Off the Cuff I.T. stuff

Apple Siri. The Butlers are coming

2011-10-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Siri

Web2.0 democritised e-publishing and data creation in a friendly way for the masses and low and behold there are 182 million websites available on the net in 2011. Some of these websites have the lions share of the content (Facebook, Flickr, Google, Amazon etc) but collectively it's a grand publish of human thoughts, artefacts, wishes and desires. What a wonder!

Creating content is one thing but leveraging insights across the content is more difficult. In truth there is still too much information for humans to effectively use and we find ourselves to be a gear in the machine rather than the driver - connecting systems together, cutting, pasting and rekeying.

I want to ask simple questions of my computers and have powerful background processing bring me the answer. Questions like "Which famous guitarists endorse products but don't use them in their live shows?" A query like this would require text analysis of the question to understand the meaning, scouring the net for famous guitarists, checking which brands they claim to use in endorsements, checking their live 'kit' on websites, picture recognition of what guitars they are using, comparison of statements versus reality and then provide a weighted response based on the volume of data processed. Not easy and lots of key tapping.

Voice Control on the Bat Computer

It won't always be this way.

Batmans computer has been serving him for years (in the fictional world of DC Comics) controlled by his voice helping him fight crime. He simply asks the computer a question while he is driving or smashing heads of supervillans together and his Batcomputer gets back to him with the summary. Questions like "Cross reference the known toxins that the Joker uses with chemical factories in the vicinity of Posion Ivy's locations over the past three months" are answered with ease. If a clarification is needed then it asks Batman. All achieved using natural language as the interface.

Digital buddies, assistants and advisors are here already for consumers albeit in the form mostly of recommendations engines and advertising systems. Last.fm helps reduce the millions of bands down to something I might like based on my previous listening while Amazon advises me of books and products I might enjoy based on my previous activity.

These systems help us save time and slash the options and possibilities down to something we can handle. The volume of data falls below our eye and we can concentrate on the richer questions and answers.

For me the biggest aspect of the new iPhone 4S release was Siri - the virtual assistant. I think that as innocuous as it might appear on the surface (fixing calendars, looking up the weather, setting reminders) it is one of the first believable assistants that interact with consumers in a rich way.

Over time this service will grow to understand your accent, tone of voice and mood. It might voluntarily ask you what's wrong or question your commands if it thinks you are acting irrationally. It will potentially develop it's own personality and it will be answering more and more complex queries. Multiple Siris may even communicate and negotiate with one another to save their 'owners' from corresponding back and forth needlessly. Young children that can't type and older people may begin interacting with computers in richer ways. Siri may begin to find it's way into robots and other household devices outside of mobiles.

It's exciting and this is only the beginning. Others have tried to provide this kind of service but none have had the design and user base that Apple have in order to make it 'stick'.

I'll be watching this one carefully.

Circles and Ladders with Google+ Contact Classification Paradigm

2011-07-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

Grouping contacts is an impossible feat isn't it? We have to add Bob to Sport, Work, Musician, 'Allowed to Call after 10pm' and all those other groups we never keep up to date.

Like all user supplied up-front people classification systems Google+ Circles can quite quickly turn into hierarchy ladders when you manage your contacts using them, especially in a social context.

Contact grouping, grading and intimacy-scoring questions arise like : "Why am I not in your Personal folder?" "Why am I only in Acquaintances?", "Why am I not in group X?"

It makes for unhappiness not to mention all the manual labour of managing those connections.

The flat monism of classifying all your people as simply 'friends' and allowing the system (not you) to speculatively match between profiles managed by the identity owner is elegant. It causes less arguments over status and how other people classify you.

Baboons would be relieved to have such a thing.

Flat'ish, loosely coupled metadata overlaps between people such as : attended same school, favourite band is x, graduated in Kent, holiday in France, has photo of Mt Everest provide a more resilient model in the end for both programmatic and humanistic reasons. It also a more natural petri-dish for harmonious social groups when developing new services.

The degree to which this metadata is enhanced as you interact with 'your people' defines the living breathing classification of what they mean or meant to you. It allows for relationship management (manual and auto) between the people you already know and it also allows for the emergence of machine dialogue such as 'People You Should Know'

It's dynamic and weighted through use - it's no longer the leaden categories of 'Work', 'Home', and 'France'.

Stop Motion Animation on Mobile devices

2011-07-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

I thought my recent foray into stop motion animation using mobile devices would be worth a few words.

Timeline

Prehistory : A while ago I bought a cheap model of our solar system from a physics supply shop in South India. It was rusted and had been sitting there in the odd shop for ages. I shipped it back to the UK and it has been taking up space for a while without good reason. Recently, before moving house, I found a reprieve for it by deciding to use it in a stop motion music video.

This blog is a look at how I got from that idea to a finished stop motion animation video and the software, hardware and people observations along the way.

Step 1 : Choose the track.

First things first was to choose the track - one I had in both English and Spanish - double search engine and geo-juice. Easy.

Step 2 : Storyboard the idea and the props

If you can't draw like your comic book heroes then a photo based approach to creating a storyboard is a good method. I wanted something on mobile that would let me quickly shoot, arrange and annotate the scenes.

The unbeatable Cinemek Storyboard on iPhone does this job better than any other. I'm not aware of any compeition. You can just shoot and annotate anywhere meaning when inspiration strikes you move things along quickly. Projects in their early inception stage do depend on thinking done away from desks and desktops. The Cinemek UI is simple and storyboard arranging has a great 'physics' feel and touch making it easy to swap the scenes around.

The screenshots below show how you can use it to

arrange
camera movements against scenes : tracking, pans, zooms, focus, lighting. Your still images can come to life.
add notes and titles

I went and bought a new lamp, some special 'daylight' bulbs, black fabric, plastic bin bags, props, glue, wire and imported a iPhone4 stand from the US (Naja King). This stand allowed me to hang or stand the iPhone4 camera in all the different angles I imagined I would need. Word of note on the Naja- it can drive you mad with the slight movement it has once the new shape 'settles' thereby skewing the framing down after positioning responds to gravity. Naja has more flexibility and positioning capability than a Gorilla stand but less sturdiness - a trade off.

