The Machines Are Talking a Lot – Technology Review

March 6, 2012 By TNTYadmin

By Brian Bergstein.
The rise of sensors, surveillance cameras, and other automated devices can be seen in a new analysis of Internet traffic.

As one of the leading manufacturers of the equipment that routes data around the Internet, Cisco Systems is in good position to know just how many 0s and 1s go zipping around all day, every day. Today it released an annual analysis of how much Internet usage is growing on mobile devices, and the report produced some staggering numbers.

For example, Cisco estimates that the amount of data that was ferried to and from mobile devices last year was eight times greater than the data on all of the Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic is expected to see an 18-fold increase between 2011 and 2016. Not surprisingly, video is a big reason: Cisco expects there to be 7.6 exabytes of data flowing to mobile devices every month in 2016, about 70 percent of the total of 10.8 exabytes of data per month. (An exabyte is more than 1 billion gigabytes and equivalent to 250 million DVDs, if that helps you wrap your mind around it.)

But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won’t come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or “M2M.” Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they’re detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

Source: Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016

Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY

Spray-on Solar Goes Double-decker. By Tyler Hamilton

July 21, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Quantum-dot cells designed with two layers open potential for higher efficiencies.

A research team at the University of Toronto has created the first two-layer solar cell made up of light-absorbing nanoparticles called quantum dots. Quantum dots, which can be tuned to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum by varying their size, have been seen as a promising route to low-cost solar cells because the particles can be sprayed onto surfaces much like paint. But cells based on this technology have been too inefficient to be practical. By discovering a way to combine two different types of quantum dots in a solar cell, the researchers could open the way to making such cells much more efficient.

Conventional solar cells are tuned to convert light of only one wavelength into electricity; the rest of the solar spectrum either passes through or is converted inefficiently. To harness a greater percentage of the energy in sunlight, manufacturers sometimes stack materials designed to capture different parts of the spectrum. A two-layer cell, called a tandem-junction cell, can theoretically achieve 42 percent efficiency, compared with a maximum theoretical efficiency of 31 percent for cells with a single layer.

In the Toronto researchers’ cell, one layer of quantum dots is tuned to capture visible light and the other to capture infrared light. The researchers also found a way to reduce electrical resistance between the layers, a problem that can limit the power output of a two-layer cell. They introduced a transition layer, made up of four films of different metal oxides, that keeps resistance “nice and low,” says Ted Sargent, a professor of electrical and computing engineering who led the research at the University of Toronto. The researchers chose transparent oxides for this layer, allowing light to pass through them to the bottom cell.

The result, described this week in the journal Nature Photonics, is a tandem-junction cell that captures a wide range of the spectrum and has an efficiency of 4.2 percent. Sargent says that the approach can be used to make triple-layer and even quadruple-layer, which could be even better. The team’s goal is to exceed 10 percent efficiency within five years and keep improving from there. Conventional solar panels are around 15 percent efficient, but quantum-dot cells of somewhat less efficiency could still have an edge in terms of overall costs for solar power if they prove dramatically less expensive to manufacture.

John Asbury, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, says that by opening up the ability to make multilayer cells from quantum dots, the U of T team has boosted the theoretical efficiency of the technology from 30 percent to almost 50 percent. But getting anywhere near those kinds of efficiencies will require a lot of work to eliminate “trapped states”—places within the quantum-dot material where electrons can become stuck. “The problem with quantum dots is that electrons have a high probability of not making it to the electrodes where they can be collected, so that has limited their efficiency,” he says. “To really have an impact means developing strategies to control those trapped states.”

Copyright Technology Review 2011.

Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY, WILD CARDS Tagged With: ,

Accelerating technologies will create a global state by 2050. By Hugo de Garis

May 30, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment
This essay argues that the exponential rate of technical progress will create within 40 years an Internet that is a trillion times faster than today’s, a global media, a global education system, a global language, and a globally homogenized culture, thus establishing the prerequisites for the creation of a global democratic state, “Globa,” and ridding the world of war, the arms trade, ignorance, and poverty. Whether Globa can cope with the rise of massively intelligent machines occurring at about the same time is far less certain.

Most readers will have heard of the phenomenon called “Moore’s Law” (i.e., the trend that the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a chip keeps doubling every 18 months). Less well known is the phenomenon I label “BRAD” (Bit Rate Annual Doubling), i.e., the speed of the Internet keeps doubling every 12 months. [Both of these are examples of Ray Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns. - Ed.]The physicists say that there is effectively no theoretical limit to how tiny a substrate can be that is used to convey information, so we can expect the Internet speed to keep doubling for many decades. This means that in 30 years, the Internet will be a billion (230) times faster than it is today (2011). In 40 years, it will be a trillion (240) times faster.

