionality is going to be a key for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, who are in competition to dominate the world of online services. But it is Adobe who is first to solve the problem, while Google's Gears, and Mozilla's Prism are still being worked out.

Microsoft, though, is notably lacking in this area. Although their Silverlight technology is often cited as a competitor, this software is actually a plug-in to allow rich web applications to use features like animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback. Silverlight competes with the likes of Flash and Quicktime, rather than Prism, Gears, and AIR.

While there seems little doubt that Silverlight will be used to target Google with an online productivity suite before too long, Microsoft has still to announce how it will integrate the desktop and online sides of the service. This won't last long, though, and Google will need to perfect Gears quickly if it is serious about taking on Microsoft in the desktop space.

For now, though, we can all enjoy the array of interesting applications that have been developed for use on the AIR platform. My favourite so far is the NASDAQ MarketReplay app, but there are plenty to play with.

More:

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

2008-02-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a pretty light day, so I thought I'd do a quick post on a fun online game I just came across. Jason Calacanis just blogged about something called the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, or PMOG.

The idea of this is that you compete against other players for 'datapoints'. You can win these datapoints simply by browsing websites (2 for each URL) or by engaging in more complex 'missions', which are created by the players themselves.

But it's not quite that simple, because the players can trade their datapoints for 'tools'. The tools take a number of forms, including 'Lightposts', which 'make visible connections that were dark before' and act much like bookmarks, 'Crates', which allow for the storage of points and tools across the web, and 'Mines', which 'catch users traveling by and self-destruct to create havoc'.

It gets even more complex when Associations are taken into account. Players are attached to a number of Associations of their choice, which govern the type of behaviour they can engage in. These include 'Benefactors', who attempt to create beneficial behaviour, 'Destroyers', whose aim is to 'annoy others players and bring themselves great joy', and 'Pathmakers', who 'illuminate connections for other citizens of the digital world'.

The fascinating thing about this game is that its players are creating, through their play, a meta-layer of meaning on top of the web. It will be fascinating to see the kind of behaviour that emerges from the players of this game. Yesterday, I wrote about Jane McGonigal, who is engaged in creating games that encourage users to solve problems through the collective intelligence of players. It seems that PMOG would fall very nicely into this category. With its epic battle of order against chaos on the web, the free-form rules of this game seem perfectly suited to allow players to engage in this kind of collective problem solving.

More:

PMOG

My Top 10 Most Anticipated Sessions of SXSW Part II

2008-02-23T18:00:00.000-08:00

Continuing on from yesterday's instalment, I am pleased to present the next five items on my list of the ten SXSW panels I am most excited about.

6. MASH Notes: A Military Surgeon's Videoblog from Iraq (Carlos Brown)

Navy Commander Carlos Brown was the chief surgeon at Camp Ramadi during the period when Ramadi - capital of al-Anbar Province - was one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. As if being responsible for saving the lives of countless US troops in this unimaginably hazardous setting wasn't enough, he also managed to keep a video blog during his time there.

In a time when discussion of the Iraq war takes such a prominent place in the Western political mindset, it is still extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to really understand what it is like to be on the ground there. Although this experiential gap will never be fully bridged, projects like this play an important part in taking us part of the way.

7. Behind the Scenes at the Onion News Network (Sean Mills)

I became addicted to The Onion when I was introduced to it by a friend while I was at school. I could hardly believe that something this funny had escaped my notice for so long. My friend lent me his Onion compilations and, months later, was begging me to give them back. I lost track of it while at University, but then a few months ago I stumbled across their relatively new parody news broadcasts, and the old magic was back.

Not only is The Onion hysterically funny, it also plays an important role in satirising our self-important and utterly inept news media. Should be very interesting to see what Sean Mills - The Onion's president - has to say.