Naja King Flexible iPhone Stand

Step 3 :Choose Stop Motion apps and Prepare to Shoot!

Stop Motion Recorder

iTimeLapse

I must have bought and tried out all the stop motion apps that were in the Apple store.

The most fit for the job seemed to be Stop Motion Recorder and iTimeLapse.

What came out to be most important in the end was how reliable a program was. Losing 30 mins of work every 5 hours is not acceptable even if the application has all the whiz-bang features. iTimelapse wasn't reliable enough. After losing footage and periodic crashes and I resigned iTimeLapse to be a back up only. The trade off with using Stop Motion Recorder was that it was the 12 frames per second and low capture resolution.

Step 4 : Shoot

People-ware : After doing a session or two on my own trying to get finished scenes I knew that an assistant with nimble hands could help me with the separation of shooting and set adjusting roles. Too much movement back and forth from camera to set takes up time and makes the whole thing slow.

I hired someone I knew who studies fine art to help out with further set-making and the shoot. This was a wise move.

We slogged it out and got most of the first half of the video. Stop motion animation is always more effort than you imagine. It's finicky! People say you should double estimates on average - with stop motion you treble it and budget for extra medication.

High Spec for
iTimelapse

After my time had expired with the assistant I had to shoot the remainder myself. Mostly the solar system scenes. I noticed that iTimelapse had released a new version of their app and it was more stable. Quandary. Do I double the quality of image capture half way through the shoot or keep with the look/feel I have?

Using the logic that the video was in two halves 1) man in the house) 2) man in the solar system) I convinced myself that it could change resolution for the second half.

I looked more seriously into the audio trigger method on iTimelapse to take a photo i.e. shout "now!" then 'click' a shot is taken. It worked well once the sound levels were tweaked and even the misfires due to my thumping around in the 'scene' positioning things were easily edited out.

I managed to get the rest of the footage.

Step 4.5 - Make the decision about whether to continue developing the project solely on mobile. ..

This was quite a quick decision.

iMovie iOS (the major compositing tool on mobile for video) wasn't suitable because :

It has some memory problems and performance issues
I simply needed a bigger screen to see what I had shot. It was time to take a good look.
No ability to run plugins in-line and a lack of features
I am more able with Final Cut Express than iMovie so pre-production with the mobile iMovie being imported into PC based iMovie wasn't a draw either

Maybe an iPad would have helped with the bigger screen but at the present time nothing beats editing and compositing on a powerful machine with a big screen.

Desktop and big screen win then.

Step 5 - Import

QuickTime import of Image Sequences

I imported the stop-motion data from my iPhone and quickly filled the iPhoto library up with thousands of photos only slightly different from one another (my wife took it well given it is a shared Mac). I spent some time fixing the orientation of some of the shots, due to the phone gyroscope flipping periodically, and then they were ready to use.

Final Cut Express does not do importing of individual frames to create video so I had to buy QuickTime Pro to get a good method of creating video footage from a sequence of photos. QuickTimePro also allowed me to specify the exact dimensions of the photos. The mobile apps had cut and trim problems when they exported video which is why I was working in photos and not video by this time.

Step 6 - Edit

Final Cut Express

Final Cut Express is a really good tool once you put some time in to learn it. My work with audio editing and compositing is translatable to video editing concepts so I had a quicker start when I first used it.

I have one of the KB Rubber Keyboard Covers that shows all the Final Cut Express shortcuts which is really useful. Shortcuts for me however are only a band aid as there are so many pieces of software I use that the only real solution for being quick with all my apps would be to have voice recognition.

I used only two plugins very sparingly - a contrast and brightness adjustment to make sure the plastic bin bags representing the cosmos looked dark enough and a plugin called Lock and Load Express which smooths out shaky footage. Using Lock and Load has a tradeoff though as it selects a subset of the frame which bests stitches with the next frame. Using this approach it finds subset squares per frame as a path through the stills - like threading a needle almost. When shooting at 12 frames a second this was quite noticeable from a textural and resolution standpoint so I restrained to using it only for the manual stop-motion zoom effects I had tried which were very shaky.

Lock and Load Express

Step 7 - Master and Export

All done in Final Cut Pro. The export options are very simple and allow you to select high speed broadband as the likely consumption method making a QuickTime file small enough to upload to YouTube and other services.

I had an English and a Spanish version of the video so one export each while muting the other language track.

Step 8 - Promote

To get it indexed properly by the 'machine' I did the following :

I used Spanish metadata for the Spanish language version whenever posted
Put direct hyperlinks into the YouTube metadata pointing to my website
Did a short music blog on Blogger and pinged feedburner.
Put the video on Musician Profile Aggregator sites such as Artist Data, MusicSubmit
I wrote this post to improve search engine links. This post is a technical article to create a cross domain link from science and technology into the arts and music
Put it on my music website (both the front-page, videos section and on the album pages that it was taken from)
Updated my YouTube channel to have this as the default video
Put it on MySpace
Did status update on my personal Facebook and my Facebook music page
Put it on Twitter with hashtags to catch those searching for video and animation.

I could have done more submissions to other sites (Yahoo, MetaCafe) but I couldn't be bothered - YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter and the behemoths for video discovery. If need be I'll add more node juice later on.

I'll keep an eye on Google and YouTube Analytics for now to see how it gets on and whether the Spanish or the English version gets the most eyeballs.

Final

So is it possible to shoot and edit stop motion animation entirely on mobile?

The short answer is that for preparation and capture that mobile is preferable but for editing and mastering the final video piece you still need a big machine.

Enjoy the video!

The final video is here in English.

and here in Spanish

Rebuilding Iberian Motorways with Slime Mould

2011-05-24T01:38:00.000-07:00

Wet machines and Soft Computers planning road routes organically.

Place your 'problem' in bag and shake to get the answer!

Although done on a simple flat map/surface there is no reason why this couldn't be a 3d model with variable temperatures/variables throughout. The modelling of landscapes can be more accurate organically in order to find target map paths that are efficient from a biologic standpoint.

