Friday, January 23, 2015
“25 Disruptive Technology Trends for 2015 – 2016”
http://www.briansolis.com/2015/01/25-disruptive-technology-trends-2015-2016/
Saturday, July 19, 2014
What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?
Some may already be familiar with Richard Feynman's classic lecture on nanotechnology (1959), which, by the way, contains assumptions as well as ideas overlapping with ID:
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Prodigal Sam
"6 Ways to Love a Depressed Person" by Sammy Rhodes.
On a totally different note, Rhodes' "Tweeting Myself to Death: The Rise & Fall of @prodigalsam" is worth a read as well.
HT: Justin Taylor.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Friday, December 06, 2013
Download your Google data
Monday, November 18, 2013
Friday, September 20, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Life - what a concept!
Kaffikjelen asked:
I wonder: Why do you think evolution is such an accepted scientific theory, having been exposed to so much confirmation and peer-review? Is it all a conspiracy?
1. Steve has already responded in the combox.
2. I'd just add there's oftentimes a significant difference between what's communicated publicly about modern evolutionary theory and what's discussed among scientists as well as published in the specialist peer-reviewed journals and related literature.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Up next: “The Internet of Things”
![]() |
Nike is leading the way to the Internet of Things |
It’s being called the “Internet of Things”:
The Internet of Things is bigger than we may realize. We are experiencing a shift from a world of inanimate objects and reactive devices to a world where data, intelligence, and computing are distributed, ubiquitous, and networked. My fellow analysts and I at Altimeter Group refer to the Internet of Things (IoT) as the Sentient World. It’s the idea that inanimate objects gain the ability to perceive things, perform tasks, adapt, or help you adapt over time. And, it’s the future of the Internet and consumer electronics.
In 2008, the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on earth. By 2020, it’s expected that there will be 50 billion things connected.
A network of things creates an incredible information ecosystem that connects the online and physical world through a series of transactions. In a world where data becomes a natural b[y]-product of these exchanges, developers, businesses, and users alike are faced with the reality that data isn’t only big, its volume and benefits are also overwhelming…
Products such as Fitbit and also Nike’s FuelBand build upon the Human API by collecting the digital breadcrumbs of users and assembling them in a way that makes sense of daily activity and validates progress. Perhaps more importantly, these devices, the data they collect and present, and the social relationships linked by publishing this information in social channels drives the ongoing pursuit of goals, and brings people together to help one another live better. As these devices are connected socially, experiences become the epicenter of engagement and encouragement, inspiring people and networks of people through extended relationships along the way. Imagine if they could also talk to one another…across devices and also across the various contexts of usage, personal, professional, medical, etc.
That’s the point.
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Speak Up
In one thread, a conservative there commented on how liberals had been bused in to post comments. Another poster said something to the effect that liberals on welfare have more time on their hands to do something like post in online forums. It's true that people often are bused in to online forums and other contexts. And it's true that welfare recipients and other people who are home a lot tend to be liberal. But I doubt that either explanation, or a combination of such explanations, even comes close to entirely explaining what's going on.
For example, there will often be a thread with, say, ten people commenting. Four of them are liberal. Even if those four were bused in, are welfare recipients, etc., it's not as though outnumbering four people by a large margin should be difficult for conservatives to do in a context like the National Review web site. Yet, it frequently doesn't happen. Often, to make the situation even worse, the conservatives who do post aren't posting as often, aren't making as much of an effort to argue for their position, and so forth. In the thread with ten participants, the four liberals will say more than the six conservatives and will make more of an effort to argue for their position. Or one conservative will make a significant effort to support his side of the argument, but the other five won't. Or something like that. It isn't just a matter of liberals being so active at a site like National Review. It's also a matter of conservatives being so inactive relative to their potential.
I've seen a lot of explanations offered for the sort of tendency I've described above, and there's some merit to those explanations. I've already mentioned some of them (busing in efforts, liberals tend to be home more). Another explanation often put forward is that liberals are more concerned about politics. They tend to be less religious, so politics is some sort of equivalent to religion for them. Liberals put the sort of effort into politics that conservatives put into other aspects of life, like religion. Though explanations like these do have some merit, they're insufficient.
Take the last explanation I mentioned. Yes, liberals are less religious, and that does explain the tendencies I'm describing to some extent. But why do the same tendencies show up in so many other contexts? For example, I often see threads at Christian apologetic web sites that are an equivalent of what I've described above regarding National Review. Five people are posting in a thread, and two of them are atheists. Or, worse yet, four of the five are atheists. The fact that only five people are posting is part of the problem. And, apparently, all of the Christians who aren't posting think it's not a problem for them to be uninvolved while they let a small handful of other Christians do all of the work. I frequently see threads at apologetic and other religious web sites, not just at political sites and in other less religious contexts, where Christian participation is absurdly low and highly disproportionate to the level of participation by non-Christians. Why?
The problem isn't just that liberals, atheists, and others who are wrong are so active. There's also a problem with conservatives, Christians, etc. being so inactive.
Apparently, one of the reasons why the Democrats did so well in the 2012 election was that they were so active online (contacting people on Facebook, sending out emails, buying ads at popular web sites, etc.). The Republicans didn't make as much of an effort, even though many of the potential voters were so open to being influenced. It's even more appalling when Christians allow themselves to be outperformed. More is at stake.
Part of the problem is that conservatives, including conservative Christians, have tended to overestimate their position in society. They've been complacent with their majority status, or they've thought of themselves as a majority when they haven't actually been one. Minorities often fight harder. Being cornered sometimes has that effect on people. Even as liberals become a majority on some issues, like homosexual marriage, they retain some elements of the minority mindset. And their conservative opponents keep thinking like a majority in some ways, a majority that's largely presumptuous, apathetic, complacent, and lazy.
