Quote of the day

' New technology is common, new thinking is rare.' Sir Peter Blake

quote of the day

“Every science is beneficial within its proper limits, but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them.”- E.F. Schumacher

Get taxed by-the-mile via GPS

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/nation/story/71078.html

Fuel tax could be replaced with by-the-mile road tax

The year is 2020 and the gasoline tax is history. In its place you get a monthly tax bill based on each mile you drove — tracked by a Global Positioning System device in your car and uploaded to a billing center.

What once was science fiction is being field-tested by the University of Iowa to iron out the wrinkles should a by-the-mile road tax ever be enacted.

Besides the technological advances making such a tax possible, the idea is getting a hard push from a growing number of transportation experts and officials. That is because the traditional by-the-gallon fuel tax, struggling to keep up with road building and maintenance demands, could fall even farther behind as vehicles' gas mileage rises and more alternative-fuel vehicles come on line.

The idea of shifting to a by-the-mile tax has been discussed for years, but it now appears to be getting more serious attention. A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the "best path forward" to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion.

Quote of the day

"Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused."- Richard Perle

Quote of the day

"When we reach this point, as the designers of future generations, we will become the victims of our technological successes. We will tell ourselves that we conquered the limitations of human nature while we actually become the products of the worst in human nature - the desire to play God. We will destroy humanity itself by ensuring that future generations will be ruled by our out-of-control appetites."- C.S. Lewis

134 billion dollars worth of US bonds found in a suitcase

That’s right, 134 billion dollars worth of US bonds (real or counterfeit) found in a suitcase.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a62_boqkurbI

Two Japanese men are detained in Italy after allegedly attempting to take $134 billion worth of U.S. bonds over the border into Switzerland.

Details are maddeningly sketchy, so naturally the global rumor mill is kicking into high gear.

Are these would-be smugglers agents of Kim Jong Il stashing North Korea’s cash in a Swiss vault? Bagmen for Nigerian Internet scammers? Was the money meant for terrorists looking to buy nuclear warheads? Is Japan dumping its dollars secretly? Are the bonds real or counterfeit?

The implications of the securities being legitimate would be bigger than investors may realize. At a minimum, it would suggest that the U.S. risks losing control over its monetary supply on a massive scale.

Think about it: These two guys were carrying the gross domestic product of New Zealand or enough for three Beijing Olympics. If economies were for sale, the men could buy Slovakia and Croatia and have plenty left over for Mongolia or Cambodia. Yes, they could have built vacation homes amidst Genghis Khan’s Gobi Desert or the famed Temples of Angkor.

Bernard Madoff who?

These men carrying bonds concealed in the bottom of their luggage also would be the fourth-largest U.S. creditors. It makes you wonder if some of the time Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spends keeping the Chinese and Japanese invested in dollars should be devoted to well-financed men crossing the Italian-Swiss border.

Quote of the day

“If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy”- Philip Zimmermann

The end of anonymity?

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=43800&c=1

A detective constable who wrote an anonymous internet blog which criticised politicians and senior police officers today lost a bid to persuade the High Court to stop The Times from identifying him.

Lancashire Police detective Richard Horton was identified in a story which was posted on The Times website today, shortly after Mr Justice Eady handed down a judgment in which he refused the officer's application for an order to stop the newspaper naming him or using his photograph.

The story was accompanied by a photograph of Det Con Horton, who was the author of a blog called NightJack.

Hugh Tomlinson QC, for the claimant, had argued that regular bloggers who communicated via under "a cloak of anonymity" would be "horrified" to think that the law would do nothing to protect them if someone did the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them.

But according to Mr Justice Eady the claimant needed to show a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity, in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence.


Tomlinson's main argument was that the claimant wished to be anonymous and had taken steps to preserve his anonymity, and that The Times had no justification for "unmasking" him. He had also argued that "as a general proposition that there is a public interest in preserving the anonymity of bloggers".

Quote of the day

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive, is devoid of the power to love.”-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Survey: Family time eroding as Internet use soars

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D98R9A280&show_article=1

Whether it's around the dinner table or sitting front of the TV, U.S. families say they are spending less time together.

The decline in family time coincides with a rise in Internet use, and the boom of social networks—though a new report stops just short of assigning blame.

The report is from the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

The center is reporting that 28 percent of Americans it interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with members of their households. Only 11 percent said that in 2006.

Privacy may be a victim in cyberdefense plan

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31338666/ns/politics-the_new_york_times/

Obama's vow to protect civil liberties may be difficult to put into practice

WASHINGTON - A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

Quote of the day

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."-Edwin hubble

Quote of the day

"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."-
Milton Friedman

Do we really need anymore czars in America?

The Obama administration has 25 czars and counting:

1.) Urban Czar: Aldolfo Carrion, Jr.
2.) Bailout Czar: Herb Allison
3.) Border Czar: Alan Bersin
4.) Car Czar: Steven Rattner
5.) Climate Czar: Todd Stern
6.) Terrorism Czar: John Brennan
7.) Drug Czar: Gil Kerlikowske
8.) Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) Czar: Richard Holbrooke
9.) Energy Czar: Carol M. Browner
10.) Faith-based Czar: Joshua DuBois
11.) Great Lakes Cleanup Czar: Cameron Davis
12.) Green Jobs Czar: Van Jones
13.) Guantanamo Closure Czar: Daniel Fried
14.) Health Reform Czar: Nancy-Ann DeParle
15.) Health Infotech Czar: David Blumenthal
16.) Middle East Czar: George Mitchell
17.) Non-Proliferation (WMD) Czar: Gary Samore
18.) Pay (Compensation) Czar: Kenneth Feinberg
19.) Persian Gulf & Southwest Asia Czar: Dennis Ross
20.) Regulatory Czar: Cass Sunstein
21.) Science Czar: John Holdren
22.) Stimulus Accountability Czar: Earl Devaney
23.) Sudan Czar: Scott Gration
24.) TARP Czar: Elizabeth Warren
25.) Technology Czar: Vivek Kundra

Quote of the day

“It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.”- Max Planck

The Belgic Confession

Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God

http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/BelgicConfession.html

We know him (God) by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God

Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.

Quote of the day

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."- George Orwell

Quote of the day

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."-George Washington

Quote of the day

"Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none."-Benjamin Franklin

Quote of the day

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."- George Orwell

Quote of the day

"There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth...lust. When he is strong...quarrelsomeness. When he is old...covetousness."- Confucius

Quote of the day

"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another. "- Rene Descartes

Quote of the day

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume our views of science are ultimate, that there no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer,"-Sir Humphry Davy

Quote of the day

"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.”- Isaac Newton

Quote of the day

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be."-
Thomas Jefferson

Czar defined

czar  

1. an emperor or king.
2. (often initial capital letter) the former emperor of Russia.
3. an autocratic ruler or leader.
4. any person exercising great authority or power in a particular field: a czar of industry.

Quote of the day

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."- Albert Einstein

Quote of the day

“When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it, he keeps a very small stock of it within”- Charles H. Spurgeon

Quote of the day

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”- CS Lewis

Quote of the day

"All movements go too far."- Bertrand Russell

Future of war = Military Robots

Here's a great video on the consequences and concerns of the future of war @
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html

Google's CEO states people should turn off their computers

"In a world where everything is remembered and kept forever, you should live for the future and the things you really care about… And what are those things? To figure this out you need to actually turn off your computer. I know this is difficult. You need to turn off your phone. You need to actually look at the people who are near you and around you and decide that it is humans who ultimately are the most important things to us and not the other aspects." -Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Statolatry defined

Statolatry, which combines idolatry with the state, first appeared in Giovanni Gentile's Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1931 under Mussolini's name. The same year, an encyclical by Pope Pius XI criticized Fascist Italy as developing "a pagan worship of the state" which it called "statolatry".

Quote of the day

"The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. "- C. S. Lewis

Government officials have warned that US GPS Satellites could deteriorate by 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown

US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide.

The warning centres on the network of GPS satellites that constantly orbit the planet and beam signals back to the ground that help pinpoint your position on the Earth's surface.

The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. According to a study by the US government accountability office (GAO), mismanagement and a lack of investment means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.

"It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption," said the report, presented to Congress. "If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected."

Men are losing more jobs at an increasing rate

http://www.reuters.com/article/economicNews/idUSN1450507420090518

One statistic that stands out in America's recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent.

The reasons are clear: male-heavy sectors such as construction and manufacturing have been hard hit. But the implications may be dire for the broader economy and hamper the recovery as families that once had male breadwinners struggle.

"In the 2001 recession, 51 percent of all job losses were for men. It was evenly split. But in this recession 80 percent of the jobs that have been lost have been men's," said Andrew Sum, a labor economics professor at Northeastern University who has studied this issue in detail.

Men also incurred about 80 percent of the job losses in the 1990-91 recession, but Sum said by his calculations the numbers this time were dramatically different. In the 1990-91 recession, men lost 1.037 million jobs. They have lost 4.5 million to date in this one.

"This time around it is amazingly different in terms of the magnitude," Sum said.