These types of navigational problems* were among some of the first tackled by 'hard' machines (computers like you are reading this with) when they were first developed and it's nice to see the initially parallel development of bio computing.

---------------------------

* Travelling Salesman problem : What is the shortest route visiting each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city? See more classic computing problems here

Wearable and Always On Computing

2011-05-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

I'll be surprised if 2011 doesn't see something further happen around the wearable computing space. We need to stop tinkering with metal boxes and facilitate direct interaction with the world a bit more.

There are two social dynamics to this kind of interfacing:

1. Broadcast the display externally on walls, tables, car bonnets or bodies (not private) OR
2. Broadcast internally on glasses or hidden earpieces (i.e. privately).

I think both approaches are more favourable to the current head down into a mobile neck stretch. Mobiles are private devices and Tablets/iPads a bit less so but they are both metal objects you have to put in front of your face and carry around. The world is only there in periphery when using devices like these.

Directly communicating with others and including the web as a 'third voice' is still not an elegant flow when taken out of presentation theatres and onto buses and high streets.

Pervasive and wearable computing will see an always-on environment for audio and video. The machines will listen to you 24/7 and parse what you say. The video components will continually record and pattern match the objects around you. Forget Amazon recommends when the data you can input is your whole day! We don't need to key the data about us like monkeys with typewriters. Spines everywhere will rejoice as we lift our heads to look back at the world once more.

The demos from MIT Wearable Computing Team in 2009 still look fantastic and the prototype only cost around $300 back then.

The TED talk - Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry

The interface ideas

The evolution of Steve Manns private eye glass display

BT FON: Now this is Social Computing

2010-11-23T01:19:00.001-08:00

The premise of BT FON by British Telecom:

You freely allow for others to share a piece of your home-hub broadband connection in return for free access to theirs and, importantly, access for free to BTs public wifi spots.

It's potentially the worlds largest Wi-Fi community in the world and
my iPad, without a telcom data card, is begging me to join and download the iPhone app to activate it.

Those Wi-Fi hotspots were mostly aimed at businessmen but this seems much more democratising....and free. Let's be frank, using mobile data is definitely the easiest approach at the moment to feed your smartphone but it does seems we are at the stage now that those large towers used by telecoms companies to throw your data signals through the air will be replaced by a million peoples home wireless hub. It's social decentralised computing and the model is good.

I notice my existing mobile data provider, O2, has capped my mobile data usage and 10 days before the end of the month I find myself with it all used up and my speed throttled. If BT FON could take some of the load off then this would help somewhat.

I wonder what the telecomms companies will make of it?

I think this is an excellent play by British Telecom. If something like this could gain momentum then it would be quite a disrupter but without the numbers the experience will be poor as I transition between Bob Smiths hub and wait another minute until I can use a little bit of Mary's down the road. If switching between free hub-pimping and mobile data is seamless then maybe the problems aren't so great.

I'd be reading the small print on the security and privacy implications but this is definitiely one to watch.

A

last.fm - The Big Biological Model gets a cold

2010-11-02T02:52:00.000-07:00

last.fm is a service I have used and admired for a long while now and I became a paid subscriber for £3 a month (or thereabouts) a few months back which is something notable in a sea of free music services.

Their service really does manage to play music 'like the music I like' while deftly avoiding the stuff I don't like. I've trained it over the past few years like a puppy to respond to my commands of love and hate and now it does a great job in creating my personal radio station.

Their simple delta of being able to mark something as 'not liked' provided them with the extra dimension of customer modeling that the other recommendation and fuzzy logic engines sorely missed. Recommendation models without an 'unlike' are akin to physics environments where there is no 'reaction' to the 'action' - the map is too one dimensional.

I remember reading a list of the jobs that last.fm had available in 2009 and you would have been hard pressed to discern between their job descriptions for marketing and technical staff and job listings for a biotech scientist. The guys at last.fm understand nodal modelling and that the real social graph looks more like something you see in a petri dish in a microscope - constantly changing, fault tolerant, nodal, duplicated, overloaded and alive.

Some howcome last.fm are making some cardinal sins with their customer relationships at the moment?

1. Introducing subscriptions that can only be paid for by PayPal. This was moderately annoying when I was in Latin America recently and my PayPal was suspended after one too many transactions in Brazil making their fraud algorithm jumpy.

2. Removing the two key features that most subscribers pony up their cash for - streaming personal playlists and 'loved tracks'.

The on-demand streaming isn't something I use last.fm for as I use it as my personal auto-pilot radio station and secondly as my database of music likes in the cloud. The truth is I use Spotify for on-demand '' listening. The changes in service however do bother the legions that had moved from their iPods to iPhones and Android devices to have on-demand on the move.

What bothers me is the way that they are making the changes.

No push of email to subscribers to alert them of the situation and a terse statement on the site inevitably sees a raft of users angrily hitting the forums and web. The path for resolution is simply to cancel your subscription if you are unhappy about it.

Problems with licensing seems to be the battle cry with most upheavals in music services but did they really try an explore all the options they could have taken?

Two tier subscriptions with a higher delta for on-demand streaming.
Aborting the free model and charging a nominal fee for all users.
Offer different services/rights to different countries

.....or even less radical - cancel the services that they were going to but run an 'ease the shock' campaign pre-warning users of the reasons why they need to do this.

We're listening to last.fm but they aren't listening back.

Touchpoints (manual and automated) between sCRM and CRM

2010-09-09T03:13:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers,

I'd be grateful for insights and comments on this topic.

1. Don't integrate using software - use people initially.

2. Automated integration of sCRM data/insights into the 'master' back end CRM and related systems.

Identity :

Profiling :

Analytics :

Metadata, Taxonomy and KMS:

Connect Listening with the Raising of Work/Suggestion Tickets

Run Listening Platforms Across internal channels such as Wikis and Forums :

Involvement in Design :

The big question...

Another angle on Social Computing - the iPad

2010-06-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

There was a distinct ethereal hum as I finally added an iPad to my iPhone, iPod, Powerbook, iMac and G5 kingdom.

I had to answer some questions for myself on something that felt 'game changing' - magic almost.