What could one do with such fantastic speeds? One obvious answer is that 3D images could be transmitted that would appear to our eyes as real and as vivid as the objects we see by the light of the sun. It would also mean that everyone on the planet could receive the media of the whole world, i.e., “everyone gets everything.” The 3D life-size images transmitted would be so real that they would generate the same emotional impact on the viewer as a normal face-to-face contact in the same room. This will have a huge impact on people’s minds and attitudes.

The “Global Language Snowball Effect”

Imagine you are a very young primary school child in the 2020s and you are watching your “vid” (i.e., your 3D video player) in your living room. You notice that about 60% of the programs and the content of the world media you are receiving on your vid is in the world’s 1st or 2nd most spoken language, i.e., English. You therefore decide to master this language so that you can understand what most of the world is saying.

Now imagine you are the minister of telecommunications in your little country and you have to decide which languages you will use for the content you will send up to the global Internet satellite system. You note that already 60% of the world Internet content is in English, so you choose to send up your country’s content in your country’s language, and in English, as well as perhaps several other languages.

A few years later, the percentage has moved up to 70%. Eventually, all countries will be sending up their content in at least two languages — their own, and English. A snowball/saturation effect has arisen (i.e., the greater is the proportion of people on the earth who watch a given language, the greater is the number of countries that transmit in that language, and the greater the percentage of content on the global media that is in a given language, the higher the proportion of people who decide to learn and listen to that language), causing English to become the global language.

English today is far and away the planet’s most spoken 1st or 2nd language. It will certainly not be Chinese, since the world will utterly reject China’s incredibly clumsy and stupid writing system. China is the only country in the world (as far as I know) that does not use an alphabet in its writing. Instead of having to learn an alphabet of some two dozen symbols, the Chinese have to learn thousands of symbols to write their language.

Global Politics

The rise of a global language will have a huge impact on the world. Ideas will be able to flow far more readily across the planet. Billions of people will be influenced by the “best” ideas that the planet has to offer. People’s minds will be influenced powerfully, so that today’s nationalist mentalities will be gradually transformed into tomorrow’s globist mentalities. People will be able to compare their own local customs with those of other cultures and reject their own if they feel that other countries customs are superior to their own. People will become more “multi” (i.e., multi-cultured) than “mono” (i.e., mono-cultured).

Multis will increasingly look down on monos as inferior beings (rather like city-slickers towards country-bumpkins), seeing the monos as limited as individuals by the limitations of the single culture that programs them. Today’s governments will no longer be able to brainwash their citizens into the ideologies of their nationalist leaders. Global education systems (“globiversities”) will be established, to educate the poor people of the world. Internet satellites will be able to beam down education programs at all levels, from kindergarten to PhD level research seminars on all topics.

Global Satellite Learning (“GSL”) will rid the world of its last dictatorships (a process called “dedictation”), as billions of poor people catch on to the idea that they can pull themselves out of poverty by buying a small cheap vid (legally or on the black market) and educating themselves using the programs beamed down by the Internet satellites, the “edsats” (education satellites). As billions do this and become “middle class,” they will demand a say in their political systems, leading within 40 years (at the rate the world is democratizing — two countries per year) to a totally democratic world.

Since democratic countries do not go to war against each other (their voting populations do not allow it), the world will be far more peaceful. The 20th century’s diabolical trade in arms can be banished, and so can war. With over a trillion dollars a year freed up from arms spending in the world, this money can be rechanneled into humanitarian pursuits.

Global Cultural Homogenization

With a global language and all countries being democracies, the stage is set for global cultural homogenization. A billion-fold faster Internet will not be the only factor leading to global cultural homogenization. There are many other factors pushing humanity into a “globist mentality”, e.g., high-speed train networks across countries and continents, space planes that can carry a thousand people from New York to Beijing in a few hours, and greater wealth, which will mean far greater numbers of people becoming international tourists, visiting the beauty spots they can see on their vids in vivid 3D.

Also, a larger global economy will stimulate global trade, the creation of ever more economic and political blocs such as the EU (European Union), SAU (South American Union), AU (African Union), etc. will mean ever more international business people will be traveling to do business and to inspect progress in their various projects, etc. All these influences and more will make the creation of a global cultural homogenization more probable.