Quote of the day

"No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth." -Charles Spurgeon

Fujitsu has just announced a new palm vein authentication device

Your palm could very well end up being the 'mark' that identifies who you are.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/17/fujitsus-palmsecure-takes-high-speed-contact-free-biometric-re/

This next item should be music to the ears of security professionals, fans of biometric devices, and germophobes alike. Fujitsu has just announced a new palm vein authentication device -- one that's being touted as the world's fastest, and the first that works without the user actually touching the device. Unlike past implementations of this technology, which moved at a comparative snail's pace, PalmSecure works in as little as one millisecond.

Sun spots and global warming

Please check out the complete article @

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42006/181/

Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon tells us that Earth has seen a reduced level of sunspot activity for the past 18 months, and is currently at the lowest levels seen in almost a century. Dr. Soon says "The sun is just slightly dimmer and has been for about the last 18 months. And that is because there are very few sunspots." He says when the sun has less sunspots, it gives off less energy, and the Earth tends to cool. He notes 2008 was a cold year for this very reason, and that 2009 may be cold for the same.

Quote of the day

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."- Frank Lloyd Wright

Americans spend over eight hours a day in front of a digital screen

I'm actually surprised that it's only around eight hours.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.92e661444313b232e8931de00c29c73b.431&show_article=1

Adult Americans spend an average of more than eight hours a day in front of screens -- televisions, computer monitors, cellphones or other devices, according to a new study.

The study also found that live television in the home continues to attract the greatest amount of viewing time with the average American spending slightly more than five hours a day in front of the tube.

The figure drops to 210 minutes a day of average TV viewing time among 18-24 year olds but rises to 420 minutes a day among those aged 65 and older.

Ray Bradbury was right all along

Even though he saw this coming years ago, he still fell victim to it's power.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510866,00.html

Televisions were still black-and-white behemoths in 1953 when Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451." But his world, in which books are banned and people watch "parlor walls," presaged a society in which television dominated.

The big-screened sci-fi entertainment systems of his dystopian novel have found their way into real-life homes across America, with digital home theater systems, media servers and video game systems played on giant plasma and LCD screens.

Even though he foresaw the color TV panels of the future, Bradbury told L.A. Weekly in 2007 — after being awarded the first Pulitzer Prize given to a science-fiction writer — that his novel reflected his fear that TV would kill interest in reading and literature.

"They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full," he said.

However, noted the article, "he says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen."

quote of the day

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." - George S. Patton

Quote of the day

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."- Ayn Rand

Quote of the day

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence”-John Adams

Quote of the day

"Home is the grandest of all institutions" - Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the day

"People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get."-Frederick Douglass

Quote of the day

"A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims." -Ayn Rand

Quote of the day

“Television is the triumph of machine over people."- Fred Allen

New Navy funded report warns of the unintended consequences of militarized robots

The complete PDF article can be found at http://ethics.calpoly.edu/ONR_report.pdf



http://www.dailytech.com/New+Navyfunded+Report+Warns+of+War+Robots+Going+Terminator/article14298.htm

The new report points out that the size of artificial intelligence projects will likely make their code impossible to fully analyze and dissect for possible dangers.  With hundreds of programmers working on millions of lines of code for a single war robot, says Dr. Lin, no one has a clear understanding of what going on, at a small scale, across the entire code base.

He says the key to avoiding robotic rebellion is to include "learning" logic which teaches the robot the rights and wrongs of ethical warfare.  This logic would be mixed with traditional rules based programming. 

The new report looks at many issues surrounding the field of killer robots.  In addition to code malfunction, another potential threat would be a terrorist attack which reprogrammed the robots, turning them on their owners.  And one tricky issue discussed is the question of who would take the blame for a robotic atrocity -- the robot, the programmers, the military, or the U.S. President.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5741334.ece

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

quote of the day

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. " -Ayn Rand

Quote of the day

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom”- Charles Peguy

What will the future of news look like?

Please read the complete article @ http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/02/misreading_news.php

Once you radically reduce supply in the industry, the demand picture changes radically as well. Ad inventory goes down, and ad rates go up. And things that seem unthinkable now - online subscription fees - suddenly become feasible. We also, at that point, get disabused of the fantasy that there's no such thing as news consumers. We see that providing fodder for "conversations" is not the primary value of the news; it's an important value, but it's a secondary value. The newspaper industry is in the midst of a fundamental restructuring, and if you think that restructuring is over - that what we see today is the end state - you're wrong. Markets for valuable goods do not stay disrupted. They evolve to a new and sustainable commercial state. Tomorrow's reality will be different from today's.

What I'm laying out here isn't a pretty scenario. It means lots of lost jobs - good ones - and lots of failed businesses. The blood will run in the streets, as the chipmakers say when production capacity gets way ahead of demand in their industry. It may not even be good news in the long run. We'll likely end up with a handful of mega-journalistic-entities, probably spanning both text and video, and hence fewer choices. This is what happens on the commercial web: power and money consolidate. But we'll probably also end up with a supply of good reporting and solid news, and we'll probably pay for it.

Quote of the day

"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist." -Ayn Rand

Quote of the day

"Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us."-Charles Spurgeon

Does artificial life desire to come into our physical existence?

Here’s a very strange quote from the founder of artificial life research, Chris Langton.


Please read the complete Wired magazine article from 1995 @
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard_pr.html

"The founder of artificial life research, Chris Langton, told reporter Steven Levy that "there are these other forms of life, artificial ones, that want to come into existence. And they are using me as a vehicle for reproduction and for implementation."

Quote of the day

“Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.”- Marshall McLuhan

Google wants to talk to your appliances

One day Google might be telling you (via your appliances) the best time to clean your own house.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/10/technology/10grid.php

Google will announce its entry Tuesday into the small but growing business of "smart grid," digital technologies that seek to both keep the electrical system on an even keel and reduce electrical energy consumption.

Google is one of a number of companies devising ways to control the demand for electric power as an alternative to building more power plants. The company has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter that consumers can use to track energy use in their house or business as it is consumed.

Smart grid" is the new buzz phrase in the electric business, encompassing a variety of approaches that involve more communication between utility operators and components of the grid, including transformers, power lines, customer meters and even home appliances like dishwashers.

"They've been putting a chip in your dishwasher for a long time that would allow you to run it any time you want," said Rick Sergel, chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry group that sets operating standards for the grid.

If the utility could "talk" to the dishwasher, it might tell the machine to run at 2 a.m. and not 2 p.m., or it might tell the homeowner how much money would be saved by running the dishwasher at a different hour.

New project to create buildings that are completely operated by robots

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20090205/165197/?ST=english_PRINT

The project is aimed at providing various services and comfortable living environment through combination of building infrastructure technologies and robot technologies. Robots will play the roles of receptionist, guide, delivery personnel, cleaners, guards, etc in place of humans. For example, they will approach visitors, attend to and take them to their destinations in the building.

As the first step of the project, the two companies established the "Smart Showroom," a demonstration space that employs the infrastructure technologies of Shimizu and the "SmartGuide," a guide robot developed by Yasukawa. In the showroom, the robot takes care of all the services including the reception, explanation of displayed items and seeing off visitors.

The infrastructure will detect the arrival of a visitor, and the robot will give spoken explanations of displayed items as well as presentations using a projector in response to the information from the infrastructure. The two companies conducted interactive proving tests and confirmed the effectiveness of the infrastructure-integrated robot services.

To realize this concept, role sharing between the building and the robot is important. Instead of relying on robots for all of the functions, infrastructure technologies, which include human detection, device control and information and telecommunication technologies, will be combined with robot technologies to centrally control the entire building, including the IDs and locations of the robots operating in the building, so that multiple robots can work in a wide area.

"smart shelves" that monitor you

Eventually everything will be watching somebody.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db2009028_712098.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story

One large consumer goods company enlisted help from Infosys to keep tabs on sales of a new cereal. The company, which Infosys declines to identify, installed "smart shelves" that use ambient light-sensing technology to monitor how long customers stand next to a particular product, whether and how long they pick it up and inspect it, and whether they choose to put it down and pick up something else. Using intelligence gathered from the shelves, the manufacturer soon noticed a troubling trend: The shelves were left empty for long periods of time, meaning it was losing potential sales because the retailer was too slow to restock it. The consumer goods company "immediately got on the phone with those stores" and told them to fix the problem, says Sandeep Dadlani, Infosys' vice-president and head of client services for retail.

Quote of the day

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."- Ray Bradbury

U.S. combat units to become half human, half machine by 2015?

Check out the full article @http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,489226,00.html

Robots will fight the wars of the future, a prominent military expert told an audience of luminaries Wednesday.

"We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," writer and Brookings Institution fellow Peter W. Singer said during his address at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference meeting this week in Long Beach, Calif., according to Agence France-Presse.

Drawing on material from his just-published book "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century," Singer said the rapid development of military robots, already used as drones and bomb defusers, might mean that U.S. combat units would be half human, half machine by 2015.

Additional info can be found @ http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iYmGo87FaeVFdRRaP39VIKM9-hqA

Quote of the day

"Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good."-C. S. Lewis

If you’re a political power worshipper, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you’re on

For those who worship political power, there is very little difference between those who claim to be either a Republican or a Democrat.

Government is a needed institution that deserves respect as well as our requirement to participate in it, but a person should never become intoxicated by it's power and bow down to it.

Just my 2 cents....