8. Bio-Networks: Using Mobile Technology to Impact Healthstyle (Kate Bauer)

This title grabbed me, but I'm really in the dark about what the content of the talk might be. It's interesting to speculate on how mobile technology might help us be more healthy. Products like the Apple/Nike collaboration spring immediately to mind, but there must be a great deal of potential for expanding this kind of functionality to a broader range of mobile devices. Not only could the data gathered from these gadgets help us better profile our own habits, they could potentially be pooled to help us gather health data about wider populations. As we see computing become ever more ubiquitous over the next few years there will be unprecedented opportunity for gathering data that will allow us to analyse heath-related behaviours in order to address medical problems in a more personalised and scientific way.

On the downside, I really hope that 'healthstyle' doesn't get adopted as an acceptable word.

9. Jane McGonigal Keynote

Jane McGonigal 'designs games from the future'. That alone ought to be enough to entice you to her keynote, but in case it's not, allow me to elaborate. McGonigal's 'alternative reality games' are based on the notion of 'collective intelligence', which is the idea that some problems are best solved through the behaviour that emerges from large groups of people. The classic example of this type of emergent problem solving is Wikipedia, which leverages the collective contributions and interactions of thousands of people to create a comprehensive online encyclopedia.

McGonigal's thesis is that this type of approach to problems will be the key to generating the solutions we will need in the future. For this reason, McGonigal argues, we should be actively teaching these skills to the next generation. The ARG games that she specialises in are specifically designed to encourage this kind of collective intelligence in order to train the gamers to master this mode of problem solving.

10. Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device (Liz Danzico)

As I have mentioned in my post on Google Apps, the mobile space is going to be critical in the upcoming war for dominance of online services, but as popular as mobile solutions are becoming many of us are stuck performing many tasks at the desktop. The reasons for this are manifold, and include poor applications and interfaces. But there are also surely more fundamental barriers to this mode of working. There is, after all, a limit to the size of the screen and keyboard that can fit on a mobile phone. These problems should be addressed by upcoming alternative interface technologies, and it will be interesting to see how this panel approaches the problem.

I'll most likely be putting up more coverage of SXSW in the coming days. As I mentioned previously I am sadly not able to attend, so I'll be relying on all you people lucky enough to be going to keep me updated!

Further SXSW resources:

sxsw.com
SXSW Baby! - an unofficial SXSW blog with resources on accommodation, parties, and much more
Complete coverage on Austin360.com

Twine Gets New Injection of Capital

2008-02-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

Dan Primack at Private Equity Hub, and Chris Morrison at VentureBeat are reporting that Radar Networks has received a new round of funding for its semantic web application Twine. VentureBeat claims that the new deal is probably somewhere in the region of $15-$20 million. It seems that Radar will be using the new cash to scale up their private beta (currently in the region of 1000 users) and to start partnering with other internet firms. Hopefully this means that those of us who have been on the waiting list for the beta may get a chance to test out the software soon.

Twine is described as a semantic 'personal data organiser'. It is an application that uses semantic technologies to organise information that is uploaded by the user and imported from other online sources so that it can be used more intelligently.

There is a lot of misunderstanding over what exactly the Semantic Web is, and what services like Twine are going to do, so in an attempt to clarify the issue I have compiled the following Semantic Web Glossary as an aid to understanding.

Semantic Web - The best explanation of the Semantic Web came from Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the paradigm in terms of a progression from the internet to the web to the 'Graph'. First there was the internet, which connected computers, and allowed cables to become invisible. Then there was the web, which connected documents, and allowed computers to become invisible. Next, there will be what he calls the 'Graph',which will connect things, and allow documents to become invisible. At each stage we are realising that it's not X, but Y that is interesting. It's not the cables themselves that are interesting, but the computers. It's not the computers that are interesting, but the documents stored on them. It's not the documents that are interesting, but the things that are referenced by them.

When I go to somebody's Facebook profile it's not that particular document that I am interested in, but the person that the profile is about. The problem is that that person has pages about them all over the internet. They may also have a twitter stream, a blog, a flickr account and a wikipedia entry. The proposal of the graph is that instead of browsing to a document you browse to a object, which could be a person, a place, a film, a particular flight, or anything else.

The technology challenge here is how to make connections between all the information on the web that is about a particular thing. At the moment computers do not have any way to understand what objects are referred to in a particular document; only humans can do that. The challenge is to create new protocols and models that allow computers to intelligently understand the contents of documents and then make connections between them.