When the whole planet can watch the media of the whole world, in a global language, the minds of the world’s citizens will be made “globist,” not “nationalist.” Political leaders of countries whose policies are considered by the majority of the world’s citizens to be harmful or stupid will feel enormous moral pressure against them.

World opinion will be overpowering. If the citizens of a given country learn that 95% of other countries are opposed to their country’s policies, that will force them to think twice about the wisdom of their own leaders’ judgments. That in turn will make their leaders think twice too. All the world’s leaders will become sensitive to global opinion.

As the best ideas and customs spread across the planet, and billions of people adopt the same set of ideas (i.e., cultural homogenization), the stage is set for the creation of a global state. This will obviously be an incremental process.

Building Globa, the Global State

There are many routes to the creation of a global state, e.g., the expansion of the EU (European Union) route, the expansion of powers of the U.N. (United Nations) route, the merging of economic/political blocs route, etc. As the size of the economic/political blocs keeps increasing, smaller blocs need to become larger to stay competitive.

For example, in the case of the U.S., if it does not do what the smaller European nations have been doing for half a century, i.e., ceding sovereignty and merging into a much larger whole, then the U.S. will “not be a player” in the 21st century, because it will not be a member of the “billion club,” whose members include China, India, the EU, etc. The US will need to merge with the 30+ countries of the Americas and/or form an “Atlantic Union” with the EU to stay economically competitive and powerful. As blocs merge with other blocs, eventually there will be a single bloc the size of the planet.

There will be many forces that will be opposed to the creation of a global state, e.g., nationalism, national sovereignty, cultural differences, the clash of ideologies, religious differences, charity begins at home attitudes, cultural inertia, cultural alienation, etc. To overcome these formidable barriers that kept nations and mentalities apart in the 20th century, the “Globists,” i.e., those people in favor of “Globism,” the creation of “Globa,” the global state, will need to organize and spread their Globist ideology.

Since the creation of a global democratic state has such huge advantages compared to today’s sovereign nation state system, where each state is always spending large amounts of money preparing for the next war, the Globists will be able to muster powerful arguments in their favor. The Globists will need to organize at a local level, at a regional level, a national level, at a continental level, and eventually at a global level. They will need their symbols, their logos, their flag, their ideology, their anthem, their political programs, etc., and will then need to proselytize the world.

Globists could be active in researching and setting up the globiversities, the GSL (Global Satellite Learning), designing cheap smuggle-able vids for the world’s poor, pouring scorn on the nationalists (e.g., jeering at national anthems, etc.), making their presence felt all around the globe, pushing towards a grand vision: creation of  a global state, riddance of war, banning the arms trade, scrapping nuclear weapons, education of the world’s population, and removal of world poverty.

These are magnificent goals and are readily achievable with the technologies that are coming in the next few decades. These technologies will soon make what was earlier seen as “globaloney” into Globa.

Globa’s Agenda

Once a global state (“Globa”) has been established, it will have its work cut out for it. The first thing it will have to do is set up a slew of new institutions, most of which will be analogous to national institutions as we know them today, e.g., create a global constitution, a global president, a global parliament, global political parties, global laws, a global civil service, global police, a global court, a global military, globiversities, global taxation, global wealth distribution, global resource management, global trade unions, global incomes policy, a global currency unit (the “Globo”), global health insurance, etc.

Once the establishment of these institutions is well en route, Globa would then need to tackle the planet’s major problems, e.g. it would need to create a globist ethics and globist propaganda, to undertake global nuclear disarmament, ban the global arms trade, meet the global environmental challenges, eliminate global poverty, establish a global taxation policy, as well as a global incomes and raw materials policy, global education, global population migration, foster greater global happiness rather than economic wealth, etc.

Globa and the Artilect

The above has argued that a global state “Globa” could be established by about the middle of the 21st century. This would be a wonderful thing if it can be achieved. However there is a gathering storm on the horizon, which will be playing itself out over the same time frame, namely the rise of the artilect (artificial intellect, i.e., a godlike massively intelligent machine) with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level.

The rise of the artilect will probably divide humanity bitterly into two major human groups: the “Cosmists” (who want to be “god (i.e., artilect) builders,” a form of science-based quasi-religion) and the “Terrans” (who are bitterly opposed to building artilects, through fear that the artilects may one day decide humans are such inferior pests and wipe them out). There is a third group, the “Cyborgists” (who want to add artilectual components to their own brains and become artilect gods themselves).