Gladiators return to Rome to battle for the pleasure of Caesar

You really think this won't progress into something more violent and symbolic over the next decade or so?

Please check out the complete article @ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1871544,00.html

Umberto Broccoli, the recently named head of archaeology for Rome, is pushing ahead with a proposal to recreate gladiator battles in or near the Coliseum. Dressed in original costumes and carrying actual swords and tridents (unlike the plastic and aluminum toy replicas used by the current hustlers), well-trained gladiator actors will be choreographed to perform historically accurate battles like those that ended in death two millennia ago.

Broccoli is largely echoing the ideas of conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The business mogul turned politico says Italy's cultural treasures need to be showcased and considered a precious source of income for the country. Sounds like history repeating itself: gladiators battling for the pleasure of the latest Caesar.

Quote of the day

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."- Ecclesiastes 1:9

Too much TV causes depression

Parents would be foolish to think they are any less likely to become depressed by watching too much TV.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29021070/

Concerned that your adolescent is watching too much TV? A new study gives parents good reason to be concerned. Researchers reported this week that greater exposure to TV during the teenage years appears to raise the risk of depression in young adulthood, especially among males.

Dr. Brian A. Primack, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and colleagues studied the media habits of roughly 4,100 healthy non-depressed adolescents. They asked the adolescents how many hours they spent during the last week watching TV or videos, playing computer games or listening to the radio.

There are several possible ways by which media exposure could boost the risk of depression, the researchers say. The time spent watching TV or using other electronic media may replace time spent socializing, participating in sports or engaging in intellectual activities — all of which may protect against depression.

Watching TV at night may disrupt sleep, which is important for normal brain and emotional development. In addition, messages transmitted through the media may reinforce aggression and other risky behaviors, interfere with identity development or inspire fear and anxiety, the researchers note.

Google's new Latitude software let's you track your friend's location via GPS

This is how it starts.

Americans won't initially be forced to give up their freedom or privacy through military force, they will happily relinquish it to be part of collective and to be accepted by their community of friends.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/04/earlyshow/leisure/gamesgadgetsgizmos/main4774320.shtml?tag=topHome;topStories#

Google is releasing free software Wednesday that enables people to keep track of each other using their cell phones.

CNET got a sneak peek at it, and CNET-TV Senior Editor and Early Show contributor Natali Del Conte explained how it works on the show Tuesday.

She says "Latitude" uses GPS systems and what's called cell tower triangulation to do the job. The software seeks the closest three cell towers and, with GPS, combines the data to show where someone is.

Quote of the day

"A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it." - Frank Lloyd Wright

If technology isn't making us stupid it's certainly making us distracted

The irony here is considerable.

Bill Gates acknowledges that 2 billion dollar of grants to modernize high schools with computers and etc. has produced few successes and yet the braniacs at Google and NASA want to create machines that are smarter than people. It appears to be rather obvious that our dependence on computers and etc. has reduced test scores in math and science since most people think that computers are better at than they are.

As machines and computers become smarter, the vast amount of people who use them become less so. While there are obviously some very gifted people who are the exceptions to this rule, they unfortunately prove the rule in the process.

Those people who are exceptions of today will unfortunately become the autocrats of tomorrow.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc2009022_531934.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_technology

The venture comes at a time when CEOs are increasingly outspoken and nervous about U.S. math and science education, arguing that America's global competitiveness depends on vast improvements in the abilities of high school graduates. So far, there are few signs of progress in raising the test scores of U.S. students in math and science. Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation has become the leading private funder of education improvement programs in the U.S. with $2 billion of grants in high schools, said last month that the effort had produced just a few successes.

Quote of the day

“materialistic progress leads only to the abyss and the power of evil”- J.R.R. Tolkien

US army backs cyborg insect project

Please read the complete article @ http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/02/03/234577/us-army-backs-flying-cyborg-beetle-project.htm

US army backs flying cyborg beetle project

The US army is backing a project that allows a flying giant flower beetle to be remote controlled for surveillance purposes.

The "cyborg" beetle has implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back so that it can be wirelessly controlled.

Scientists at the University of California have developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the beetle's electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight.

The research is funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is envisaged the beetle could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions.

The beetle's payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, and six electrodes implanted into the animals' optic lobes and flight muscles.

Google and NASA back new school to help create smarter-than-human artificial intelligence

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b162dfc-f168-11dd-8790-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Quote of the day

"The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.-Charles Spurgeon

Are insect soldiers the weapons of the future?

Do I hear a locust?

Please read the complete article @
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5634450.ece

The history and future of insects as weapons are explored in my new book, Six-Legged Soldiers. As an entomologist, I was initially interested in how human beings have conscripted insects and twisted science for use in war, terrorism and torture. It soon became apparent that the weaponisation of insects was not some quirky military footnote but a recurring theme in human strife, and quite possibly the next chapter in modern conflicts.

Insects are one of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today, and one of the most widely ignored: they are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly and can spread disease and destroy crops with devastating speed.

Quote of the day

"When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government." ~Alexander Chase

The day Google went bad

I'm glad it was just a human error and not it's artificial intelligence going crazy. This glitch did reveal the possibility that a website could be made 'irrelevant' if Google accidentally tags it as harmful since most people won't visit a website that they believe has malware.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/4413065/Millions-hit-by-Google-breakdown.html

An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning 'This site may harm your computer'.

It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites - and some of its own pages - as containing malicious software or 'malware'.

The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google's email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders.

The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered some kind of major failure that could have had serious implications for internet commerce.

The Google search page is by far the most popular on the internet, with the overall site receiving several hundred million queries each day. It is the most common homepage and accounts for almost four out of every five internet searches, making it a crucial part of the global economy.

Google automatically identifies sites that may carry viruses and harmful software as part of its searches, but on Saturday all sites that were searched for carried the warning.

It suggests that either every server on the internet had become infected with a virus, an unlikely scenario, or the Google security system had suffered a breakdown.

Quote of the day

“I fear that we're going to live in what amounts to a surveillance society. It's not going to be the evil Big Brother of 1984, but I fear that we are rapidly moving toward a society where all of our movements, all of our transactions, all of our business is known to somebody out there. And a profile of us will be easy to assemble.”-Barry Steinhardt

Advertisements that watch you

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D961JH3O0.htm

Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there's a slim -- but growing -- chance the ad is watching you too.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly.

That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.

And even if the ads don't shift based on which people are watching, the technology's ability to determine the viewers' demographics is golden for advertisers who want to know how effectively they're reaching their target audience.

The bottom is falling out of the movie industry.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aDMXKb0oqb34&refer=home

Plunging DVD sales threaten to reduce profit for studio owners Time Warner Inc.,Walt Disney Co.,Viacom Inc. and News Corp., and may force them to write down the value of movies, analysts said.

Fourth-quarter shipments fell 32 percent in the U.S. and Canada to 453.6 million DVDs, according to Los Angeles-based Digital Entertainment Group. The drop is the biggest since the industry-funded researcher started keeping track in 1997.
The decline is being fueled by viewer shifts toward rental services such as Netflix Inc., the U.S. recession and technology that makes it easier to stream Web videos to televisions.

“Making a movie just won’t be as profitable as it once was,” Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente in New York said in an interview. “There will be a complete bottoms-up reconstruction of the economics of the film business.”

Plot to destroy Fannie Mae data

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Feds-allege-plot-to-destroy-apf-14208185.html

The Justice Department says it foiled a plot by a fired Fannie Mae contract worker in Maryland to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant's 4,000 computer servers nationwide.

Quote of the day

"There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good."
Robert Pirsig

The first genuine nail in the coffin of the personal computer via Google's GDrive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/25/google-drive-gdrive-internet

The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet.

The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as "the most anticipated Google product so far". It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs inside most of the world's computers, in favour of "cloud computing", where the processing and storage is done thousands of miles away in remote data centres.

Home and business users are increasingly turning to web-based services, usually free, ranging from email (such as Hotmail and Gmail) and digital photo storage (such as Flickr and Picasa) to more applications for documents and spreadsheets (such as Google Apps). The loss of a laptop or crash of a hard drive does not jeopardise the data because it is regularly saved in "the cloud" and can be accessed via the web from any machine.

Everybody worships power in one form or another

Everybody worships some form of power. While I believe that God is the only true source of power that should be worshipped, here’s 11 substitutes that have been popular among all cultures throughout human history. While the things listed below are important aspects of humanity that can be appreciated, none of them should be worshipped.

1. The worship of corporate power
2. The worship of political power
3. The worship self empowerment
4. The worship of the power of the collective
5. The worship of the power of music
6. The worship of sexual power
7. The worship of the power of money
8. The worship of the power of one’s own intellect
9. The worship of computational power (technology)
10. The worship of military power
11. The worship of the power of nature

Quote of the day

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."
Bill Gates

Google + Government = Watch out

The digital reach of government will surely be expanded over the next four years.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fi-google24-2009jan24,0,5255660.story

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt campaigned for Obama and was one of four Googlers on his transition team. He is now as likely as any corporate chieftain to get his calls to the White House returned.

At the top of the company's policy priorities are two that consumer advocates largely champion. First, it wants to expand high-speed Internet access so people can use its Web services more often. It also is pushing for so-called network neutrality: prohibitions on telecommunications companies charging websites for faster delivery of their content.