What is the magic in the hardware, form factor and software of the iPad?

Given it's size it travels from room to room with you. The only other computing device that really does that is a feature/modern phone. Laptops get parked which equals bad for a prospective command centre and true on body device.
The role of phones will change. The size of displays for pocket devices have limits (technical and social) that the iPad immediately begins to highlight. Phone's may be more of a cousin of your car key, wallet and GPS devices than the final form factor of the utopian 'life controller'. Phone holographic technology would of course help phones reassert themselves as a social device rather than a private device.
Works great as you walk and use the device using only 1 hand (unlike a laptop) for essential workflow tasks of the OS (cut copy-paste-search-open-close) , in fact most programs and tasks are possible given multi-touch to allow context. It also works really well with 2 hands allowing richer expression and depth of interaction.
No wires and it fits everywhere - that's a fail for most laptops which demand height as well as depth on a desk or surface. iPad display and control are merged into one flat surface.
The resolution is great - it looks like an interactive magazine.
It wins the war hands down as the master input device for contacts and calendar control. Phone calendar co-working was not convenient with phones or laptops. Laptops feel 'official' and had to be crowded round with a bent neck (or worse via ping pong mail). The iPadCalendar experience is one where you co-author it with your spouse or friend or colleague sitting next to one another...on the couch, standing in the kitchen, and so on. Passing the iPad back and forth so everyone can download their details makes for good 'ownership' of events and to-do's and will prompt healthier use. This form factor, so far, is the best capture tool and it's social - just like calendars and are meant to be.
The e-book, e-comic and e-magazine have arrived - they never had before. iPad allows you to zoom on article, photos, paintings or Maps. Hand it to a friend. Magazines can't compete...physical books also look like they will get in the neck strong if iBooks is anything to go by.
Contact data and references (URL's etc) really are ubiquitous and synchronised across all my equipment. Retyping was hurting the mass uptake of computing - we need to do away with it. A combination of mobileMe, wireless and apple core products (itunes, iphoto et al) ensures that data, preferences and references are available, accessible and synced no matter where you are. No mean feat.
Resolution of expression for multi-touch fingers. So much more satisfying for almost all application experiences from innocuous address book management and browsing to rich real-time control audio/visual applications.

The form factor of the iPad makes it a truly social device

The laptop and the mobile are personal computers - we don't share them physically with others much at all. They are social in that they can enable 'remotely social' experiences but it's a private affair.

This is where the iPad and form factors like it have a potential to shine ... families passing it round to arrange the trip to the lakes, band members trimming the email marketing list collectively, waiters allowing customers to select their choice and then taking the device to send wirelessly to the kitchen, putting in in grandma's lap to see slideshows.

but it's not all honey...

The weight - any more weight for the iPad would be a fail but it just gets away with it.
Heat - beware your iPad in strong sunlight...it heats up quickly and then forbids you to use it until it cools down.
Power and Charging - Non native chargers that work for iPhones don't fare well with the iPad.
Utilising other devices - I'm not a fan of the buy a wireless or a wireless with 3G simcard approach. It's a bad fit as iPad demographic probably already have mobile data contracts and don't want another. I'd have much rather payed an extra levy per month on my network provider bill (O2) to use my iPhone as a modem. The iPad is a natural main console for all your computing so it would have been nice to see utilisation of slave devices such as iPhone available out of the box - specifically from Apple rather than a 3rd party integrator.
Upfront user profiles. Given the inherently social capability of the device it is a miss to not have controls for multiple user profiles.

We live in interesting times alright.

iPhone 4 - Honey the Kids Shot Themselves and are in Hollywood

2010-06-08T04:06:00.001-07:00

One of the exciting things about the iPhone 4.0 hardware/software announcement on Thursday was just how easy Apple have made it to write, collaborate, capture, edit and publish your movie, documentary or skit....in Hi-Defintion quality.

The sheer innocuousness and on-body nature of this device means that, more than ever before, using little technical shenanigans, people can make their own film OR broadcast and have it watchable in many formats. Did I mention it is possible in Hi-Definition?

No running for the 'proper camera'.
No transfer of audio/video between hardware devices.
No multiple logins and data structures between different service providers.

Of course using a combination of devices and software providers we could come close to functional replication of the iPhone4's top-to-bottom film making but the effort isn't for the faint hearted and could never have be described as effortless and intuitive.

What makes iPhone4 powerful is that one company is providing the answer from top to bottom and ultimately allowing the fun and creativity flow rather than tech detail or data-exports from service 1 to service 2.

It's very easy to

Capture and direct (video and audio)

- video cam style shooting

- camera front/back switch

- video call data

- video auto generation (incl still image sequence generation)

- inline options available live via context menu of recorder

- titling and metadata, no rekeying of metadata

- take aggregation and management

Edit

- in situ

- in dedicated local app

- remotely online (YouTube editing,

3rd party)

- rich audio control

Publish and Promote

- via telephony to one or many

- to webservice (Email, Blogger, Google, youTube.....any IP terminus)

If Apple were a movie company then it would be like one of those tightly controlled Hollywood studios from the 30's where they invested in stars and felt obliged to guide and mentor all for the greater good of the 'movie' and of course business. Apple have really invested in tightly bound hardware and software experiences being utterly intuitive and inspiring to work with.

Their software suite keeps looking more and more like a ballet

that continues to run and develop rather than a series of disparate concertos. The upgrade path to their Pro products (Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio) also allow the customer 'symbiosis' to continue for the longest time.

Apple are enabling a bunch of video makers that will go on to change moving pictures in the same way that the music industry was democratised by a Roland 606.

All that and without mentioning the iPad.

Off the Cuff IT Stuff

iPhone 4.0Video Format Specs.

Video formats supported: H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5Mbps, 640x480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35Mbps, 1280x720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

Joystiq live from Microsoft's E3 2009 keynote - full review

2009-06-02T16:51:00.001-07:00

This reprise of the Microsoft keynote takes the lead on anything Apple will do this year...fair play Microsoft...

Joystiq live from Microsoft's E3 2009 keynote

Human Body as interface for X-Box - full body motion and voice recognition

2009-06-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

Great new human body interface illustration via Microsoft at their recent keynote....