Since the computational capacity of nanoteched matter is so great (e.g., a grain of sugar with each atom switching in femtoseconds could outperform a human brain by a factor of trillions), the Terrans will lump the Cyborgists into the same ideological camp as the Cosmists (since a cyborg would be indistinguishable from an artilect in artilectual capacities). Since the Terrans will have a limited time window of opportunity within which to oppose the Cosmists/Cyborgists, before the cyborgs and artilects come into being and are then smarter than the Terrans, the Terrans will not be able to wait for too long.

The Terrans will have to “first strike” the Cosmists/Cyborgists/cyborgs/artilects before it is too late. The Terrans will be using 21st century weapons that will enable the scale of mass killing to rise from the tens of millions of people of the major wars of the 20th century, to the billions of people of a major 21st century war. The Cosmists/Cyborgists will anticipate this first strike by the Terrans and be prepared for it, also using 21st century weapons.

Thus Globa will have to face its greatest challenge: can it cope with the rise of Cosmism and Cyborgism? Will Globa be able to cope with the passions generated by two murderously opposed, very powerful ideologies (Cosmism and Terranism)? Opinion polls already show that the “species dominance issue” (i.e., whether humanity should build godlike artilects this century or not) divides humanity about evenly. Many individuals are ambivalent about the magnificence of building artilect gods, and horrified at the prospect of a “gigadeath” “artilect war.”

It is not at all obvious that a unified global state would be strong enough to withstand the divisive passions of the “species dominance debate” that will heat up in the coming decades and may explode into a “global civil war” killing billions of people, with 21st century weapons, in the greatest war humanity has ever known, because the stakes have never been so high: the survival of the human species. 20th century wars were largely “nationalist wars.” A major 21st century war would be a “species dominance war.”

The above essay is a summary of the ideas in the author’s second book, Multis and Monos : What the Multicultured Can Teach  the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State. The ideas above concerning the rise of the artilect are taken largely from the author’s first book, The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. Both books are available at amazon.com

Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY, WILD CARDS

Humans in 50 years:

May 4, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

John Holden asks scientists how humans might change over the next 50 years. Will we become cyborgs? Will we be disease free? And what have vacuum cleaners got to do with it? 

Prof Charlie Spillane, Centre for Chromosome Biology, NUI Galway

Exciting new opportunities for human enhancement are now emerging due to converging technological advances. In robotics and nanotechnology it includes cybernetic boody augmentations and artificial red blood cells; in information technology, it means artificial intelligence, computer-aided human decision making, mobile computing and smart clothes; in cognitive science, it takes in augmented reality, “smart” drugs, neural implants; and in biotechnology it involves genetics, immunology, synthetic biology and bio-engineering.

Technological synergies are now emerging that offer new opportunities for human enhancement. These synergies are likely to herald a Human 2.0 era, in which human enhancement technologies are one of the next science, technology and innovation frontiers.

Technological nations that embrace, rather than fear, the advent of human enhancement will likely be the future leaders in the provision of human enhancement technology products, services and innovations.

Human enhancement is not new. The process has been underway since humans developed their first enhanced skills, such as making fire, writing and the cultivation of food crops.

Such technological enhancement of human capabilities has facilitated human population expansion from 200 million people just over 2000 years ago to 7,000 million people on the planet today.

Enhancement of human capabilities continues to be achieved in a multitude of ways, not all of which have to be based on genetics. Some everyday examples include reading, exercising, nutrition, studying, glasses, prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, computers, vaccination, smart phones and Viagra.

Dr Mauro Dragone, UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics

I’m working on a European-wide project that will make domestic life for humans easier for all concerned in the future. We are trying to build intelligent ecologies of robotic devices combining sensors, household appliances and mobile robots. Not just humanoid robots working in your home but broader home systems.

We already have lots of little robots working in our houses. Various domestic exist appliances with limited intelligence: alarm clocks, TVs, cookers, vacuum cleaners. The challenge is to make those entities learn how to work together in an intelligent way.

Imagine a house in which we install an autonomous vacuum cleaner and also an alarm system. With cooperation between the two systems, the vacuum cleaner can automatically learn that their user doesn’t like the cleaner to be activated at certain times of the day. So it will do its cleaning when, for example, the user is out of the house.

We are trying to build systems that adapt to the human, rather than the human having to adapt to the device. [These are] systems that can learn to cooperate and do work more efficiently. We are designing devices and artificial intelligence solutions that mimic brains found in biology. These brains will be connected across the whole house system and so every device will share knowledge and help each other to learn.

Dr Ross McManus, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Trinity College Dublin

The point at which our understanding of biology can be translated into treatments for diseases is getting closer all the time and I think the landscape will be very different 50 years from now.