RDF - Standing for Resource Description Framework, RDF is one of the core technologies that will enable computers to understand the contents of documents. It is called a 'metadata model' which essentially means that it is a way of structuring a document to allow meaningful information to be extracted from it by a machine. The RDF specification is based on a tripartite model called a triple, which represents resources in the form of 'subject-predicate-object' expressions. So the RDF model for the expression 'My computer is a Mac' would consist of three parts; the subject ('My computer'); the predicate ('is'); and the object ('a Mac').

OWL - Standing, somewhat inaccurately, for Web Ontology Language, is another specification that allows allows a definition of classes and a modeling of the relations between them. This is an ontological language, which means that it it concerned with defining the kinds of things that exist in web documents and applications. These 'kinds of things' are called classes. The specific members of classes are called individuals, and the relations between classes are called properties. An example of a class might be 'Book', or 'Author'. An example of an individual might be 'The Pickwick Papers', or 'Charles Dickens', and an example of a property might be 'WrittenBy'. Thus the property 'WrittenBy' defines the relationship between the classes 'Book' and 'Author'. OWL is thus a method for mapping out all the things on the web and the relationships between them. OWL ontologies draw on the information provided by the RDF schema.

SPARQL - Standing for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language, SPARQL is a language used to make queries about RDF models. Because RDF allows machines to understand not just documents but the things to which they refer, SPARQL can make queries about those things. With SPARQL, for example, we could ask the question 'List all fantasy books written between 1985 and 1998 by authors who have published more than 5 books'. At the moment we wouldn't be able to get answer because there are hardly any (in comparison to the total volume of documents on the web) RDF models available, but when the whole of the web is modeled using RDF, SPARQL will be an extraordinarily powerful tool.

I hope that this brief glossary has shed some light on what the Semantic Web effort is all about, and why so many people are excited about products like Twine. If you think I've got anything wrong, or have anything else to say, please feel free to leave a comment.

My Top 10 Most Anticipated Sessions of SXSW 2008

2008-02-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

So, unfortunately I'm not going to SXSW, but that doesn't stop me being excited about it. I'm hoping - probably in vain - that at least some of the talks might be released as videos on the web (ala TED), but in any case here is a list of the ten SXSW sessions that I would most like to see.

1. Make It So: Learning From Sci-Fi Interfaces (Nathan Shedroff)

Well, this just sounds cool, doesn't it? Sci-fi has always influenced real world technology, and people naturally begin to expect what they see in cinematic visions of the future to be realised. Robots, for example, were invented in fiction rather than in the lab. From their roots in Greek mythology, through the 19th century tales of Luis Senarens, Edward S. Ellis, and William Douglas O'Connor, up to the 20th Century with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the novels of Issac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, the idea of mechanical and electrical 'men' had been long-entrenched in the popular consciousness before the technology was available to realise such a vision.

The same is surely true of computer interfaces. The original Star Trek communicator has found itself manifested in reality as the 'clamshell' style of mobile phone, the linguistic user interface seen in so many science fiction shows will become a reality within the next decade, and there is much talk of developing a 'gesture interface' much like the one used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

I'm sure that Nathan Shedroff will bring a fascinating angle to this discussion.

2. Futurist's Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025 (Michele Bowman)

Social media forms (blogs, wikis, aggregation sites etc) are currently enjoying exponential growth, and are fast becoming a principal channel of information dissemination, so it is natural to ask what these technologies will look like in the future, and how they will affect society.

Michele Bowman has previously argued that these social media have made the flow of information and ideas visible for the first time. She has analysed the 'physics of information flow' through the lenses of complexity theory and epidemiological modeling (using the metaphor of a disease spreading to understand information flow) in order to better understand this behaviour.

It should be fascinating to hear what she thinks the social media landscape will look in 2025 when the joint influences of ubiquitous computing, neural interfaces, and virtual reality have come into play.