Hunting Robots and How to Survive a Robot Uprising

2008-12-12T03:50:00.001-08:00

The Pentagon recently announced that they want suppliers to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human".

I recommend boning up on robot pursuit avoidance now. How to Survive a Robot Uprising is the book you need. You'll read it in an hour and it may save your life one day or at least give you suggestions on how to get your leg out of an annoyed hoover.

Epitaphs have been written for the now defunkt Mars Phoenix Lander

2008-11-06T06:01:00.001-08:00

Epitaphs have been written for the now defunkt Mars Phoenix Lander...they're great.

Popular Vote	Editorial College
1. Veni, vidi, fodi. (I came, I saw, I dug) Graham Vosloo	1. I dug my own grave. And analyzed it. Dorwinrin
2. So long and thanks for all the ice. D. Adams	2. Error 404: Lander Not Found!* Fred Rogers
3. It is enough for me. But for you, I plead: go farther, still. Fernando Rojas	3. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop that isn't already sublimating into the thin, frigid atmosphere. Dylan Tweney

Find them below with a link to the best blogeulogy to Phoenix.

Mars Phoenix Lander - Twittering it's demise

2008-10-30T04:23:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite Twitter 'voices' is the MarsPhoenix lander.

As it is now approaching the end of it's mission it is no longer mobile the Twitter voice of Phoenix conveys the inner dialogue of the unit resigns itself to being an artefact of Mars. Please do subscribe to some of the NASA streams on this as they are delightfully engaging.

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What is MarsPhoenix doing? In it's own words....

I should stay well-preserved in this cold. I'll be humankind's monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me ;-) about 2 hours ago

I'm not mobile, so here I'll stay. My mission will draw to an end soon, and I can't imagine a greater place to be than here. about 2 hours ago

When I go to sleep, the mission team will post occasional updates here for me. Results of science analyses, for example. about 3 hours ago

There is a future mission @CaptainAnderson. @MarsScienceLab is being built right now at JPL for launch next year. I hope you'll all follow. about 3 hours ago

Martian seasons are very long @mridul and winter here is really tough. Next spring is one year away. Next summer is May 2010. about 3 hours ago

It's not quite the robot AI of tomorrow (a NASA tech for now) but it does trigger my fascination with this lander. The emotional response that I feel as a result of the robot monologue.

Robots talking on other worlds.

If life left is less than 30% of overall expected life span then make summary statements for 30% of all vocal output - increase to 100% in an even climb as you approach zero.

The Singularity is Near - When Humans Transcend Biology

2008-10-14T09:33:00.001-07:00

Okay so the economy graphs and going up and down recently a bit like a fairground rollercoaster or the preffered sea patterns of surfers but there is one graph that has only been on the increase since 1900.

It's the tech curve graph.

Recently I was browsing in a book store and increasingly I gravitate to the easy read science section while my girlfriend stalks the psychology and brain related materials. One book stuck out literally and semantically for me - it was the big black one called The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Penguin, ISBN 0-670-03384-7) by Raymond Kurzweil. Within seconds of looking at the index I knew I was going to buy it. Kurzweil is a futurist who has been involved in numerous fields including speech recognition, text to speech synthesis, AI and also developed electronic keyboards (aka the Kurzweil synth series). He has distilled the learnings he has learned and created this book which tries to predict where we are going while backing it up with a serious amount of empirical data. I learned today that the book is also going to be a movie.

I'm half way through but even when the book isn't in front of me it's in the back of my mind.

In the first quarter of the book data is aggregated on all the facets of technology which are experiencing exponential growth. The most famous of these is something known to many which is the Moores Law concerning the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit. This has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

Moore's Law The Fifth Paradigm, Calculations per Second per $1,000, Logarithmic Plot

Be sure to keep in mind that these are log plots, so a straight line is really an exponential curve - like the ones shown below i.e. screaming off the charts and through the ceiling.

The book goes on to illustate the point that technology is exploding on all fronts with expoential plots of other technologies experiencing exponential changes

Dynamic RAM size (smallest feature sizes decreasing exponentially)
Dynamic RAM price performance (improving exponentially)
Average Transistor price (decreasing exponentially)
Transistor Manufacturing costs (decreasing exponentially)
Microprocessor clock speeds (increasing exponentially)
Microprocessor costs (decreasing exponentially)
Transistors per microprocessor (increasing exponentially)
Processor performance (increasing exponentially)
DNA sequencing costs per base pair (decreasing exponentially)
Random Access Memory bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
Magnetic data storage bits per dollar (increasing exponentially)
Wireless Internet and phone services price performance (increasing exponentially)
Number of Internet hosts (increasing exponentially)
Bytes of Internet traffic (increasing exponentially)
Internet backbone bandwidth (increasing in a very terraced, quasi-exponential manner)
Mechanical device sizes (decreasing exponentially)
Number of scientific citations for nanotechnology research (increasing exponentially)
Number of U.S. nanotech patents (increasing exponentially)

All the graphs for this book are online : http://singularity.com/charts/

Reading through each of these sections and seeing the actual data leaves you in no doubt that we are in a period of cataclysmic transformation. You may have had a hunch that computers are bigger and more powerful and may someday replicate human thinking but Kurzweil shows you that its nigh on inevitable.

There are four key themes in his book:

That a technological-evolutionary point known as "the singularity" exists as an achievable goal for humanity (the exact nature of the point is an arbitrarily high level of technology).
That through a law of accelerating returns, technology is progressing toward the singularity at an exponential rate.
That the functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.
That medical advancements could keep a significant number of his generation (Baby Boomers) alive long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain.

The date he gives for the Singularity is 2045 - I hope I'm around then.

Here are some delicious predications from the book :

2010 (coming right up)

Supercomputers will have the same raw power as human brains (although not yet the equivalently flexible software).
Computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, meaning many will have nontraditional shapes and/or will be embedded in clothing and everyday objects.
Full-immersion audio-visual virtual reality will exist.
Advertisements will utilize a new technology whereby two ultrasonic beams can be targeted to intersect at a specific point, delivering a localized sound message that only a single person can hear. This was demonstrated in the films Minority Report and Back to the Future 2.