The recent sad case of Batten’s disease in an Irish infant has however raised awareness of the possibilities for gene therapy in the treatment of inherited disease. Gene therapy is in its infancy but offers real hope for the future.

A key development will be the harnessing of stem cells to replace damaged tissues. Coupled with the repair of genetic defects in such cells prior to reintroduction to the body, this should lead to radically improved treatments.

Individual genome sequencing will become the norm in the near future and this will usher in an era of personalised medicine, allowing for individualised, specific drug treatments, but also the identification of our very own palette of hidden mutations that could cause disease in our children were our partners in possession of the same defects.

Use of pre-implantation screening of embryos with DNA sequencing, will cause a big reduction in the rates of inherited diseases – although it may take some of the spontaneity out of making babies. Sequencing information can also be used to identify our risk of getting a whole horde of more common diseases, such as arthritis, heart disease and asthma, so that we can take pre-emptive action.Knowing thine enemy intimately is the key to designing drugs for specific cancers, many of which have individual defects at the genetic level, another front on which we will see radical improvements in the medium term.

Dr Rachel Armstrong, senior TED Fellow, Avatar group, The Bartlett School of Architecture, London

There will be a much greater difference in the ageing of well off and poor people. Private medicine will be necessary for health maintenance while public services will deal with a lottery of dire emergencies owing to demand.

Those with access to good health care will enjoy preventative and maintenance treatments, so that they stave off ageing for longer cosmetically and physiologically. Wealthy older people will be having children later and it will not be unusual for women to bear children in their sixties, perhaps even older as biologically they will be as healthy as women 20 years their junior.

© 2011 The Irish Times

Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY, WILD CARDS Tagged With: ,

Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book. By Brian X. Chen

April 28, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

From WIRED.
Former Apple engineers Kimon Tsinteris (left) and Mike Matas teamed up with Al Gore to create a new publishing platform called Push Pop Press. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

What do you do after working for Apple, a company whose mission seems to be nothing less than disrupting entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ding in the universe.

That’s the idea behind Push Pop Press, a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.

Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.

“The app is the richest form of storytelling,” Matas said. “[Push Pop Press] opens doors to telling a story with more photos, more videos and interactions.”

Push Pop Press is pushing into a widening niche within the print industry, which is scrambling to produce digital versions of books, magazines and newspapers in hopes of reversing declining revenues.

The platform comes as a slew of competitiors seek to upend the book publishing business, a shift that once seemed improbable but now inevitable, thanks to the success of new devices such as the iPad, Kindle and Nook. Notably, Amazon began selling more e-books than printed editions just 33 months after its Kindle launched.

If e-books have been flying off the “shelves” for years, Push Pop Press aims to bring a new dimension to the platform, adding high-end graphics to the largely unadorned text offered in popular e-book editions like the Kindle. It’s the latest bet — still unpaid after some 25 years of digital publishing– that plain old text is about to undergo a major evolution as authors and readers demand more interactivity.

For magazine publishers and newspapers, one of the trendiest technology solutions involves creating iPad or Android editions of publications — for which advertisers, so far, seem to pay at rates which rival print dollars instead of web pennies.

The 800-pound gorilla in this digital space is Adobe, whose tools are used to create some tablet 280 periodicals (including the iPad version of WIRED magazine). But the complexity — and expense — of Adobe’s Creative Suite is an opportunity for new entrants in the self-publishing game.

Problem is, it’s neither easy nor cheap for dead-tree publishers to hire app programmers, or to purchase the resources necessary to digitize their publications with sexy code. And after factoring in the hefty costs of development and time spent on production, mobile apps have hardly proven a goldmine for major publishers.

If successfully scaled, Push Pop Press could become the easiest and quickest way for publishers and independent artists to turn their media into iPhone and iPad apps and take a whack at making money in the App Store.

Book apps created with the platform can take advantage of the iPad’s and iPhone’s advanced sensors, touchscreen gestures, microphone and powerful graphics chip to turn reading into a rich, interactive experience, Matas said. Videos, interactive diagrams and geotagged photos are just some elements that can be embedded in a book produced with the tool.

Not impressed with words alone? Check out Gore’s tour of his book produced with Push Pop Press, embedded in the video below.

Al Gore’s Our Choice Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Al Gore’s Our Choice: Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Gore’s App Mission

The former vice president’s production company Melcher Media approached Matas in September 2009 to create an app version of Our Choice. Gore wanted his book app to contain videos, diagrams and other forms of multimedia that would flex the iPhone’s muscle.