"Google is not just a benign corporate entity. It has a variety of special interests," said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has sparred with Google over data-privacy issues. "They're in a great position to push their agenda through with the support of the president and the Democrats in Congress."

But Google's newfound political ties heighten concerns about its grip on the online advertising market. The company could play better defense against strong competitors trying to curb its influence.

Quote of the day

"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
Max Frisch

Nationwide, food banks are reporting a 30% increase in the number of people seeking assistance

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/21/news/economy/food_banks/index.htm?postversion=2009012116

Nationwide, food banks are reporting a 30% increase in the number of people seeking assistance -- double the increase reported just six months ago, according to Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks across the country. The organization says food banks serve 25 million Americans of the 35 million it estimates are in need of food banks's services.

As a result of growing demand, 72% of food banks have been unable to adequately meet needs, resulting in cut backs in the amount of food they make available to pantries that serve food

Quote of the day

"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." ~Sydney J. Harris

Pulitzer Prize-winning author states that book reading is coming to an end

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/6221607.html

The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40.

I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries.

They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t.

Quote of the day

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them. "
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Many kids are spending up to six hours a day in front of a video screen

As bad as this is, I’m sure it’s even worse for their parents. Point and clicking on visual icons is hardly a mastery of technology that is worthy of appreciation. As technology becomes smarter the user becomes less so.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1122225/The-toxic-Web-generation-Children-spend-hours-day-screens.html

Youngsters are shunning books and outdoor games to spend up to six hours a day in front of a screen, a survey has revealed.

Children as young as five are turning their bedrooms into multi-media 'hubs' with TVs, computers, games consoles, MP3 players and mobile phones all within easy reach.

The trend triggered warnings that the next generation will struggle to compete in the adult world because they lack reading and writing skills.

At the same time their mastery of technology is not widely appreciated by their parents.

The market research involving 1,800 children aged five to 16 found that they spend an average of 2.7 hours a day watching TV, 1.5 on the internet and 1.3 playing on games consoles, although in some cases these activities are simultaneous, such as watching TV while playing on a console.

Quote of the day

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government." -Thomas Jefferson

Global cooling?

If the sun soon enters a very active period of prolong solar activity (sun spots and solar flares) than we could see earth's global surface temperatures rise again.

http://www.saukvalley.com/articles/2009/01/16/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/d390d2efc24b9fb639385713a7780401.txt

Elwyn Taylor, Iowa State University climatologist, points out the second reason - sun spots and solar flares. These disturbances on the sun's surface have a huge influence on the earth's temperature. Back in the 1640s, sun spots disappeared for approximately 100 years. During that time, we had what was called "the little ice age" with bitterly cold winters.

Drew Lerner, World Weather Inc. meteorologist, says the earth temperature cools following reduced solar activity. He points out that the amount of energy coming from the sun since the early 1980s has been reduced. Since it takes 20 to 25 years for the solar effects to be felt on earth, we will likely see cooling for the next 15 to 20 years.

Lerner adds another reason to expect colder weather ahead - results from tracking the weather temperature cycles in the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. Their 10- to 20-year cycles are now finishing up an extended period of warmer winters and are moving into a trend toward colder temperatures. These indexes have been dependably accurate predictors, according to Lerner.

Quote of the day

"The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion." - Frederick Douglass

Voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and the future of search

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3if42f3145e3efa9c4f299b95e2754a98e?pn=1

Imagine if you could talk to your computer, ask it any question you needed answered, and it would talk right back to you with intelligently gathered search results. The concept has popped up in numerous sci-fi and superhero yarns for decades. But now it's also the kind of thing that various search visionaries seriously talk about when pondering where the medium will be five years from now.

Indeed, as comprehensively awesome as Google and its competitors are at sorting through massive quantities of information (just how exactly did we find things 10 years ago? Books?), many digital industry executives and entrepreneurs believe that, overall, search will evolve and improve dramatically by the middle of the next decade.

Talking computers is just one avenue experts predict search will take. Many theorize that search engines will be able to provide more personalized results based on previous searches (something that's already been talked about for a while). Some speculate that social networking sites will become the new focal point of search. Others say the medium will shift to mobile devices.

Microsoft gave the industry a clue about where it thinks search is headed last July when it acquired Powerset, one of several startup companies that specialize in semantic search.

Semantic search (sometimes referred to as linguistic) promises to be able to infer the intended meaning of search queries that take the form of full questions. Theoretically, semantic searches deliver more relevant results than keyword searches, since they're based on the frequency of particular words' occurrences, coupled with the popularity of Web pages.

"It is a stepping-stone to artificial intelligence," said Powerset co-founder Barney Pell, who's now partner, search strategy and evangelist at Microsoft.

Pell predicts that in five years, keywords will no longer drive the search ad economy, as advertisers will -- in a sense -- be able to purchase ads that factor in user intent.

Quote of the day

“If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful”
C.S. Lewis

A typical Google search produces 7g of carbon dioxide

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

The Earth’s magnetic field is losing strength

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081125090348.htm

At present the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing by 5% every hundred years and researchers do not know why or what the consequences will be. In the South Atlantic Anomaly, the strength of the magnetic field is decreasing ten times as fast and the measuring station will therefore also give the researchers the opportunity to learn more about the consequences of the global weakening of the magnetic field.

The magnetic field protects the Earth from radiation from space and the area around the South Atlantic Anomaly is therefore very poorly protected. In the Anomaly, the radiation belts that surround the Earth, the van Allen belts, are very close to the surface of the Earth. This is, among other things, significant to satellites, which suffer by far the majority of faults when they fly through this area.

Scientists have found two large leaks in Earth's magnetosphere

There is a very good possibility that two large leaks in the Earth’s magnetosphere could contribute significantly to global warming. While the sun is going through a very calm period right now that could be contributing to a cooling period. As the sun cycles and enters a period of increased solar storms more of it's radiation can enter into the earth's atmosphere and increase surface temperatures.

http://www.livescience.com/space/081216-agu-solar-storm-shield-break.html

Scientists have found two large leaks in Earth's magnetosphere, the region around our planet that shields us from severe solar storms.

The leaks are defying many of scientists' previous ideas on how the interaction between Earth's magnetosphere and solar wind occurs: The leaks are in an unexpected location, let in solar particles in faster than expected and the whole interaction works in a manner that is completely the opposite of what scientists had thought.

The findings have implications for how solar storms affect the our planet. Serious storms, which involved charged particles spewing from the sun, can disable satellites and even disrupt power grids on Earth.

The new observations "overturn the way that we understand how the sun's magnetic field interacts with the Earth's magnetic field," said David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., during a press conference today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The bottom line: When the next peak of solar activity comes, in about 4 years, electrical systems on Earth and satellites in space may be more vulnerable.

Quote of the day

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”- Galileo Galilei

European leaders call for new global rules for a new economic body

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090108/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_france_new_capitalism

The leaders of France and Germany appeared to put disagreements over economic policy behind them Thursday, calling on the U.S. to join global efforts to address the financial crisis.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, leading a two-day conference with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the future of capitalism, said the crisis has shown that no country can go it alone on economic policy.

Merkel said the International Monetary Fund has not managed to regulate global capitalism, and she called for the creation of an economy body at the United Nations, similar to the Security Council, to judge government policy.

Speaking at the conference, European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said "global rules" on government aid to companies would be "helpful."

Will “Green Collar” jobs become dependent on new government regulations?

One concern I have with the coming of the “Green Collar” economy, is that it could become dependent on the federal government creating intrusive and needless regulations to ‘force’ people to need ‘Green Collar’ products and services. If the next batch of regulations are not enough to get individuals and companies to purchase “Green Collar” products than the Federal Government will use it as a justification to create even more regulations until people start buying them.

If US unemployment continues to rise upwards and towards 10%, many of those who once championed ‘less government’ and 'free markets' could be the first in line for increased government control in order to get their own piece of the "Green Collar" economy.


Just my 2 cents...

Quote of the day

"when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley."- George Carlin

Microsoft ready to layoff 15,000 workers

As ‘Cloud Computing’ (and/or 'Cloud Intelligence') really starts to take off, so will the amount of layoffs in the tech industry.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10130165-75.html

The latest to report on the possibility of layoffs at the software giant is the blog Fudzilla, which puts the number of job cuts at 15,000, or nearly 17 percent of Microsoft's worldwide operations. The January 15 date is a week before Microsoft's second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for January 22.

Quote of the day

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them”- Aldous Huxley

A new kind of mind? The creation of global Artificial Intelligence

While I have substantial respect Kevin Kelly's intellect and his incredible insight in regards to the future of the Internet, I seriously doubt his very Utopian depiction of the future the will be brought into fruition by the 'technium'. Any attempt to predict the future that fails to factor in humanity's falleness is certainly going to 'unintentionally' turn any possible Utopian dream world into a anti-Utopian Hell on earth.

This new kind of mind as he describes would certainly be one 'beast' of a machine.

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time.