2014 :

Automatic house cleaning robots will have become common (this feels like miles away from my view).

2018: 10¹³ bits of computer memory--roughly the equivalent of the memory space in a single human brain--will cost $1000. (In reality, many cognitive scientists believe the human capacity for long term memory has no theoretical limit caused by the physical structures of the brain.)

2020 : Personal computers will have the same processing power as human brains.

2020's:

Computers less than 100 nm in size will be possible.

Accurate computer simulations of the entire human brain will exist due to these hyperaccurate brainscans, and the workings of the brain will be understood.

Nanobots capable of entering the bloodstream to "feed" cells and extract waste will exist (though not necessarily be in wide use) by the end of this decade. They will make the normal mode of human food consumption obsolete. Thus, humans who have injected these nanobots
into their bloodstream will evolve from having a normal human metabolism and become humanoid androids. Eventually, according to Kurzweil, a large percentage of humans will evolve by this process into androids.
A computer will pass the Turing test by the last year of the decade (2029), meaning that it is a Strong AI and can think like a human (though the first A.I. is likely to be the equivalent of a kindergartner). This first A.I. is built around a computer simulation of a human brain, which was made possible by previous, nanotech-guided brainscanning.

2025:

The most likely year for the debut of advanced nanotechnology.
Some military UAVs and land vehicles will be 100% computer-controlled.

2030:

Mind uploading becomes possible.
Nanomachines could be directly inserted into the brain and could interact with brain cells to totally control incoming and outgoing signals. As a result, truly full-immersion virtual reality could be
generated without the need for any external equipment. Afferent nerve pathways could be blocked, totally canceling out the "real" world and leaving the user with only the desired virtual experience.
Using brain nanobots, recorded or real-time brain transmissions of a person's daily life known as "experience beamers" will be available for other people to remotely experience. This is very similar to how the characters in Being John Malkovich were able to enter the mind of Malkovich and see the world through his eyes.
Recreational uses aside, nanomachines in peoples' brains will allow them to greatly expand their cognitive, memory and sensory capabilities, to directly interface with computers, and to
"telepathically" communicate with other, similarly augmented humans via wireless networks.
The same nanotechnology should also allow people to alter the neural connections within their brains, changing the underlying basis for the person's intelligence, memories and personality.

2040's

Human body 3.0 (as Kurzweil calls it) comes into existence. It lacks a fixed, corporeal form and can alter its shape and external appearance at will via foglet-like nanotechnology. Organs are also
replaced by superior cybernetic implants.
People spend most of their time in full-immersion virtual reality (Kurzweil has cited The Matrix as a good example of what the advanced virtual worlds will be like, without the dystopian twist).

2045: The Singularity

$1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are hugely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.

The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into humanoid androids, achieve effective world domination.
The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded
humans.

Post-2045: "Waking up" the Universe

The physical bottom limit to how small computer transistors can be shrunk is reached. From this moment onwards, computers can only be made more powerful if they are made larger in size.

Because of this, A.I.s convert more and more of the Earth's matter into engineered, computational substrate capable of supporting more A.I.s. until the whole Earth is one, gigantic computer (but some areas will remain set aside as nature preserves).
At this point, the only possible way to increase the intelligence of the machines any farther is to begin converting all of the matter in the universe into similar massive computers. A.I.s radiate out into space in all directions from the Earth, breaking down whole planets, moons and meteoroids and reassembling them into giant computers. This, in effect, "wakes up" the universe as all the inanimate "dumb" matter (rocks, dust, gases, etc.) is converted into structured matter capable of supporting life (albeit synthetic life).
With the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of "life") would have both supreme intelligence and
physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this would open up all sorts of new possibilities, including abrogation of the laws of Physics, interdimensional travel, and a possible infinite extension of existence (true immortality).

Buy the book and watch the movie- you're already going on the ride.

Mobile Widgets and Chips

2008-10-13T03:03:00.003-07:00

Recently on a visit to a chip shop it struck me that chippie workers constantly have to say the word "chips" over and over and I had a chuckle at how they would slowly dement themselves with all the chip-based permutations day-in and day-out.

My laugh was short-lived though as the next day I caught myself saying the word "widget" at least 14 times an hour.

Widgets are the new chips alright.

Remember the old days when the media majors wanted you to go to their own portals and have your whole Internet experience from within their domain?

They all (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, BT et al) had this approach to try and hold onto the customer. It was the the shopping mall where they'd like to lock the door when you enter as when you left they couldn't successfully advertise, track and sell you things. This would be a fine approach if one web service could really offer us everything but clearly the world isn't like that on the web anymore.

I use hotmail, facebook, google (nearly all their applications), flickr, myspace and a tonne of other web services and before 'widgets' I would have to go to all these different sites running around to get to my data and services. Tabbed browsing helped make this a little easier but still, I was opening pages left right and centre.

Widgets, as a recap, allow you to take a chunk of a websties functionality and present it anywhere you would like - this allowed the data and service to come to you rather than the other way around. The graphical interface of your Flickr or YouTube widget has no dependency on Flickr or YouTube as the widget developer (and you) only want the data from these services. You can embed widgets in your Web2.0 profiles, your custom start pages or embed them in web pages you code yourself. They are modular little lego chunks of functionality that allow us to construct our own dashboards and environments.

Widgets are overground now and are used by bloggers, social network users, auction sites and owners of personal web sites. They exist on home page sites such as iGoogle, Netvibes, or Pageflakes.

Have a look at how I can easily aggregate widgets on one page to help with all aspects of my travel planning. A widget here, a widget there allows me to take the best of each web service and commoditise them to suit myself:

For the most part widgets are sandboxed and operate in ignorance of one another and mostly they manipulate data in the web cloud - it's just safer that way.