Matas sketched a concept and later discussed it with his former Apple co-worker Tsinteris. During his time at Apple, 25-year-old Matas focused on human-interface design for the iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X. And 30-year-old Tsinteris was deeply involved in developing the Maps app for the iPhone 3G, as well as some aspects of OS X.

After discussing the project, Matas and Tsinteris realized that in order to reproduce Gore’s book, they needed tools that didn’t exist yet.

“Kimon took a look at [the concept] and said that in order to build it we need to build a whole publishing platform,” Matas said.

And if you’re going to put that much effort into the tools, why stop after making just one book? The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.

Gore’s book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.

It’s a bit like walking through a digital museum. When you first launch the app, you see a cover of a 3-D animation of a spinning globe with the title superimposed over it. Tapping into the intro plays a video of Gore introducing the book’s topic.

From there, you swipe through a visual table of contents, and when you select a chapter, the chapter title appears on the top three quarters of the screen. A timeline at the bottom allows you to swipe through the pages. To start reading, you touch a page with two fingers to pop it open.

Diagrams embedded inside some of the chapters are interactive, inviting you to swipe the illustrations or even blow through the iPad’s microphone to move a windmill, for example.

Photos are geotagged, so when you select an image and tap on a globe icon, you can see a world map with a pin showing precisely where the photo was taken.

For the pair, geotagging was one of their favorite features to add, because at Apple, they worked together on integrating GPS in the Maps application for the iPhone 3G.

“It’s crazy how much context this brings to it,” Matas said about the geotagged photos in Gore’s book.

Every element inside Gore’s enhanced e-book is composed of native iOS toolkits and APIs (e.g., Core Animation, Core Text and Objective C) to make the experience extremely smooth and fast.

“This speed is something you can’t approach on a web browser,” Matas said.

Gore’s book is just the first of what Matas and Tsinteris hope will be a series of similarly interactive e-books. The pair are planning to release Push Pop Press as a piece of Mac software for anyone to create a book app in the future.

The programmers did not disclose an estimated ship date or price for the Push Pop Press publishing software, but they said the goal was to make it “very affordable.”

When released, Push Pop Press could aggressively compete with Adobe. Currently, many publishers rely on Adobe’s expensive Creative Suite tools to lay out their print pages and to digitize their content for Apple’s iPad.

Push Pop Press could likely undercut Adobe on price, not to mention ease of using the product. An interactive magazine, book, comic book or photo essay can be created with Push Pop Press in as little as 20 minutes, the programmers claim.

However, Matas and Tsinteris don’t view their software as a long-term competitor with Adobe. The software giant has a lock-down on the high-end of the creative field, Tsinteris said, and Push Pop Press’ core audience will likely be smaller publishers looking for an easy, drag-and-drop solution to create apps.

“This is a layout tool, not a developer tool,” Tsinteris said. “It’s a little like playing with Legos.”

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He recently wrote a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing June 7, 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

Filed Under: BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, WORK

On the Next Internet. by Bob Jones

April 19, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

Grid computing began as a data-management solution for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Now, it stands to redefine collaborative problem-solving in science and beyond.

Charles Curran, a physicist who recently retired as the longtime storage consultant at CERN, remembers the old days of data access: when filling a request from a researcher was often a labor-intensive, daylong misadventure.

In the 1970s, information from CERN’s accelerators and experiments was stored on tapes, held in a huge library in the IT department, originally retrieved manually by operators and then copied to disk for the researcher. Overworked operators fell asleep, went missing for hours at a time, invented trickery to make the machines work faster, and overloaded the conveyor belts, causing tapes to fall off and disappear. Tape-retrieval robots squared off against mice (in one documented case, the mouse was found months later, desiccated) or overheated when they couldn’t reach tapes, melting their wheels in frustration. A request to see a certain tape often took 24 hours to fill.

Now the wait is about two minutes, hardly enough time to get a cup of coffee.

Accessing and processing data is now faster, more flexible, more reliable, and cheaper. A researcher in Croatia can reach and exchange data, in a variety of formats, with a colleague in Argentina almost immediately, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without leaving her desk or going up against any rogue mice.

In the past decade, the public research community, the European Commission, the US, and other countries’ governments have invested heavily in game-changing data infrastructure known as “grid computing.” A grid is a network for sharing computer power and data-storage capacity over the internet. It goes well beyond simple communication between computers, ultimately aiming to turn the global network of computers into one vast resource for solving large-scale computer- and data-intensive applications. Grid computing is often compared to the concept of an electric power grid in which the power generators are distributed; in a computational grid, users can access computing power without regard for the source of energy or its location. A key element of grid computing is that it enables real-time collaboration between geographically dispersed communities in the form of virtual organizations.