3. Textbooks of the Future: Free and Collaborative! (Jimmy Wales)

We all know Jimmy Wales as the founder of the invaluable Wikipedia. In this open online encyclopedia Wales has realised a vision of knowledge as free and available to all. It is exciting to think of the possibilities of extending this vision to educational textbooks. A world where learning materials are free and open could solve a number of problems including the expense of textbooks, which prohibits many who want to learn from doing so, and the language barriers that stop those in the 3rd-world from enjoying the same access to knowledge that we in the West enjoy.

It will be fascinating to hear how Wales intends to overcome the problem of assuring educators of the accuracy of these open resources, and whether he has considered the possibility that these new textbooks have the potential to be customised for each learner in order to more fully personalise the learning experience. I can't help but think that Jimmy Wales should have been included on the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Engineering Challenges committee, as his contributions to the area of 'advancing personalised learning' could have been extremely valuable.

4. A Critical Look at OpenID (Jason Levitt)

I first became aware of the identity problem from Dick Hardt's famous Identity 2.0 presentaion at OSCON 2005, the problem being how to move your identity securely from silo to silo on the web. One popular solution to this problem is OpenID, which is a decentralised single sign-on system. The system has a number of detractors, however, who typically argue that the technology lacks security and is over-complex.

Jason Levitt is the project leader of BBauth (Browser-Based Authentication), which is a Yahoo! project to solve the same problem. It should be interesting to hear Jason's criticisms of OpenID, and his thoughts on digital identity in general.

5. 10 Things We've Learned At 37signals (Jason Fried)

I have long been fascinated by web design, and what makes a good interface and what does not. There's no doubt that Jason Fried is one of the leaders in this area, and as the co-founder and CEO of 37signals he's also an accomplished entrepreneur. Whether his '10 things' are design related or business related, this should be an interesting session.

Tune in tomorrow for the next five!

More:

sxsw.com

UPDATE: Part II is here.

Google Apps a Threat, but Don't Count Microsoft Out

2008-02-22T09:43:00.002-08:00

Bernard Lunn, over at ReadWriteWeb, has just posted an article arguing that Google Apps is a serious threat to MS Office. His conclusion is that 'Google Docs looks like a major winner'. The main points of his argument are that:

Google is far ahead on collaboration features.
Google has far superior mobile access to its office suite.
The apps, especially Docs, are increasingly mature.
Google's existing ad technology provides a solid economic engine with which to monetize the apps.

Largely, I think that all of these are, to some degree, true. But I think it is far too early to decalre a winner. Let me take each of his points in turn.

First; collaboration. Yes, as it stands Google is of course far ahead in this area. But Microsoft has barely got going. With their recent acquisitions of Calista and Caligari (see my previous post on the subject) Microsoft is obviously planning a big push on the collaboration front. With some of the ideas that they seem to be considering, it may soon be Google that needs to step up its pace of innovation.

Second; mobile access. Again, it's obvious that they're not there yet, but it seems clear from their acquisition of Danger (again see previous post) that Microsoft is taking their mobile platform more and more seriously. Windows Mobile is already becoming a more credible platform, and I have no doubt that they have big plans for this area in the future.

Third; maturity. This is the area where Microsoft has the bigest advantage. Docs is by far the best, and I have used the service quite extensively with mixed results. There's no denying that it is getting there, but it's still lacking some basic stuff. The range of fonts is quite small, there's no facility for headers and footers, and the interface can be frustrating at times. The big downside, as Lunn notes, is that there is not yet any offline access. Granted, it's probably on its way, but for now Microsoft is ahead in this area. And I don't think there's any doubt that overall Word is more mature than Docs.

Finally; the economic model. Yes, AdSense is great, and at times actually useful to the user. But Microsoft's first acquisition of the year was FAST, a company that is developing interesting advertising and search technologies. If they manage to buy Yahoo, which looks likely, they'll have even more muscle in this area.

In summary, it's undoubtedly true that Microsoft is playing catch up, but it looks like they might be about to catch up fast. And let's not forget that they have a huge advantage in their enormous installed user base. Google is a threat, yes, but the battle's far from over.

More:

Grand Challenges

2008-02-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

The National Academy of Engineering has just announced its list of Grand Challenges for Engineering, as determined by a committee of the best and brightest, including Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Craig Venter.