- A New Kind of Mind / Kevin Kelly

Quote of the day

“When you see a man with a great deal of religion displayed in his shop window, you may depend upon it, he keeps a very small stock of it within”- Charles H. Spurgeon

2008 was the second least active solar year since 1913

Let's just say that solar activity (or the lack of it) has a greater influence on the Earth's surface temperature than many want to acknowledge.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=315533893763712

2008 has been a year of records for cold and snowfall and may indeed be the coldest year of the 21st century thus far. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

Quote of the day

“Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.”-Francis Meehan

The earth’s rotation is slowing about two milliseconds per day

Before you get overly concerned, 1,000 milliseconds is equal to only 1 second.

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/081226-ns-leap-year.html

Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone's control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year's Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you'll have an extra second to celebrate because a "Leap Second" will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.

By international agreement, the world's timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world's irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009. 

More robots that will replace human workers and drive down wages

Check out the complete article from Scientific American @
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=artificial-intelligence-robots-rule

"One thing that really excites people developing artificial intelligence is seeing hundreds of robots working autonomously," Wurman says. Getting dozens of robots to move around in the same space without crashing into one another or creating traffic jams is a bit like choreographing a dance.

Other companies are beginning to join the dance as well. Medical device maker DJO, Inc., will by March begin using Kiva's robotic fulfillment system at its primary U.S. distribution center in Indianapolis. Online retailer Diapers.com is also planning to install Kiva robots in all three of the company's distribution centers to help store, move and sort a variety of baby products, including diapers, wipes, formula, bottles and clothes.

One of Kiva's goals is to enable more and more robots to be able to work in concert. "We want to scale these systems up to 5,000 robots," Wurman says.

The reason today's robots are not as agile as the T-800 of the original Terminator movie is because creating artificial intelligence is not as easy as it looks in Hollywood.

"AI suffers from the fact that it's so easy to imagine the human-level intelligence in a robot that you could interact with like you interact with people," Wurman says. "But the AI field has made a lot of progress. Twenty years ago, a chess program that could beat a world chess champion was a big deal. Now, it is not seen as such, because it's been done. AI has come to stand for only the things we haven't figured out how to do, so it's not really fair."

If you would like to see an automated warehouse in action check out this video @

http://www.kivasystems.com/demo/index.html

After looking at the video it makes you wonder who's working for who. The few people that work in the warehouse will most likely be replaced by some type of robotic system within the next 5 years as well.

The rise of the statist world economy

The last thing the world needs is a global version of the 'New Deal'.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aDjmuEpDoctc

“We’re seeing a more statist world economy,” says Ken Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “That’s not good for growth in the longer run.”

'Statism' is defined as:

The practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy.

Allocation and Misallocation of Human Capital - defined

The engine of growth in the capitalist economy and the main source of the wealth of nations is productively employed human capital. This means that there are at least three key elements that must be present in an economy for successful development: 1) adequate supply of potential human capital must be forthcoming; 2) incentives to employ this human capital in productive, innovative uses must be stronger than incentives to employ it in strategic rent-seeking games or other non-productive activities; 3) the institutional framework must allow a smooth reallocation of resources to entrepreneurs possessing high human capital and potentially beneficial innovative ideas.

Quote of the day

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. George Santayana

Before we start creating a ‘Green Collar’ economy (New Deal 2.0), let’s make sure we don’t take steps toward fascism in the process

If the 'Green Collar' economy (New Deal 2.0) does become a reality, I hope that America still has the fortitude to resist some of it's more dangerous fascist-like tendencies.

Please read the complete article @ http://www.reason.com/news/show/122026.html

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.”

Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.…Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”

Roosevelt may have stretched the Constitution beyond recognition, and he had a taste for planning and power previously unknown in the White House. But he was not a murderous thug. And despite a population that “literally waited for orders,” as McCormick put it, American institutions did not collapse. The Supreme Court declared some New Deal measures unconstitutional. Some business leaders resisted it. Intellectuals on both the right and the left, some of whom ended up in the early libertarian movement, railed against Roosevelt. Republican politicians (those were the days!) tended to oppose both the flow of power to Washington and the shift to executive authority.

Germany had a parliament and political parties and business leaders, and they collapsed in the face of Hitler’s movement. Something was different in the United States. Perhaps it was the fact that the country was formed by people who had left the despots of the Old World to find freedom in the new, and who then made a libertarian revolution. Americans tend to think of themselves as individuals, with equal rights and equal freedom. A nation whose fundamental ideology is, in the words of the recently deceased sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism” will be far more resistant to illiberal ideologies.

Quote of the day

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”- Benito Mussolini

Does Public-Private Partnerships = Fascism 2.0?

Check out these two videos on the significant problems that can occur when government and corporate powers coalesce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5AcIHgwi30
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxOsBgHsUq0&feature=related

Gladiators to return to Rome after 2000 years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/3852364/Gladiators-to-return-to-Rome.html

Umberto Broccoli, the archaeologist in charge of the Colosseum, said that he is planning to bring the gladiatorial clashes of ancient Rome to the modern Italian capital as part of a "serious project" to revive interest in its monuments and museums.

Whereas the gladiators who entertained ancient Roman crowds in the huge amphitheatre often battled to the death, today's fighters will engage in mock battles.

While sparing their opponents from injury, those aspiring to follow Russell Crowe's heroics in the film Gladiator will nonetheless wear authentic helmets and body armour and wield the same swords, tridents, nets and daggers that were used in ancient times.

The idea of re-enacting the contests is being pushed by Mr Broccoli, superintendent of archaeology at Rome City Council.

"I don't want this to be a carnival. It would be a serious project. Museums and ancient monuments like the Colosseum must speak to the public in a new way," he told the newspaper La Repubblica.

The reason why unemployment is actually higher than the headlines suggest

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2008/db20081212_666543.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis

....digging deeper into the labyrinth of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Web site can offer a more complete, if imperfect, picture of joblessness. Since 1993, the BLS has tracked a category of unemployed called U-6, which captures the total unemployed, plus what the agency calls "marginally attached" workers and those employed part-time "for economic reasons." For November 2008, that rate was 12.5%, nearly double the official unemployment rate and the highest since the government started tracking this category.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Marginally attached workers are those with no job and who aren't hunting for one but who are interested in working—people who have left the workforce because the employment situation seems so bleak that they've stopped trying. This measure covers anyone who has looked for work in the past 12 months, not just the past four weeks. In November, 1.9 million workers were marginally attached, up 637,000 from a month prior. This category includes long-term unemployed, such as factory workers who can't find a job paying close to what they'd been earning before.

Unemployment rates in construction and extraction jobs such as mining hit 12.1% in November, followed by 9.4% in production jobs. That means the ranks of the marginally attached will increase.

The IT industry is one of biggest job-growth disappointments of all time

Cloud computing will only reduce IT jobs even more over the next decade.


The quote below is a 2006 article from:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002001.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives

Perhaps most surprising, information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time. Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google and Yahoo!, businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear.

Quote of the day

"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."- George Orwell

The decline of men

As technology and automation commoditized manual labor over the last century, there's no surprise that a man's physical strength has become marginalized. While this is a problem, it will pale to the issues that will arise as advanced algorithms and A.I. continue to commoditize human intelligence by cultivating it.

A recent article about the book "The Decline of Men":

http://promotions.nypost.com/seven/10262008/postopinion/postopbooks/the_decline_of_men_135322.htm

"The Decline of Men" is not an angry screed against women or one of those Robert Bly-like manifestos (at least not exactly). It's more as if Garcia is sounding an alarm. Men out there take note: You're not the virile (or dominant) creatures you once were.

It's not simply a loss of the "manly" American; our country is changing. And men are reacting in various ways (many of them self-destructive).

Garcia provides oodles of facts and figures on the supposed male decline. "Three decades ago," Garcia writes, "boys and girls read and wrote at roughly the same level. Today an eleventh-grade boy writes and reads at the level of an eighth-grade girl." The life expectancy of the average American male (75.2) is five years fewer than that of the average woman (80.4). Male salaries have been stagnant, whereas female salaries have shot up - and the modern economy doesn't have the same need for hunter/warriors in the future. (And if it did, it seems as if Sarah Palin is trying to fill that void, too.)

In other words, it will only get worse fellas.

Quote of the day

“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.” Lionel Trilling

Extropianism defined

Extropianism, also referred to as extropism or extropy, is an evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition. Extropians believe that advances in science and technology will some day let people live indefinitely and that humans alive today have a good chance of seeing that day.

Quote of the day

"When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network." Google Chief Executive- Eric Schmidt

The precautionary principle defined

The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. The principle implies that there is a responsibility to intervene and protect the public from exposure to harm where scientific investigation discovers a plausible risk in the course of having screened for other suspected causes.

Will our dependence on technology become even more severe within the next decade?

Please read the complete article @

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/cloud_culture.php

Inseparable Dependence.

"Always on" plus superior performance will lead to supreme dependence on our part. There is the curious paradox that as the hard-lifting computation leaves the devices near our bodies and takes place in the invisible cloud it psychologically moves the device closer to us. As devices get smarter they get more intimate. A friend of mine had to ground their teenager for a serious infraction. They took her cell phone away. They were horrified when she became physically ill. It was almost as if she had an amputation. And she had in one sense. I was reminded of the book/movie The Golden Compass wherein the children in that world have spiritual guardian animals, called demons. These intangible animals sit on their shoulders or hover nearby and advise and comfort them. The most horrible torture in this world is to be separated from your demon. In the future, the cloud and cloud intelligence will be our Golden Compass demons. Separation from the advice and comfort afforded by the cloud will be horrendous and unbearable.