In the next decade, we must invest even more heavily in such technology. Data is fundamental to science, and the science we do now requires ever-increasing data sets. We need flexible, powerful computing systems to support this data.

How did we get here? Computing grids were in their infancy in the late 90s, when the collaborations around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) shifted focus to its computing needs. Plans for information technology needs are often looked at last in projects like this because, while you can trust that computing will be more advanced, you don’t know what form that advancement will take by the time your machine, satellite, or observatory is ready.

However, for the LHC there was another problem. Funding for computing wasn’t included in the original costs. (The logic was that this couldn’t be estimated accurately, so it wasn’t estimated at all.) By 1999 all of the money CERN had received for the LHC was needed to build the machine itself.

With little funding available at CERN or elsewhere, the computing system would have to be distributed. A single organization could never find the money to do it alone. At around that same time, Carl Kesselman and Ian Foster were proposing the fundamental ideas of the grid—connecting distributed processors into a kind of supercomputer. CERN decided to take a closer look.

This led to a truly novel system. Distributed computing had existed before, but it didn’t look like this. The LHC’s grandfather, the Large Electron–Positron Collider, used a distributed computing system in the late 1980s. But the system was custom built, fixed in size, and used only for physics. There were a few sites for each experiment, and once it was finished one couldn’t add new sites at will. With grid computing, the system is dynamic. If one site goes down, the system switches to a different one. And the same computers are used for Earth sciences, life sciences, humanities research, as well as physics. The system is managed by the project Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE).

As politicians and citizens begin to take global warming more seriously, it has never been more important to have powerful and accurate climate information. Elaborate computer models are the primary tool used by climate scientists and bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to report on the status and probable future of our Earth.

Models like those used by the IPCC need data from the atmosphere, land surface, ocean, and sea ice, all originating from different communities, along with large amounts of accompanying metadata describing that data. The amount of data that climate scientists need to manage is enormous—in the petascale—yet a broad and global community needs to be able to access and analyze it.

A grid solution, where information stored around the world can be woven together without moving databases, is ideal. In fact, no other solution is immediately apparent: The data is too heavy to be centrally located. The Earth System Grid Federation—funded by federal agencies like the US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—will provide the data-sharing infrastructure that will enable global analysis of the climate models used by the IPCC in its next assessment.

While the needs of the physics, life science, and Earth science communities originally drove the development of grids like EGEE, now that the technology is in place, disparate communities across the globe are using it to examine questions they could never have addressed before. Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, forecasts burglary rates using the UK’s National Grid Service. The ASTRA project and its Lost Sounds Orchestra revive long-gone instruments such as the epigonion, barbiton, syrinx, salpinx, and aulos. By using grid-computing techniques to model the instruments, they can approximate sounds not heard for centuries. UNOSAT, a cooperative project between the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Program and CERN, delivers satellite images to relief and development organizations. With processing from grid technology, some of these maps track pirate activity off the Horn of Africa.

The fundamentals of grid computing, first developed to allow complex physics projects, has led to a related technology known as cloud computing, heavily virtualized distributed computing, which has been adopted for many commercial applications. The public may not know they are using a cloud—but they are. Online banking, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and web-based email are all examples of heavily virtualized services that exist “out in the cloud.” Making a full cycle, grid computing itself is adopting aspects of cloud technology, making more use of virtualization and setting up grid sites in the cloud. However, true grid infrastructure still excels at collaborative sharing of resources belonging to different institutions; clouds spread the resources of one domain to the rest of the world for remote access. Collaboration is the basis of all the large-scale scientific challenges (e.g., CERN has 20 member states). Projects like the LHC are too big for any one organization or one country to do alone; collaboration is the only option. The same holds for the major challenges facing society across other disciplines (energy, climate change, food production).

Now that we have excellent ways to reach and share data, we have a whole new set of problems, albeit more sophisticated. Who owns freely shared data? How long should it be kept? What besides the data must be kept so we can use it? Who pays for the energy to store data? How can researchers or disciplines resistant to sharing—afraid their ideas will be poached—be encouraged in a “publish or perish’’ world? A number of security questions also come to the fore: What happens to the data if companies running clouds go bust? Who is allowed to view data? Should all countries have access to e-infrastructures, regardless of their politics? These infrastructures are potential targets—how do we safeguard them?