The committee has determined a list of 14 challenges that it considers the most important facing humanity 'at the dawn of this new century'. A dramatically phrased goal, indeed, and the project has produced some suitably lofty-sounding results. The challenges are as follows:

Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Provide access to clean water
Reverse engineer the brain
Advance personalised learning
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Advance health informatics
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
Prevent nuclear terror
Engineer better medicines
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality

All noble sounding goals, I'm sure you'll agree. But on closer inspection, I found many of these to be disappointing. In fact, some of these challenges are not strictly engineering challenges at all.

Take 'prevent nuclear terror', for example. No doubt there may be engineering solutions to this problem, but the problem itself is not an engineering challenge. There are many ways to solve this problem, all of which should be pursued with equal vigor. As well as engineering solutions there are political, social, and economic answers to this question. To narrowly define the issue as an 'engineering challenge' is misleading. It would have been far more useful to specify a particular technology that could be developed. The challenge should have been 'Engineer a missile defence shield', or 'Develop a remote nulcear detection system', or 'create a technology to clean up nuclear contamination'. And while we're at it, why restrict the issue to nuclear 'terror'? Surely nuclear attacks and accidents of all types deserve our attention?

As a second example, take the challenge 'Advance personalised learning'. No doubt there are engineering solutions that will advance this goal, but of course there are non-engineering solutions as well. Restructing the school system, advancing teacher training, or providing a scalable and customisable curriculum are all potential solutions to this problem, but they are not strictly engineering challenges. The NAE suggests on its website that in the future we might develop a Matrix-esque system that allows us to simply download new skills and knowledge into our brains. That would be an engineering challenge (and certainly worth of the epithet Grand), 'advance personalised learning' is not.

Other of these challenges are so vague and obvious that they hardly warrant writing down. 'Engineer better medicines', for example, or 'Engineer the tools of scientific discovery'. I think you would be hard pressed to find anybody who didn't think that making better medicine should be a goal, so how does it help us to write it down? It would have been more helpful, and interesting, if these big brains had come up with the most important engineering challenge in medicine. 'Develop a cure for AIDs' for example, or 'Engineer the human genome to eliminate Alzheimers'. 'Engineer better medicines' is just a platitude.

Before starting on this project to draw up a list of Grand Challenges, the committe should have sat down and decided what their goal was. They should have limited themselves to developing challenges that were both well defined - so that we can take the next step of addressing the challenge, and when we have succeeded - and engineering problems. Many of the challenegs they have presented in their current form are next to useless because they do not meet these criteria.

However, it's not all bad. The top two priorities (as chosen by visitors to the NAE website) were 'Make solar energy economical', and 'Provide energy from fusion'. Both of these are engineering problems that are reasonably well defined. They are also critical to the future success of the human species.

Let us hope that these goals are followed up on. It is somewhat dismaying to find that clicking on the 'Next Steps' link on the project website presents a comment form with 'What do you think?' written above it. Well, guys, I was somewhat hoping that you were going to help with that.

Motor Skills to Become Irrelevant to Gaming?

2008-02-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

Recently Robert Scoble came up with the idea of making a website to list skills that have become obsolete. Then, a few days later we all read the news that Emotiv Systems was releasing a device that would allow users to control computer games with their minds.

To my mind this announcement means that we're going to have to add a large set of skills that have traditionally been central to computer gaming to Scoble's bin of obsolescence. For years and years - ever since computer games were introduced - most games have required a degree of motor agility to master. Whether it be the real time strategy game that requires fast clicking to stay ahead of your opponent, or a first person shooter that demands lightning-quick reflexes to score the perfect rail gun shot, the ability to move your fingers about rapidly has been an imporant part of being a gamer.

But now that it looks like we'll just need our minds for controlling a game, all those years spent developing muscle memory and precision motor skills have apparently been wasted. To my mind this is a good thing - my motor skills are not that precise - because it will allow other game elements - like strategy or storytelling - to play a larger role.