Then there's the problem of being too slow to adapt to changing technology and social expectations. A Christian web site will give itself a facelift, perhaps improving its appearance and starting to have a Twitter account, for example. But the behavior of the site's owners doesn't change much. They're still too slow to notice societal trends, too shallow in how they address issues, too unwilling to interact with opposing positions in depth, etc. Their web site's facelift doesn't amount to much.
Part of what we need to do to adapt to the changes occurring in the world around us is to get more active online. That's where the technology is headed, and that's where people are. Complaining about it doesn't make it go away. If you'd prefer to spend more time offline, then too bad. God placed you in the twenty-first-century world, with its technological advances and unprecedented access to information. I suspect that the large majority of you live in a wealthy nation with a lot of technology, political freedom, and other advantages. You have opportunities that people living in other times and places haven't had. To whom much is given, much is required. Our responsibilities are largely of an intellectual nature. We have such easy access to information through books, web sites, etc. In addition to being involved in praying, reading the Bible, and other common Christian disciplines, you should be participating in online forums frequently (discussion boards, blogs, Twitter, and whatever else). Do you regularly make an effort to participate in such things? When you see a thread at a political web site about homosexual marriage, and the liberal participants have a disproportionately high presence in the discussion, do you just remain silent? Or do you speak up? When you see a Christian at an apologetics web site carrying on a discussion with an atheist (or two, three, or four atheists at once, as often happens), do you just sit back and watch? Or do you get involved? Do you help your fellow Christians carry the burden, or do you just let them do all of the heavy lifting? Why don't you give up some of the time you spend on sports, movies, housework, etc. in order to do more important things, including spending more time in online discussions about issues that are significant? Since so many of the most important issues in life are discussed online more than they are offline, and people are spending more time online than they used to, shouldn't your behavior change accordingly?
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Monday, April 01, 2013
Doing more with less, beating “Moore’s Law”, enabling “Big Data”, and creating new kinds of jobs
Underlying the press to do more with less is a concept known as “Moore’s Law”, which posits that “that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double roughly every two years”. This has enabled chip manufacturers to roughly double the power of microprocessors each year. [A similar law, called Kryder’s law describes how storage space works in a similar way.]
![](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/https/blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKFtALIbvV17nel-tJ_2a73OfEWk8bmWO4zvuCJYzsZlTZKvYmJm4DkKhNpcQE31gqLHHKxzwkxtX3HynvsJAkdQbKjZvEwL2cPM6GVG2THOtPMHnqodXd5vl9ioOtJR30tr6t/s320/Circuit-Board-Traffic.png)
Nevertheless, the Harvard Business Review has a helpful blog post by Hector Ruiz, the former CEO of chip maker (and Intel competitor) AMD, which talks about how chip technology is going to become even smaller and more efficient in spite of the increasing traffic:
To understand where the industry is today and where innovation is headed, it's helpful to think of the microchip as a metropolitan area and its components as buildings.
Decades of innovation have made the components of a microchip smaller and smaller. Yet chips have grown larger as more and more components are packed onto them to meet increased computing needs — making the interconnections between each minuscule part more spread out.
That "sprawl" is like the suburbs around a city. The same problems that apply to a sprawling metropolitan area apply to the microchip: getting from point A to point B requires increasing time and energy just like driving a congested freeway from a suburban home to a job downtown does. Information travels across bigger microchips with less efficiency at slower speeds, while consuming more power.
We can't increase the surface area of microchips much more without running into those problems, and we're getting closer every day to the limits of how small we can make components. So what next?
The trend in urban development today is to build up, bringing people back into city centers and transforming suburbs into functioning city units where jobs, shopping, and homes are as closely connected as possible. That idea applies to microchips in the form of three-dimensional interconnect. It's the off-ramp to Moore's Law: In 3D interconnect, engineers stack wafers like the floors of a skyscraper in extreme miniature, with vertical connections (think elevators communicating between floors) in addition to traditional horizontal links.
![](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/https/blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5GtIsdEXRKrJx0hrZavI4kzaq3q2fZ8SUqi8nbQU-x3n-KlZcn_s4_f1LahhvoxuBrA3IhxbagFg51HzBWdrnKliEchgEwmWJ5LCZQcS6pRwiDLB37ea4y9SY9GMRgitpz1RD/s200/Big-Data.png)
Much of that is “unstructured” – in the forms of images and videos stored at such venues as Facebook and YouTube. But increasing volumes of it come in the forms of measurable, actionable information. Gartner has predicted that 1.9 million new IT jobs in the US alone will be created to support “big data” over the next two years.
Eloqua and similar “marketing automation” programs that I’ve described are enabling marketers to do more with the onrush of data – to accomplish more (and more relevant) “marketing functionality” with fewer people, while at the same time changing the face of what needs to be done.
That bodes well for folks who understand the type of change that’s happening, what it is they’re dealing with.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
An impossibility in an impossible universe
This has been around for a while, but it's still enjoyable to watch:
Some may likewise be interested in "the Scale of the Universe" and "Powers of Ten."
And (on an entirely different note) maybe this too: "Protecting the Submarine Cables That Wire Our World."
Well, I believe I've now met my link love quota for the year. Thankyouverymuch!
Thursday, March 14, 2013
So long, and thanks for all the feeds
Don't panic.
Then again, I think fish is nice, but I also think Google isn't evil, so who am I to judge?
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Furniture Not Included
HT: Steve Zrimec