As e-infrastructures have become the lifeblood of modern science and society, funding agencies, governments, and policy panels have many urgent issues to address. But given the choice, I wouldn’t swap this set of problems for the old.

Bob Jones is project director of the European Commission–funded Enabling Grids for E-science project. Danielle Venton contributed to this piece.

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From BBC NEWS Are you experienced? By Bobbie Johnson

April 17, 2011 By TNTYadmin Leave a Comment

It is a bright Thursday morning and, like millions of people all over the world, I am sitting in front of a computer. Unlike them, however, it is not to work.

Instead, I am a test subject sitting inside a research lab at the London offices of internet giant Google.

A researcher explains that the computer will record everything I do, while a camera pointing at me will track my facial expressions.

With clipboard in hand, she tells me to imagine that I am looking to buy something and want to find out more online.

So I start the PC and head to the web.

Then the questions start: What am I looking for? How do I decide what looks interesting? Why click on one link rather than another?

The experiment may seem odd, but it is precisely what thousands of businesses now do each day as part of what is known as user experience design.

In the past, companies would simply slap information on a website — but today, with so much competition online, top destinations put a great deal of thought into making their products better.

As a result, designing online user experiences is now an important process for any company that is serious about the web, from huge names such as Google and Facebook all the way down to small businesses.

“User experience designers are the digital equivalent of architects,” says Andy Budd, the managing director of web agency Clearleft, based in Brighton, England.

“Just as architects are crafting the physical world around you, user experience designers are doing the same with the digital landscape you use every single day.”
Google home page Google takes the user experience seriously, despite its famously spartan homepage

Practitioners, who refer to what they do simply as “UX”, try to understand people’s desires and motivations in order to make sure that online services are satisfying, pleasurable and a joy to use.

By observing people’s behaviour online, asking them careful questions and testing different options, researchers can sometimes be the difference between a visitor sticking with a site or getting frustrated and going somewhere else.

Many online businesses are still dominated by usability decisions made by engineers or graphics designers, who tend to prioritise efficiency or beauty over the needs of users.

But over the last few years, user experience design has emerged as a distinct concept.

Primarily championed by scientist and researcher Donald Norman in the 1990s, it developed more rapidly as the web became more prevalent in people’s lives.

In recent years it has evolved into a fast-growing field that many see as integral to building great products.

Google, for example, now has hundreds of UX experts working all over the world, each of them operating in labs similar to the one I am sitting in.

The researcher who has been grilling me about the way I use the web is Lidia Oshlyansky.

She joined the Californian company last year, having previously done a similar job for the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia.

“When you’re doing user experience testing, you’re looking for patterns,” she says.

“If one person says something about the way they use the product, that’s interesting — but if lots of people are saying similar things, then you might have found something important.”

The fact that a company such as Google spends so much time perfecting its web design may surprise some.

It is, after all, famous for its spartan homepage and dedication to speed above everything else.

In fact, to many people it seems that Google is almost anti-design, especially compared with a rival such as Apple, known for its focus on luxurious products.

“We have this reputation, and it’s been touted quite a bit,” admits Ms Oshlyansky.

“But there is actually an emphasis on the user experience.”

Still, she points out, making things fast can be an important part of a user’s experience of an online service: “Speed is part of what we do, though.”
Lidia Oshlyansky Google’s Lidia Oshlyansky says user experience testing is all about spotting patterns

Since the world of user experience design is still young, many professionals began their careers doing something very different.

Ms Oshlyansky, for example, spent several years as a social worker in Chicago before deciding to change track.

Today her job involves travelling around the world to study ordinary web surfers and find out how they think and use Google’s products.

Once she has collected the raw information and understood what it means, she works with the company’s engineers and web designers to improve what a product does.

This can be as simple as using different words to describe things to users, or changing the size, shape or prominence of buttons.

Sometimes it becomes more complicated, with new features being added to help people do what they need to do or getting rid of aspects of a service that can impede its purpose.

Even though the benefits of this research can be clear — more engaged customers, and more of them — Ms Oshlyansky says it can be a battle to explain the difference a good UX practitioner can make to a product, especially since many people believe they have an innate sense for design.

Still, says Mr Budd, demand for smart designers is outstripping supply as more businesses realise that how a user feels about their service can often be as important as what it does for them.

“I wouldn’t say that good user experience design was vital to the success of every online business any more than I would say that good customer service was vital to every offline business,” he says.

“But it can be a strong competitive advantage, and will continue to grow in importance over time.”


~~

By Bobbie Johnson Technology reporter, BBC News

Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY