"Mirror Worlds" is only one of David Gelernter’s big ideas. Another is “lifestreams”—in essence, vast electronic diaries. “Every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream,” he wrote in the mid-1990s together with Eric Freeman, who produced a doctoral thesis on the topic. Putting electronic documents in chronological order, they said, would make it easier for people to manage all their digital output and experiences. The latest trend is “life-tracking”. Practitioners keep meticulous digital records of things they do. The first self-trackers were mostly über-geeks fascinated by numbers. But the more recent converts simply want to learn more about themselves, says Gary Wolf, a technology writer and co-founder of a blog called “The Quantified Self”. They want to use technology to help them identify factors that make them depressed, keep them from sleeping or affect their cognitive performance. One self-tracker learned, for instance, that eating a lot of butter allowed him to solve arithmetic problems faster.
Read more at The Economist.
Saturday, November 13
A Sea of Sensors
RFID tags, which have been used to identify everything from cattle to tombstones, will not be the only type of sensor crowding the planet. Anything and anyone—machines, devices, everyday things and particularly humans—can become a sensor, gathering and transmitting information about the real world.
The concept of the “internet of things” dates back to the late 1980s, when researchers at Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in Silicon Valley imagined a future in which the virtual and the real world would be connected. In the following years much of the academic work concentrated on bringing this about with RFID tags, which are reliable, inexpensive and do not require a power supply. When exposed to a radio signal, they use its energy to send back the information they contain, mostly a long number identifying an object.
Now it is “active” tags (which have their own power source) and, even more, wireless sensors that are attracting most of the interest. As with all things electronic, these are becoming ever smaller and more versatile.
Engineers working on sensors think this will eventually lead to “smart dust”—sensors as small as dust particles that can be dispersed on a battlefield, say, to spy on the enemy’s movements. Such devices are still far off, but at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley a taste—or more precisely, a feel—of things to come is on offer even now. To demonstrate the firm’s new accelerometer, a device the size of a cigarette box that measures the acceleration of an object, Peter Hartwell, a researcher, puts it on his chest, and a graph of his heartbeat appears on a screen beside him. “This sensor”, he proudly explains, “is one thousand times more sensitive than those in your smartphone.”
Read more at The Economist.
The concept of the “internet of things” dates back to the late 1980s, when researchers at Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in Silicon Valley imagined a future in which the virtual and the real world would be connected. In the following years much of the academic work concentrated on bringing this about with RFID tags, which are reliable, inexpensive and do not require a power supply. When exposed to a radio signal, they use its energy to send back the information they contain, mostly a long number identifying an object.
Now it is “active” tags (which have their own power source) and, even more, wireless sensors that are attracting most of the interest. As with all things electronic, these are becoming ever smaller and more versatile.
Engineers working on sensors think this will eventually lead to “smart dust”—sensors as small as dust particles that can be dispersed on a battlefield, say, to spy on the enemy’s movements. Such devices are still far off, but at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley a taste—or more precisely, a feel—of things to come is on offer even now. To demonstrate the firm’s new accelerometer, a device the size of a cigarette box that measures the acceleration of an object, Peter Hartwell, a researcher, puts it on his chest, and a graph of his heartbeat appears on a screen beside him. “This sensor”, he proudly explains, “is one thousand times more sensitive than those in your smartphone.”
Read more at The Economist.
Radio Stabilized, Newspapers Slammed In 3Q
A quick glance over third-quarter results from big publishers and radio groups suggests their fortunes are diverging, following a long period of tandem decline. In short, radio is perking up as the economy enters a slow, tentative recovery -- but newspapers are continuing to suffer losses. Most big radio groups reported single-digit growth in revenues in the third quarter compared to last year -- modest, but noteworthy on the heels of two years of straight declines. Conversely, big newspaper publishers continued to struggle, with single-digit declines across the board.
Read More at Media Post.
Read More at Media Post.
Thursday, November 11
The Real and the Digital Worlds are Converging
WHAT if there were two worlds, the real one and its digital reflection? The real one is strewn with sensors, picking up everything from movement to smell. The digital one, an edifice built of software, takes in all that information and automatically acts on it. If a door opens in the real world, so does its virtual equivalent. If the temperature in the room with the open door falls below a certain level, the digital world automatically turns on the heat.
This was the vision that David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, put forward in his book “Mirror Worlds” in the early 1990s. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality,” he predicted. “Some part of your world—the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital—will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”
Yet it is the smartphone and its “apps” (small downloadable applications that run on these devices) that is speeding up the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. Smartphones are packed with sensors, measuring everything from the user’s location to the ambient light. Much of that information is then pumped back into the network. Apps, for their part, are miniature versions of smart systems that allow users to do a great variety of things, from tracking their friends to controlling appliances in their homes.
This was the vision that David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, put forward in his book “Mirror Worlds” in the early 1990s. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality,” he predicted. “Some part of your world—the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital—will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”
Yet it is the smartphone and its “apps” (small downloadable applications that run on these devices) that is speeding up the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. Smartphones are packed with sensors, measuring everything from the user’s location to the ambient light. Much of that information is then pumped back into the network. Apps, for their part, are miniature versions of smart systems that allow users to do a great variety of things, from tracking their friends to controlling appliances in their homes.
Smartphones are also where the virtual and the real meet most directly and merge into something with yet another fancy name: “augmented reality”. Download an app called “Layar” onto your smartphone, turn on its video camera, point at a street, and the software will overlay the picture on the screen with all kinds of digital information, such as the names of the businesses on the street or if a house is for sale.
Bestseller Lists for E-Books
The New York Times says it will begin publishing bestseller lists for e-book fiction and nonfiction in early 2011. The addition of two new lists for e-books points to the growing importance of the medium to the industry — and underlines the fact that what may be selling best in hardback or paperback may not be what’s selling best in electronic format. U.S. consumers are projected to spend $1 billion in e-books this year, according to a recent report from Forrester, who also expects that sales will surpass $3 billion by 2015.
Read more at Mashable.
Read more at Mashable.
Still in Standard Def
Even though 56% of U.S. households have high-def, more than 80% of television viewing is still done in standard definition, according to a report this week by Nielsen. Even on HD sets, though, about 20% of programs are viewed through non-HD feeds.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
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