The Extended Self.

Where is my stuff? If I google my own mail to find out what I said, or rely on the cloud for my memory, where do "I" end and it starts? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of interest, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes -- if all this is sitting somewhere -- but nowhere in particular -- it changes how I think of myself. What happens if it were to go away? A very distributed aspect of me would go away. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves -- a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye -- than the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.

Quote of the day

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form.”- Albert Einstein

Technological underemployment is the true source that’s driving down real wages

Not only has technological underemployment driven down real wages for the last decade, but we are only just beginning to witness it’s real economic ramifications on our culture.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is at odds with the Air Force over the use of unmanned vehicles

Expect to see significantly more unmanned vehicles in the coming years since Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will be staying on with the next administration.

If the Air Force does indeed remain behind schedule in training qualified human pilots to fly the unmanned vehicles, than this will certainly speed up the research and production of completely autonomous unmanned vehicles in the coming decade.

The following article was from April of this year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/21/usa.iraq

Gates has prodded the air force since last year to add more of the unmanned planes called Predators, which specialise in surveillance video, to the two war efforts. Predator capacity has increased to 22 from 12, but Gates said today that more progress is needed.

"Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth" to secure more unmanned planes from the air force, Gates said in a speech to military university students.

"While we've doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough."

Also called a "drone", the Predator flies as high as 25,000 feet, carrying missiles and infrared cameras. Air force leaders have chafed at the pace of Predator pilot training requested by Gates, fearing that the rush would leave the force unqualified.

Will political and corporate powers eventually coalesce into a single entity?

The corporate power worshipers in Wall Street appear to be migrating towards the political party with the most power in Washington.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/12/02/big_business_transfers_its_loyalty_money_to_the_democrats/

...the Obama administration's promise of swift government action to protect companies and workers is likely to achieve one result that has been unthinkable for 75 years: It will make the Democrats the party of Big Business.

..the financial sector split the difference between the two parties in 2008, it will probably skew toward the Democrats in succeeding elections, as Obama becomes the chief advocate of the Wall Street bailout. Such a development would be shocking considering the animosity between Big Business and the Democratic Party that began during the New Deal of the 1930s, which drove up taxation and slapped new regulations across many industries. That animosity continued throughout the Reagan era, when businesspeople craved the lower tax rates and deregulation of Reaganite Republicans.

Since Reagan's heyday, however, the Republican Party has fallen apart in the Northeast and upper Midwest, home to many of the largest financial-service companies and industrial manufacturers. Corporate executives seem to be among the many Northerners who have bailed on a party that is increasingly dominated by Southern evangelicals.

There are no signs that Republicans are going to try to win back Big Business anytime soon. Even though the recent $700 billion bailout package was orchestrated by a Republican president, the GOP, as the party in exile, will almost certainly coalesce around opposition to it.

The warbots are coming

They seem to think that warbots will be more ethical in the battlefield, but I obviously have my doubts.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/240147/us-invests-in-ethical-warbots.html

The US military is working on autonomous soldier robots capable of making ethical decisions on who to attack.

The US Government is planning to invest $4 billion into autonomous systems by 2010, and has hired researchers to help create robots that comply with the Geneva Convention, the code governing a soldier's actions in combat.

"My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can," says Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech in a report commissioned for the Army.

He argues that robots "do not need to protect themselves" and "can be designed without emotions that cloud their judgment or result in anger and frustration with ongoing battlefield events".

Quote of the day

"No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power."- CS Lewis

An interesting video on the concept of 'Mixed Reality'

If you would like to get a better idea of what the future will look like when the lines between real world and artificial/digital world become blurred, check out this video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yx5VpbQpA

Hundreds of billions of dollars going into militarized autonomous systems

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Will-Robots-Replace-US-Armed/story.aspx?guid=%7B3C31807B-CFC4-4774-8517-EE2AE1264377%7D

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are going into military applications, with virtually no money for consumer applications," says Smith. "And, don't expect those Hollywood-created versions of robotic soldiers. The robots you've seen in movies aren't necessarily what the military's creating."

…the latest advancements in military robotics and artificial intelligence are aimed at removing the human factor from the decision making, creating weapons that will ultimately 'decide' whether to fire weapons. And that dramatically raises the stakes for the military and for civilians.

"As we become more accustomed to these robots, we will ultimately give them more control," says Smith. "Our leaders must make smart, ethical decisions about these 'thinking' weapons. It's not a vision of a far-flung future. They are here now, on the battlefield, and these machines will change our world."

The coming identity crisis- you vs. your avatar

As artificial/digital worlds intersect more frequently with the real world, the problems related to mixed/dual realities will become more apparent.

Check out the complete article @ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27897933/page/2/

Avatars are these little computer models that act as our representatives in the digital world. We create them in our likeness (or in our what-I’d-like-to-be-ness) and send them forth into the vast digital beyond, controlling their every move from the not-so-vastness of our real-world lives.

It’s all very “Matrix” and, of course, it’s not exactly a new phenomenon. But still, avatars seem to be popping up everywhere these days – acting as our surrogates in online forums, in instant messages and, increasingly, inside video games and the machines that play them.

I also find that playing god with myself is harder than I thought it would be. When presented with vast opportunities to mold my image – especially in the case of the “Home” avatar – the choices were downright daunting.  Do my eyes look like this? Or this? Do these cheeks really capture who I am? Does this chin say “Winda”?

And who is this avatar any way? I mean, is this really supposed to be me? After all, she’s nothing but some prettied-up ones and zeros. Surely I add up to more than that.

Quote of the day

"If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present clarified by the great works of the past."- Robert Kaplan

quote of the day

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry Truman

Cloud integration - the future of mobile computing

Please read the complete article @ http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/voice-in-google-mobile-app-tipping-point.html

" A mobile phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and processing. But it's time we realized that the local compute power is a fraction of what's available in the cloud."

"...we can imagine the future of mobile: a sensor-rich device with applications that use those sensors both to feed and interact with cloud services. The location sensor knows you're here so you don't need to tell the map server where to start; the microphone knows the sound of your voice, so it unlocks your private data in the cloud; the camera images an object or a person, sends it to a remote application that recognizes it, and retrieves relevant data. All of these things already exist in scattered applications, but eventually, they will be the new normal."

This is an incredibly exciting time in mobile application design. There are breakthroughs waiting to happen. Voice and gesture recognition in the Google Mobile App is just the beginning.

Myopia defined

myopia- lack of discernment or long-range perspective in thinking or planning

Quote of the day

“I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death” -Frederick Douglass

Researcher: Self-driving cars could save U.S. auto industry

It’s odd they cite ‘distractions’ as a reason why cars should become autonomous (self-driving), but often those distractions are created by our very dependence on digital devices like cell phones and etc. Technology was supposed to give us more freedom, but often it appears that it actually does a better job of supplanting human skills with artificial/digital ones.

Check out the complete article @ http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Development&articleId=9120740&taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=1

"We can make cars drive themselves," said Thrun. "Look at what causes accidents - distractions. They're on the phone or looking in the glove box. We could build cars that don't veer out of their lane on the highway. That right there would cut down on 10% of accidents. You know, human pilots are only allowed to land the planes themselves during good weather. Autopilot must be used in bad weather. With robotics, we could make cars much, much safer."

Thron, who talks to auto company officials about how they can better use robotics, said he hopes self-driving vehicles are on the road in less than a decade. He added that the first autonomous cars won't be driving us from the restaurant to the garage at first, but they may be able to take over the controls on the highway.

Quote of the day

"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them." - George Orwell

Technology is "ushering in a new golden age for human kind"?

Don’t forget, whenever someone promises a "new golden age", it’s going to be neither 'new' nor 'golden', and since it’s coming from Rupert Murdoch I certainly wouldn’t trust it.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24619205-7582,00.html

The chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, owner of The Weekend Australian, says new technology is "ushering in a new golden age for human kind".

Quote of the day

"Everybody is getting to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present timeservers." - Charles Spurgeon

A new apparatus of control

One valid point to remember is that the founding principle (both technically and philosophically) behind computers and the Internet is control, not freedom.

An excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book 'The Big Switch’.

http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/excerpt3.shtml

Galloway explains, the connection of previously untethered computers into a network governed by strict protocols has actually created “a new apparatus of control.” Indeed, he writes, “the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom - control has existed from the beginning.” As the disparate pages of the World Wide Web turn into the unified and programmable database of the World Wide Computer, moreover, a powerful new kind of control becomes possible. Programming, after all, is nothing if not a method of control. Even though the Internet still has no center, technically speaking, control can now be wielded, through software code, from anywhere. What’s different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.