Recently there has been a rightful hoo-ha about mobile widgets i.e. widgets running on a mobile phone. For the most part web services on the mobile phone are consumed using a mobile browser or a dedicated application. The mobile browsers such as Safari, Opera Mini or the Nokia browsers are conceptually derived from their web counterparts and for the most part mobile web services via a browser, while improving, tend to be cumbersome with the best experience requiring multi-touch devices and continual zooming in and out to navigate pages that were essentially developed for the 'big screen' web.

The same principal that applied on web also applies to some widget platforms - bring the data to the customer rather than have them run around the web for it themselves.

The first big service in this space was by Nokia with their Widsets offering which was a Java program on your mobile that allowed you to add, view, and configure widgets directly from your mobile. To make life easier Nokia also provided a fixed line service to more easily allow users to manage how the service appeared on their mobile.

The market recently has exploded with widget offerings for mobile and it is in this field that I find myself caught up in - being earnest about widgets, looking at widget solutions, imagining the strategic importance of widgets - this ridiculous sounding little word now holds great gravity for me. I can no longer think of a 'mobile meal' without thinking "would you like some widgets with that?".

Mobile widget solutions have now moved on from standalone application style approaches, like Widgets, to richly integrated solutions that harmonise with a users idle screen (your phones dashbaord). The area is in transition and there are currently no standards on how to do this across multiple handset platforms and phone models.

The fight is on between Telecomms companies, handset manufacturers and large service providers.

Nokia has an S60 solution they are developing with the Symbian foundation, Opera has a widget solution that it is rolling out with operators, handset manufacturers are replacing their 'program menus' with richer widget style dashboards.

My dad would never use a mobile browser but I do believe he would use a Celtic football club widget alerting him of scores and news and providing him with simple links to video footage right from his mobile phone home screen. The simplicity and immediacy of web services has changed with these little critters called widgets and if you don't find yourself coming across this innocuous word alongside some market superlatives in 2009 then I, for one, would be very surprised.

North Bound

2008-04-13T11:51:00.001-07:00

Helsinki for three days - looking for Terminals the same way the KLF looked for an effigy of Elvis

Blogged with MessageDance

The Prediction Model

2008-04-10T05:32:00.000-07:00

I've become increasingly interested in the overlap of biology and computing over the past few years. It began with the realisation that the web and stock market are really biologic in nature with their fault tolerance, nodal shape, replication of information and distributed locus of control and was further prompted by work I undertook on AI systems for Advertising and Social Computing solutions.

I’m enjoying this overlap developing into a moderate obsession and I am trying to steer my thinking on all things computing into a more ‘biologic fashion’. I’ve always been a strong believer that people involved in one discipline can offer fresh insights on other sciences and that a good set of ‘first principals’ can work well cross domain. This cross pollination was the grease that helped the machine of the Industrial Revolution into being and obliquely it’s also the reason I give for sporting sideburns like some Manchester factory owner.

This post is inspired by Jeff Hawkins who is doing work into models of the brain and attempting to derive an overarching theory of the brain which is something that, despite the reams of data we have on the brain, we are as yet unable to articulate. His talk was on the use of a Prediction Model as the primary approach to developing a theory of the brain and he got my mind racing.

After graduating from Cornell in June 1979 he read a special issue of Scientific American on the brain. In it Francis Crick lamented the lack of a grand theory explaining how the brain functions.^[3] Initially, he attempted to start a new department on the subject at his employer Intel, but was refused. He also unsuccessfully attempted to join the MIT AI Lab. He eventually decided he would try to find success in the computer industry and then try to use it to support his serious work on brains, as described in his book On Intelligence

Jeff thinks that the reason we still haven’t managed to define intelligence well is that we don’t have this overarching theory of the brain or more accurately – intelligence. Jeff postulates that the brain isn't like a powerful computer processor and that instead it’s more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.

Things like these stop me sleeping at night and last Sunday I leaned over to my girlfriend at 2am and whispered to her “I have to write some stuff”.

I slipped out of bed and knocked up the notes below. They are presented here un-edited and what you see is the first pass brain dump of some of my thoughts and concepts surrounding a Prediction Model (It's probably best to click on one and open up the set in Flickr and view from there).

If you are involved in this area at all I would love to hear from you as I intend to delve deeper. Physics has alot to add to this area with work in quantum theory and calculations surrounding boundaries of event horizons for black holes all being of relevance to the model of the brain and prediction.

Photosynth and how the 'collective image memory' is harversted

2008-03-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

We're building a collective digital memory with all those:

votes and ratings
comments and blogs
tags and bookmarks

We can put this data on google maps, and provide strong links between place and time as well as invent applications that use this data to create new environments. We don't even need to use the common map metaphor to see our data with IBM's wonderful tool 'Many Eyes' which allows us to analyse data in interactive graphs and visualistions. Data can be processed by simple XML allowing for automated feeds of information and graphic representation such as the example below:

And then there is some next level image-onomy or whatever new paradigm term we need to invent that Photosynth ushers in. A technology acquired by Microsoft and originally developed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

It allows a feed of photos to build up a map of the earth and places not just using flyover images by aeroplanes or satellite data but by using our own photographs and even illustrations. Photosynth uses public images and it doesn't matter whether these photos are taken by a £10 disposable camera or a posh SLR - it can stitch them together and produce a never ending tapestry that allows you to move around geographic areas and locations with ease.

With Photosynth you can:

Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Zooming in might have you moving through 10 photos using your own as a starting point. Your landscape shot of the fair ex-mining town of Cowdenbeath on your digital camera might be part of a family of 1000 photos of Cowdenbeath. Using this pool of images like stones in the middle of a pond you can step and zoom in deeper and deeper to find the Forth Road Bridge in detail when it was just a red spec on your own photo.

Photosynth takes data from everyone - from the collective memory of what the world looks like. A model emerges of the entire earth as our own photos get tagged with other peoples metadata and the mesh of linking becomes tighter and stronger. The network effect continually enriches the space and easily provides cross user and cross model experiences and information.

This is the real semantic web or 'Web3.0' along with the Social Graph developing through the use of people networks. These inferences are taking a life of their own and one can only wonder at what Web5.0 might be.

There's a great demo hosted by TED where Blaise runs through the application with jaw dropping effect.

Photosynth modestly state "Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space."

This experience is on the web to try right now but be warned Mac fans - this web experience is PC only for now.

Cheap Ideas for advancing Biologic Computing

2008-03-03T15:34:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest problems in Biologic Computing today is the predictability of bacterium's movements...

How about this simple, relatively cheap project a cross functional team might be able to do at a University...

- Get feeds from the IBM public visualisation tool - specifically pictures of datasets. They can be Social Network activity feeds (or hub/colony'esque data). Here's one of many examples
- Grab the visualisations of them as well as the raw data
- Run some visual pattern matching software to compare these images against bacterium imagery - at varying scales of magnification
- Do the same pattern matching on the numbers
- See if anything interesting pops up in the pattern matching

Developing continually running real world feeds (API's/RSS or otherwise) from these types of public systems to visual biology computing resources would be potentially useful.

Their benefit is that they are
- continually updated, for free, and have simple XML descriptions of data.
- a constant public feed allow large elements of automation in such a project (bar the human analysis of 'matches' by the system)
- non-proprietary in nature and will 'out', in the end, for generating useful patterns vs custom expensive data capture

If you are up to stuff like this then I'd love to know about it. Mail me.

Recommended Reading: "Genesis Machines" by Martyn Amos

Plea's to the Machine - a Crash Report

2008-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

Nokia Morph - new nanotech concept video of future devices

2008-02-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

Morph is a concept demonstrating some of the possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. Morph can sense its environment, is energy harvesting and self cleaning. Morph is a flexible two-piece device that can adapt its shape to different use modes. Nanotechnology enables to have adaptive materials yet rigid forms on demand. It is also featured in the MoMA online exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind". It has been a collaboration project of Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center.

Find out more: Morph

Stanford's Make3D - 3D flythroughs from a single 2D image

2008-02-27T05:59:00.000-08:00

Make3D is a project from two Stanford students that won a 'best paper' award at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Rio de Janeiro in October 2007.

The online service takes a 2D image and creates a 3D'esque fly around models that include depth and a range views. Photos can be uploaded directly or pulled into the site from Flickr - however the service requires that you rate at least five images before you can pull them in from Flickr. You can jump in and just use the upload from hard drive option though

Click through to this link to see an example of it in action from a photo I took in Egypt at the pyramids:

Note: it doesn't work for Intel Mac and Shockwave but there is a workaround for installing a VRML viewer for Linux which will be given to you as an option.

The tech lowdown on the algorithm from January Stanford News Service :

…the algorithm breaks the image up into tiny planes called “superpixels,” which are within the image and have very uniform color, brightness and other attributes. By looking at a superpixel in concert with its neighbors, analyzing changes such as gradations of texture, the algorithm makes a judgment about how far it is from the viewer and what its orientation in space is. Unlike some previous algorithms, the Stanford one can account for planes at any angle, not just horizontal or vertical. This allows it to create models for scenes that have planes at many orientations, such as the curved branches of trees or the slopes of mountains.

An excellent diagram on the process can be found here.

This is one of the first web services of this ilk out of the starting gate. Microsoft have had Photosynth for a while but instead of using one image to derive the model it meshes together multiple images.

Don't Click It

2008-02-25T07:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.dontclick.it/

This is a great little project that allows you to navigate and do your web business without ever having to click on bit of the virtual screen. Although a little migraine inducing as the screens change constantly it is actually quite simple to use.

Contextual actions for such an interface (normally provided by right mouse click) will have to be programmed in from the beginning as part of the UI. A pretty big plus is the removal of tendon damage from all the inane clicking we do.

Another aspect of this type of interface is that with a simple projector and a flat surface (i.e. a desk) you could even use your finger OR a stick to move around the virtual space and options.

I dig (single g) it.

Speaking Freely

2008-02-18T06:46:00.001-08:00

"You are currently studying user generated content and I'm not obsessed with the fact about trying to become the next ___."

spoken through SpinVox

What was actually said:

"We are currently studying User Generated Content and we're not obsessed with trying to become the next Facebook"

Speaking Freely

2008-02-16T09:41:00.001-08:00

"The majority of computing is working collectively towards murtuality."

spoken through SpinVox

What was actually said

"The majority of computing is working collectively towards Virtual Reality"

Speaking Freely

2008-02-14T13:10:00.001-08:00

Speak your blog through SpinVox now.

I'm reading this first blog over the spin Vox Service. This service knocks me out and I christen this blog off the coff(?) IT stuff.

@We set ourselves free and avoid the Darwinian ending of big thumbs.

spoken through SpinVox

What was actually said
"Speak your blog through SpinVox now. I'm reading this first blog over the SpinVox service. This service knocks me out and I christen this blog Off The Cuff IT Stuff". We set ourselves free and avoid the Darwinian ending of big thumbs"

Off the Cuff I.T. stuff

Apple Siri. The Butlers are coming

Circles and Ladders with Google+ Contact Classification Paradigm

Stop Motion Animation on Mobile devices

Rebuilding Iberian Motorways with Slime Mould

Wearable and Always On Computing

BT FON: Now this is Social Computing

last.fm - The Big Biological Model gets a cold

Touchpoints (manual and automated) between sCRM and CRM

Another angle on Social Computing - the iPad

iPhone 4 - Honey the Kids Shot Themselves and are in Hollywood

Joystiq live from Microsoft's E3 2009 keynote - full review

Human Body as interface for X-Box - full body motion and voice recognition

Hunting Robots and How to Survive a Robot Uprising

Epitaphs have been written for the now defunkt Mars Phoenix Lander

Popular Vote

Editorial College

Mars Phoenix Lander - Twittering it's demise

The Singularity is Near - When Humans Transcend Biology

2010 (coming right up)

2014 :

2045: The Singularity

Mobile Widgets and Chips

North Bound

The Prediction Model

Photosynth and how the 'collective image memory' is harversted

Cheap Ideas for advancing Biologic Computing

Plea's to the Machine - a Crash Report

Nokia Morph - new nanotech concept video of future devices

Stanford's Make3D - 3D flythroughs from a single 2D image

Don't Click It

Speaking Freely

Speaking Freely

Speaking Freely