Doubtless, though, some people will not want to give up their finely honed reflexes, and so physical interaction with games will never completely disappear. It may not be the norm anymore, but I have no doubt that a genre of games will survive designed solely to test physical ability.

Whatever happens, the next few years look to be very interesting.

Google Health Gives Media Opportunity to Whine About Privacy

2008-02-21T07:28:00.000-08:00

Google has announced a pilot program for its new Google Health service, a project intended to provide easy access to medical records for doctors and patients. The trial will involve between 1,500 and 10,000 patients in Cleveland who have volunteered to have their medical records stored in Google's new service.

It's easy to see the rationale behind this move, which falls perfectly into line with Google's mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The more information Google has about you the better it can target its ads, and the more efficient they will become. And of course, the better targeted ads become, the less they annoy, and the more they help, users. From the Google Blog:

Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.

But it seems like any new product from Google these days is followed by endless chatter about privacy, and the danger Google presents by collecting too much information.

And although it is right that the media and the public at large should stay vigilant to possible privacy infringements, in this case I believe that their fears are overblown.

If this were a mandatory government project to centralise all your personal information in one database then the outcry would be fully justified. In this case, though, it is a private company providing an entirely voluntary service. It is when non-submission to a database becomes a crime against the state, and not just a company, that we should object.

Google Health looks like a useful service to me, but if you don't like it, don't sign up.

More:

NewsClipper is excellent idea; violates copyright

2008-02-20T16:01:00.000-08:00

NewsClipper may sound like just another news aggregation service, but in fact it's something quite new. TechCrunch describes it as 'Google News for Video', and that's about right. It's a site that brings together news clips from all the major news networks in one place. It's bare bones, and a little rough around the edges right now, but the functionality is impressive. The only thing that comes close to this is Yahoo News, which is considerably less comprehensive.

And unfortunately there's a good reason for that. NewsClipper embeds videos from networks like CNN that do not allow embedding. Not only that, the site allows you to re-embed all of its video on your own site.

Sadly this is where I think the project is going to run into troubles. As much as I'd like to see this project succeed - it has a wonderful feel of freedom of information about it - I'm afraid it's going to run into legal problems quickly, since it seems fairly clear that it reproduces copyrighted material without permission. Although the site's founder argues that none of the video is hosted on his servers, and therefore should not be vulnerable to legal action, I have a feeling that the lawyers from CNN et al will not see the situation in quite the same way.

Nonetheless, I really hope I'm proved wrong. I'll be watching this one closely.

More:

NewsClipper Brings All The News Video from Around the Web to One Place

Gates: We can take on Google even without Yahoo

2008-02-20T09:34:00.000-08:00

In an interview with Ina Fried of News.com Bill Gates has indicated that Microsoft has a plan to go head to head with Google even if they fail to acquire Yahoo.

Although he apparently acknowledged that the plan would proceed faster with Yahoo's engineers on board, Gates claimed that the company could succeed anyway with a plan that involves 'breakthrough engineering'. At first glance this may seem to be nothing more than a display of bravado, especially considering Microsoft's dismal failure to develop Google-beating web services. However, a look at the software giant's other acquisitions for 2008 sheds some light on how they might pull it off.

Microsoft has bought four companies so far this year. In chronological order of acquisition, they are:

1. Fast Search & Transfer - Acquired 8th January

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST) is an Oslo-based company, founded in 1997, that is focussed on search technology. The company's core product is FAST ESP, a real-time search and business intelligence solution, that has in the region of 3,600 implementations. The technology has three broad areas of application; online and mobile; information access and discovery; and OEM (which incorporates the solution within other companies' products).

The company also has a product called FAST AdMomentum, which is a 'performance advertising and search monetization solution'. In other words, a possible alternative to Google's AdWords.

Furthermore the company is currently engaged in research to develop next generation search engines, as well as a project known as PHAROS, which is aimed at transforming audiovisual search technology.

2. Calista Technologies - Acquired 21st January

Calista, founded in 2006 in San Jose, is a leader in the development of next-generation Virtual Desktop solutions. Calista differentiates itself from traditional solutions by using open standards. The result is that the cost per user is significantly lower, meaning that desktop virtualisation could finally go mainstream. The product also provides support for all common file and streaming media types with no need for client side software.

The upshot of all this is that if Microsoft is so minded they could incorporate an industry-beating web-based collaboration solution within its suite of web services.

3. Caligari - Acquired 6th February

Founded in 1986, and based in Mountain View, Caligari is a 3D modeling and animation company. It might not be immediately obvious why this acquisition has consequences for web services, but a closer look at the company's suite of technologies reveals an interesting application.

Caligari's main product is a technology called truePlace, which is a 3D virtual meeting space. Somewhat similar to Sony's Home software for the PS3, and Linden Research's Second Life, trueSpace provides rich, interactive, virtual spaces for online collaboration. At the core of the technology is a modeling/rendering package that allows users to create 3D spaces of their own design. Coupled with the trueSpace7 collaboration server the technology allows multiple participants to connect to these spaces in real time.

Combined with Microsoft's existing Sharepoint software, and Calista's virtualisation technology, Microsoft is in a position to deliver groundbreaking collaboration solutions that will make Google Docs look like something from the stone age.

4. Danger - Acquired 11th February

Danger, founded in 2000 in Palo Alto, is the company behind the Sidekick GPRS/EDGE mobile computing device (or 'phone'). This acquisition is patently aimed at taking on Google's Android project, as well as the Apple iPhone.

In combination with its Zune music technology, and FAST's mobile search solutions, Microsoft has the chance to develop a mobile platform to support its online services. This will be a vital component of its strategy to beat Google, since a set of web services without support from a mobile platform would quickly lose out to one that did.

All this adds up to one thing. Yahoo or no Yahoo we can look forward to an all out war to gain dominance on the web. Microsoft has positioned itself well with its recent strategic purchases and is clearly thinking about some extremely innovative and exciting technologies. Google certainly will need to do a lot more than rely on its incumbent position in order to win.

More:

Newspond claims to be 'most advanced news site on the planet', can't really justify claims

2008-02-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

A news aggregation site called Newspond has just launched that makes some pretty bold claims about itself. The people behind Newspond seem to think that they're the first to use technology to deliver news rankings, claiming that their site uses 'machine intelligence' to analyse news 'at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of'. Wow! I just hope the site doesn't become self-aware and launch a coup to dominate the planet.

Seriously, this just seems to be a Techmeme clone with slightly more mysterious, and less transparent, ranking algorithms. The site uses a metric called the 'Buoyancy Rating' to determine a story's ranking on the site, but we are not told how it works other than that it is based on linking behaviour. What's more, there are no RSS feeds for their content, making the site significantly less useful than existing resources.

It looks slick enough, and their claims are outrageous enough that they'll probably get some attention for a couple of days, but I doubt this will knock Techmeme off its throne.

More

LG will continue to develop and sell dual-format HD players, is foolhardy

2008-02-19T16:06:00.000-08:00

Pocket-lint is reporting that LG will not follow virtually every other company in the HD-DVD consortium by abandoning the format. In a statement following Toshiba's announcement the company has claimed that 'it is necessary to provide a player which supports both formats.'

I can see only two possible explanations for this apparently irrational behaviour. First, they may simply be attempting to exploit the confusion surrounding the HD market. Despite the clarity that Toshiba has recently brought to the marketplace, the majority of consumers will likely still be unaware that HD-DVD is all but dead. To those people a straightforward claim that 'this player will take anything' may be attractive.

Second, they may be targeting the sizeable chunk of people who have accumulated a significant collection of HD-DVDs, but, for whatever reason, need a new player.

In either case, LG has made the wrong decision. With the imminent dearth of HD-DVDs that will be on sale it is unlikely that even the most uninformed consumer will be willing to pay a hefty premium for a dual format player. By the same token, there will be very few people whose HD-DVD collection will be valuable enough at this point to justify a pricey player of this type.

Of course, the third possibility is that LG's board has simply been blinded by the amount of investment they have put into the development of these devices, and is loathe to abandon them. In this case, they need to promptly wake up and cut their losses. If they discount the players heavily enough they can still get rid of their existing stock easily enough.

LG's stock is down 1.62% since yesterday's close.

More:

Yahoo's Rejection of MS Offer Looks Miscalculated

2008-02-19T15:07:00.000-08:00

Following Yahoo's rejection of Microsoft's $31/share, $44.6 billion takeover bid it looks like Microsoft will respond by authorising a proxy fight to oust Yahoo's management. A proxy fight would entail Microsoft persuading shareholders to install a new board through the use of their proxy votes.

Although most such attempts fail, Yahoo looks vulnerable because all of their Directors are up for nomination this year. A common defense against proxy fights is to stagger the election years of their Directors, but unusually Yahoo seems not to have employed this strategy.

If Yahoo was counting on an increased offer, they now seem to have miscalculated badly. My feeling is that Yahoo will agree to deal at $31/share before Microsoft initiates its hostile move, because it just doesn't make sense for them to open themselves up to a protracted battle.

The more interesting question is what this means for Microsoft - and the wider industry - in the long term. Notably, their stock price has fallen 12.8% since the announcement of the offer, and I think this is quite understandable. Ultimately this is a tacit admission by Microsoft of two things. First, that the future is web services. We already know that they have invested considerable time and energy attempting to develop this area themselves, and now we see them going after the number two web company very aggressively. Second, it's an admission that they are unable to gain a foothold in this business with their in-house talent alone.

All this adds up to one thing: the end of Microsoft as we know it. If web services is going to be their core business in the future, and they can't master that business without buying in help from outside, then what is the parent company bringing to the table? I think that the best Microsoft can hope for at this point is that, post-acquisition, they manage to retain Yahoo's employees, and simply add Yahoo's profitability to their own, acting more or less as a holding company. If they are wise they will stay away from the day-to-day management of the firm, and will sit on the sidelines investing capital as required. If they play it right then they may be able to grow their market share by drawing on Microsoft's financial clout, and exploiting possible synergies with Microsoft's traditional businesses.

The worst case is that Microsoft acquires Yahoo, loses all its employees (a probability if the proxy fight takes place, or if they interfere too much after the buyout) and fails to maintain a significant share of search ad-revenue as a result. At this point Microsoft has effectively removed Yahoo from the marketplace, leaving Google to further entrench its already formidable lead.

Microsoft was made great because it was born of innovation. Once it was a leader, and was rewarded accordingly. Now it is a follower, and the market is reacting as it should. Either way, it looks like Bill got out at just the right moment.

More:

Toshiba: No More HD-DVD Players

2008-02-19T14:31:00.000-08:00

Finally, after a number of false positives, Toshiba has officially announced an end to its HD-DVD player manufacturing business. This won't come as a surprise to anybody, I'm sure, but it's nice to know we can all rest safe in the knowledge that one HD format has finally won the day.

For the moment Toshiba is going to continue to ship players to retail channels, aiming for a complete cessation by the end of March. I can only assume that they are going to try to market the remaining units as HD upscaling DVD players.

The company has stated that this move 'will not impact on Toshiba's commitment to standard DVD', but makes no mention of plans to switch to Blu-ray.

Although this move is long expected, it will be interesting to see how it impacts Toshiba's HD-DVD partners, notably Microsoft, Universal, Paramount and DreamWorks. It remains unclear how long it will take for the studios to move their HD content over to Blu. It will also be interesting to see what effect this will have on the next XBox. It's going to take some humility for Microsoft to announce that it will ship with a Blu-ray player.

The most interesting question, though, is how this war's victor will fare in the upcoming battle against digital downloads. With Apple and others now offering quasi-HD content for rental it seems more and more that the great Red v. Blu saga was a mere warm-up for Disks v. Downloads. The ultimate winner may seem obvious, but the route by which we get there will give us all something to write about for the next few years.

More:

New Home

2008-02-19T13:20:00.000-08:00

Well, I have finally tired of Blogsome's inadequacy. I just can't take it anymore, so here I am in my new home. I am hoping that a less headache-inducing blogging tool will encourage more frequent posting, so stay tuned!