Research shows that violent video games increase aggressive behavior

Just another example how the artificial/digital world influences the real world for the worse.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27722613/

Researchers found that among three groups of 9- to 18-year-olds followed over several months, those who regularly played violent video games were more likely to get into more and more physical fights over time. The study is among the first to chart changes in gamers' aggressive behavior over time, lending weight to evidence that violent video games can encourage violence in some kids. And it's the first to show that the effects are seen across cultures, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

The findings are based on two separate groups of teenagers from Japan — 1,231 teens in all — and 364 9- to 12-year-olds from the U.S. At the outset, participants estimated how often they played violent video games, then their own aggressive behavior was followed for up to six months afterward.

Quote of the day

"We cannot expect people to take seriously our belief in objective truth if, in our practice, we indicate only a quantitative difference between all men who are in ecclesiastical structures or who use theological language. I do not mean that we should not have open dialogue with men; my words and practice emphasize that I believe love demands it. But I do mean that we should not give the impression in our practice that, just because they are expressed in traditional Christian terminology, all religious concepts are on a graduated, quantitative spectrum -- that, in regard to central doctrine, no chasm exists between right and wrong."- Francis Schaeffer

Cameron Diaz and Google’s Larry Page want to create harmony between all the world’s religions

They should call this comedy “Something about Larry”.

When particular religions and cultures have beliefs (secular or religious) that are diametrically opposed, it’s foolish and naive to think you can create harmony among them. Some ideas and beliefs should be at opposition, since that's often allows for a healthy and robust debate.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081114211405.6b9pjnso&show_article=1

A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.

The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a "wish" granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.

"Tedizens" include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.

The road map for Whole Brain Emulation (WBE)

Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) were responsible for the creation of this road map. To check out the 130 page PDF visit- http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf

Google adds voice recognition technology to Apple’s iphone

Please check out the complete article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/technology/internet/14voice.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

Dystopia defined

A dystopia is the vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia. A dystopian society is one in which the conditions of life are miserable, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, and disease.

Some academic circles distinguish between anti-utopia and dystopia. A dystopia does not pretend to be utopian, while an anti-utopia was intended to create a utopian society, but a fatal flaw or other factor destroyed or twisted the intended utopian world or concept.

Resistance is Futile

Here’s another video with Wired Magazine editor-at-large Kevin Kelly talking about the 'One Machine’, ‘The Technium’ and humanity’s apparent inability to escape it’s imperialistic type dominance on culture.

While he appears to think the “One Machine” will be a great thing, it reminds me too much of the ‘Borg’ from Star Trek.

To see the video visit- http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/popcasts.aspx?lang=&viewcastid=37

Technological determinism defined

Technological determinism is a reductionist doctrine that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history.

Quote of the day

“Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”- George Orwell

The Hive Mind, Socialism 2.0, The One Computer, and Web 10.0

If you would like to get an idea of what society might look like in the next 6,500 days (17 Years), check out this link to a video with Kevin Kelly (Wired magazine fame). http://www.kk.org/2008/11/web-100.php

If you're short on time start it at the 8 minute mark.

Physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new "theory of everything"

Is he on to 'something'?

A video explanation of this can be seen @ http://www.exchangemagazine.com/morningpost/2008/week43/Tuesday/1021022.html

Physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new "theory of everything" -- a grand unified theory that explains all the elementary particles, as well as gravity.

Why you should listen to him: Working from principles of differential geometry, physicist Garrett Lisi is developing a new unified theory that purports to explain all the elementary particles, and gravity, in one elegant model. His theory is based on a mathematical shape called E8. With 248 symmetries, E8 is large, complex and beautiful -- and Lisi believes the relationships of its symmetries correspond to known particles and forces, including gravity.

For more information on E8 check out- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)

I wonder when we will get ‘Rome Reborn’ version 6.0?

More info about Rome Reborn 2.0
http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/

Version number

The first version of "Rome Reborn" had the version number 1.0. This reflects the fact that the model currently illustrates one of many phases in the long urban history of Rome. When this or any future version is corrected or improved in some way, the version number will change after the decimal point (1.1, 1.2 etc.). Substantial improvements or additions of new phases will be reflected in changes of the number before the decimal point (1.0, 2.0, etc.).

Future of the project

The leaders of the project agree that while continuing to create digital models of specific monuments, they should also vet and publish models made by other scholars. In this way, the vision of Rome Reborn can be realized more quickly as scholars around the world contribute their components to the larger edifice of the complete digital model of ancient Rome from the late Bronze Age to late antiquity. Scholars wishing to publish their work are therefore urged to contact the director of the project, Prof. Bernard Frischer.

Google let’s the glory that was Rome rise again

No surprise the first ancient city to be truly replicated in the digital/artificial world will in fact be Rome.

We should be taking the real road out of Rome, not the ‘artificial’ one back to it.

Please read the complete article @ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,450604,00.html

Visitors will once more be able to visit the Colosseum and the Forum of Rome as they were in A.D. 320, this time on a computer screen in 3D.

The rendering of the ancient city in Google Earth lets viewers stand in the center of the Colosseum, trace the footsteps of the gladiators in the Ludus Magnus and fly under the Arch of Constantine.

The computer model, a collection of more than 6,700 buildings, depicts Rome in the year A.D. 320. Then, under the emperor Constantine I, the city boasted more than a million inhabitants, making it the largest metropolis in the world. It was not until Victorian London that another city surpassed it.

The project has been developed by Google in collaboration with the Rome Reborn Project and Past Perfect Productions.

Quote of the day

"I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary." - Charles Spurgeon

As newspapers (and news websites) across the country cut their staff, the Associated Press has become more powerful.

As newspapers cut their staff to offset a significant decline in advertising revenue, the Associated Press (AP) has become increasingly more influential. Many newspapers use AP generated articles as a low cost method to fill up pages with news and information.

While many promised the Internet would bring upon a golden era of diversity in news and information, ironically newspapers are gradually coalescing into a single source/voice for news.

Some AP stats:

243 bureaus in 97 countries.

1,700 U.S. daily, weekly, non-English and college newspapers.

5,000 radio and television outlets taking AP services.

850 AP Radio News audio affiliates.

550 International broadcasters who receive AP's global video news service, APTN, and SNTV, a sports joint venture video service.

121 number of countries served by AP

4 languages in which AP sends news. The report is translated into many more languages by international subscribers.

Just my 2 cents....

IBM revives the concept of creating broadband Internet over existing power lines

The existing electrical power grid could eventually become fused with the coming global computer grid.

Pleasecheck out the full article @ http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081112/tec_broadband_over_power_lines.html?.v=6

IBM Corp. is throwing its considerable weight behind an idea that seemed to have faded: broadband Internet access delivered over ordinary power lines.

Their strategy is to sign up electric cooperatives that provide power to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States. Rather than compete toe-to-toe with large, entrenched cable or DSL providers, IBEC is looking for customers that have been largely left out of the shift to high-speed Internet.

Signing on IBM, perhaps the highest-profile company to buy into the idea, could juice a technology that has failed to make much of an imprint.

The technology involves sending data on the same wires that provide electricity. Every half a mile or so, a device clamped to the line perpetuates the signal. Inside homes, customers plug a modem into any wall outlet and sign on.

M.I.T. professor : "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence"

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence."

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning."

Scanning your palm as a secure form of identification

If you're ever asked to place a 'mark' on that hand as well, you might have a problem.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5129384.ece

An alternative technique, developed by Fujitsu, scans the palms of people's hands to identify a similarly unique vein pattern. This system has also been gaining international recognition. It was recently installed at Carolinas HealthCare System, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, the first healthcare provider in the United States to implement this technology.

Quote of the day

"Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?" - Billy Graham

Will the next stage in human technological evolution be the 'One Machine'?

If true, it would surely be one 'beast' of a machine.

Please read the complete article @ http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/11/dimensions_of_t.php

The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.  

Somewhere between 2020 and 2040 the Machine should exceed 6 billion HB. That is, it will exceed the processing power of humanity.

Cyber attacks becoming more powerful and sophisticated

Please read the full article @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/10/technology/10attacks.php

A survey of 70 of the largest Internet operators in North America, South America, Europe and Asia found that malicious attacks were rising sharply and that the individual attacks were growing more powerful and sophisticated, according to the Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. This report is produced annually by Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Massachusetts, that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks.

The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be overwhelmed by the most powerful attackers.

Quote of the day

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”- Albert Einstein

Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Will the new CTO position grow into something far different and more significant over the next decade? If the gross expansion and corruption of past government agencies teaches us anything, the CTO position will eventually turn into something ugly.

Nothing ever goes as planned, especially when you're dealing with technology and millions of people.

Please read the complete PDF @ http://obama.3cdn.net/780e0e91ccb6cdbf6e_6udymvin7.pdf

"Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21 st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

• The CTO will have a specific focus on transparency, by ensuring that each arm of the federal government makes its records open and accessible as the E-Government Act requires. The CTO will also focus on using new technologies to solicit and receive information back from citizens to improve the functioning of democratic government.

• The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions. For example, the Chief Technology Officer will oversee the development of a national, interoperable wireless network for local, state and federal first responders as the 9/11 commission recommended. This will ensure that fire officials, police officers and EMTs from different jurisdictions have the ability to communicate with each other during a crisis and we do not have a repeat of the failure to deliver critical public services that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

Research shows a rise in birth defects and infertility among men

While it might not be mentioned in the article below, I think it’s time for everyone to take those cell phones out of their pockets for a while. Something is getting burnt and it's not the bread in the toaster.

Please read the full article @ http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=fffbfc6d-38c4-463b-8b8a-6f2d367b1c5f

That's the question scientists and researchers have been pondering since alarming trends in male fertility rates, birth defects and disorders began emerging around the world.

More and more boys are being born with genital defects and are suffering from learning disabilities, autism and Tourette's syndrome, among other disorders.

Male infertility rates are on the rise and the quality of an average man's sperm is declining, according to some studies.

Quote of the day

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."-Abraham Lincoln

Surprising research on how technology influences the functionality of the brain

It appears that doing Google searches causes the brain to become more active than reading a book, but areas linked to abstract thinking and empathy showed virtually no increase in stimulation.

I wonder if there's a direct link related to the negative influences of technology which cause some people to migrate into eastern forms of contemplative meditation. If so, we might see higher percentages of people practicing contemplative meditation as a method to cope with 'over stimulation' that's unintentionally imposed by excessive use of digital devices.

Is this a good thing, or do two wrongs just make things even worse?

Please read the complete article @
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hzuuOOKk4WNaA4DvAlUe74MQH5YQ

"What happens to a developing teenage brain that's spending nearly nine hours a day with the technology?" he asked.

"These kids haven't fully developed their frontal lobes, their complex reasoning and judgment and decision-making skills. How will that natural stage of development be affected by the exposure to the technology? We don't know the answer to that."

"If we spend a lot of time repeating one kind of activity, and neglecting another, the neural circuitry is going to be different. And certainly the brain on Google study suggested that," he said.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article5014746.ece

Overall, a new study concludes, the brains of those tested were markedly more active when carrying out internet searches than when reading books.

However, the stimulation was concentrated in the areas that control decision-making and complex reasoning. Areas linked to abstract thinking and empathy showed virtually no increase in stimulation.

Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution and author of ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, said: “The hypothesis in iBrain is that natural selection will weed out people with brains that are more emotional or more capable of abstract thought and that we will be left with people who are more autistic in tendency. I would agree.”

Quote of the day

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell

US military using World of Warcraft to test Artificial Intelligence

Online games are certainly becoming the new incubator for artificial life.

Check out the complete article @ http://gizmodo.com/5077240/us-army-to-push-x+files-tech-development-invade-world-of-warcraft

Self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging". To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online:

“We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they’re good enough to convince humans that they’re actually human, that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang. I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they’re responding.”

Quote of the day

"A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it. "- Frederick Douglass

The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world

Add one more truck driver to the unemployment line. Sure those who create, install, and service autonomous systems will have jobs, but for every one of those types of jobs there will be 10 truck driver-like jobs lost in the process.

We are all just one step closer to technological unemployment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27575051/

The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.

That's nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.

"Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy," said Tony Stentz, a professor at CMU involved in the project. Stentz expects that over the next five to 10 years, the technology will expand to areas beyond mining, eventually finding its way into consumer cars and trucks.

Quote of the day

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.-CS Lewis

US Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledges that automation is destroying American jobs

Back in January US Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged that automation is destroying more US jobs than outsourcing. American worker’s are in for tough times unless we can finally admit that technology and automation need to have some limits. Many people are in a state of denial and won't even acknowledge that technologies such as the Internet/email have exponentially increased that rate of outsourcing. The Internet along with huge increases in bandwidth speeds has made it easier and cheaper for a significant amount of US companies to be to be able to communicate with manufacturing facilities in China and etc.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence, advanced algorithms, and 'cloud computing' will significantly reduce the amount of good paying jobs in the IT/computer industry similarly to what robotics have done in the manufacturing sector.

US Secretary Henry Paulson:

"You may not know it, but who is the largest manufacturer in the world? The U.S., by a lot. It's fascinating. When I had looked at the data in 1950...manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were about 30 percent of the country then, and there are about 15 million manufacturing jobs, OK? Today, we've got the same 15 million manufacturing jobs; they're about 10 percent. But the output has gone up seven times over that period, and...our manufacturing base is two-and-a-half times larger than China, it's bigger than Japan, it's bigger than Germany. This is a story about automation".

Defense Department's “Unmanned Systems Roadmap: 2007-2032”

Here's some info on the US Defense Department's “Unmanned Systems Road map" for Artificial Intelligence and related autonomous systems.

Where that 'road' takes us is another question.

The complete PDF (source) document on the "Unmanned Systems Roadmap" can be found directly from the US military @ http://www.acq.osd.mil/usd/Unmanned%20Systems%20Roadmap.2007-2032.pdf




Please read the complete articlehttp://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48453

“A new Defense Department report reflects military needs and goals in acquiring improved unmanned systems during the decades ahead, a senior official told Pentagon reporters here today.

Titled, “Unmanned Systems Roadmap: 2007-2032,” the report looks at how the U.S. military should proceed in developing, acquiring and integrating air-, land- and sea-based unmanned technology over the next 25 years, Dyke Weatherington, deputy director of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Task Force, said at a news conference. The task force is within the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“The publication of this most-recent roadmap will further our strategic planning and our overall objective of developing, procuring and integrating unmanned systems into the force structure of the Department of Defense to support our various military mission capabilities,” Weatherington explained.

The document is the result of more than 18 months of work between the department, the services and other military and government agencies, Weatherington said. “

The concept of Artificial Intelligence is rooted in Greek and Roman culture

There are many roads back to Rome and while none of them will be new, modern technology will make them more accessible.

Please read the full article @ http://htmltimes.com/turing-test-machine-intelligence.php

The notion of artificially created intelligence dates even further back than the Greek story of Pygmalion--the statue brought to life by her creator. Historically, there is context for such a story. Pygmalion was written around the time that Greek mechanical engineering was becoming complex enough to give rise to such an idea. Complicated differential gearing, as seen in the works of the Antikythera mechanism (a complicated mechanical orrery dating from 150–100 BC) would have given Greeks a hint at non-biological life. The word for such a creature was an automatos, or something “acting of one’s own will.”

A short history of automata: Automata became popular first in Greek and Roman times. Automata were very simple mechanical devices used as orrery, such as the antikythera device, or as entertainment. In Greek times, these were likely astrological or horological in nature. After the slow end of the Roman Empire, automata was picked up again in the 8th century Persian Empire. The Banu Musa brothers invented an automatic flute player, and the later Al-Jazari of the Turkish Artuqid Dynasty invented what may have been the first programmable mechanical automaton, a floating musical band. Later automata moved west, and during the Renaissance Da Vinci worked on a programmable lion automata. The most important age of automata dawned in the 17th and 18th centuries when the craft was adopted across Western Europe. In 1822, Charles Babbage almost took the idea of a programmable automata to it's ultimate possibility by designing a mechanical computer.

Would humanity’s last invention be the creation of the first ultraintelligent machine?

An interesting observation from 43 years ago:

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.-“ Irving John Good (1965)

Quote of the day

"Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing." - Bill Cosby

Chinese computer users have become chief targets for online criminals

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20081103/tc_afp/uschinaitinternetsoftwarecrime_081103212216

Chinese computer users have become chief targets for online criminals, according to a security report released Monday by Microsoft.

The global software giant's latest assessment of threats and vulnerabilities reveals that attackers favor hiding malicious programs in seemingly innocent Web browser applications and that China is their preferred target.

"The majority of (exploits) we are finding is where the local language is set to Chinese," said Microsoft malware protection center general manager Vinny Gullotto.

"It reflects a lot of what is happening in the Chinese market. There is so much going on out there with the Internet today that it seems to be somewhat natural that we might see this happen there."

Approximately 47 percent of software "exploits" found stalking the Internet in the first half of 2008 were in Chinese while 23 percent were in English, the second most common language for attack programs.

These include programs which can record a user's keystrokes or steal passwords and credit card and banking information.

Microsoft security watchdogs say they find higher computer-infection rates in developing countries where fledgling Internet users aren't savvy to tricks and traps used by hackers and online criminals.

"They are exploring this whole new world and not thinking about what problems they might face," Gullotto said.

Quote of the day

“Every generation needs regeneration” Charles Spurgeon

US Air Force plans to “Rewrite Laws of Cyberspace”

I'm sure Russia and China have their own plans as well.

Please read the complete article @http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/air-force-aims.html

The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the "laws of cyberspace."

It's more than a little ironic that the U.S. military, which had so much to do with the creation and early development of internet, finds itself at its mercy. But as the American armed forces become increasingly reliant on its communications networks, even small, obscure holes in the defense grid are seen as having catastrophic potential.

Trouble is that even a founding father can't unilaterally change things that the entirety of the internet ecosystem now depends on. "You can control your own networks, rewrite your own laws," says Rick Wesson, CEO of the network security firm Support Intelligence. "You can't rewrite everybody else's."

Quote of the day

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."- George Orwell

Will the roadmap to the Singularity lead to humanity's dead end?

While there's no doubt there are some very bright individuals who look forward to the creation of the Singularity. I think they severely under estimate how easily power corrupts and how the power/influence that would be created by the Singularity would quickly coalesce among a selected (autocratic) few.

The reasoning of this new autocracy will be just like the autocrats of the past- "the masses are too dumb to have this type of power at their disposal, so we must control it for their own safety."

Just my 2 cents....