The Long View

SilverLining: Yes sheep can, too.

A remarkable video.

Fragmentation, convergence, contribution

The world is becoming more and more abstract. Certainties of the past are dwindling; we are moving in an ever escalating spiral of innovation, change and, more recently, turbulence.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this: cautious withdrawal and open embrace. 

Whichever you "chose" (and a lot could be said about that conscious or unconscious choice) will have an impact on our individual and collective outcomes and futures (yes, with a plural s). 

Yet there is more to it: the fragmentation of the traditional monoliths (state, company, society, family) is not just a breakup of cherished habits. It is also a powerful invitation to connect with people"other" side with the "other" context, with the people we do not usually do business (or buddiness) with. 

The opening of new intellectual and social portals produces and generates vast opportunities to talk to people of varying backgrounds, knowledge levels and semantic fields and linguistic jargons. Organisations, well established, like Ted, or more recent ones like Mindshare, highlight the growing desire to converge and exchange field notes with people from different scientific backgrounds.

In this interactive mash-up between social sciences, cognitive discoveries, business priorities and fractal movement, each of us can make a contribution. 

What we sometimes forget today, in the fearful chatter of recession an depression, is the basic fact that we still live in an economy of abundance, as measured in terms of available information, accelerated creativity and opportunities to shape and create the new paradigms for the century, while helping those around us that may be struggling today.

I am fundsmentally convinced that the sucess stories of the future will be written not by those who ask "What do I have to lose?" but by those who act on the question "How can I help you succeed?" 

The Internet of the future

The Internet as we know it, with endless sources of information, seemingly limitless resources and its tidal wave of downloaded documents is just the beginning.

We have seen nothing yet. Current search engines give us millions of references to places where to find information (a Google search on "leadership" gives me this morning about 183,000,000 entries in 0.14 seconds), but nothing in terms of how these pages relate to each other, and, more specifically, how they can be useful to me. In many ways, this way of finding information is already starting to look antiquated.

Enter the Semantic Web.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) under the "founder of the Internet" Sir Tim berners-Lee is working on the next generation internet. In the site's own words:

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.
…
The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?
Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.
The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Suddenly, the Web becomes my oyster.

The impact on business will be swift, and huge. Even top notch state-of-the-art websites of today will look outdated  as we move into the next era of mass information management. The Harvard Business Review in its February issue warns CEOs that they have a problem if they ask their CTOs about the semantic web and get a blank stare.

And you just thought you had it figured out?

Making 3 trillion dollars palpable

The famous three trillion dollar war has long haunted the media.

Here is a YouTube video (Found through Visualizing Economics) that displays this graphically - in typical Web 2.0 fashion. Chances (and, indeed hopes) are that many powerpoint presentations will eventually be retired for more memorable data display, as in this short film. These 2:40 minutes stick. 

The X-Prize for impossible challenges

The X-Prize Foundation launches and manages a series of competitions for "audacious and achievable goals".

It is based on the Orteig Foundation, which, in 1927, offered $25,000 to the person who crossed the Atlantic non-stop. A 25-year old won the prize. His name was Charles Lindbergh, and the rest is aviation history: the industry took off in a big way, in every sense of the word.

The X-Prize foundation rewards similar challenges: making the seemingly impossible a new reality. The Ansari X-Prize proposed to reward with $10M the team that made the first reusable spacecraft that could reach 100km in altitude twice in 10 days. In 2004, SpaceShipOne won the prize.

Stewart Brand, in a member email from the Long Now Foundation characterises a good Prize competition as follows:

• A very large cash prize
• A clear objective and simple rules; 
• A defined problem rather than defined solution; 
• A target that had become stuck; 
• Something that attracts maverick thinkers; 
• Something whose success will change people's sense of what is possible.

Currently running prizes:

• Extremely cheap genome sequencing
• Race for the 100mpg car (2.35l/100km).

One central reason for these prizes is not the bravado element. The organisers realised that the notion of the seemingly impossible is a relative one. Not along ago some things were considered impossible that we take for granted today: air travel; instant distant communication; heart transplantation; animal cloning… 

Even the economics make sense:  the quoted example is the current cost of AIDS is $80 billion a year, $800 billion a decade.  A successful $1 billion X-Prize for a cure for AIDS would be a hugely efficient economic event as well as a massive humanitarian breakthrough.

In a seminar, one of the organisers, Peter Diamandis proposed a comprehensive list of X-Prizes that could make huge contributions to mankind:

• First (private) Human on Mars
• Faster-than-light Communications
• Organ Replacement
• First Baby Born off Earth
• Babelfish - Instant universal translator .
• Flying cars
• Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test
• Self-replicating (non-biological) machines:
• Longevity:  Double the length of the healthy human lifespan
• Cancer:  Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it
• Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice
• Cure for AIDS
• Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet:  Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater
• SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence
• NY to Paris in 30 min
• Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship
• Human to orbit for <$100,000
• Apollo 8: Privately fly 1 person around the moon and safely back to Earth.
• Robot Sports:  (1) beat Tiger; (2) beat a championship soccer team; (3) beat a Formula-1 team
• Humans in Deep Ocean:  3 people to ocean bottom twice in 3 days.
• Image 100% of the Ocean Floor
• Backup the Biosphere:  Create a data backup of the internet and the top 10,000 species on Earth
• Replicator:  create out of energy and raw materials anything.
• Energy Extraction - e.g. ZeroPoint ; Cold Fusion
• Hot Fusion -- Sustained, net-energy positive
• Vision Restoration: Wire up a false eye for a blind person to gain 20:20 vision
• First brain transplant: full functioning of memory and motorfunction and lives > 1 day
• Download brain to a computer with all memory intact
• Brain to brain communication that are more than 10x the speed of audio conversations
• Develop real-time collective consciousness for a group of over 100 people
• Eradicate Hunger for > 90% of the human population
• Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population
• Carbon Sequestration: Create an economic device to extract/sequester carbon from the atmosphere
• Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential
• Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.

  It can be done - which would be your favourite? (You can also propose your own…)

Hologram conferencing

Telstra, an Australian communications company, has just demonstrated an Australian first in hologram conferencing. Found on news.com.au:

"In an Australian first, Dr Bradlow's life-sized, real-time hologram walked, talked and interacted with business executives at an Adelaide conference while he stood in front of cameras in Telstra's Melbourne office. Cameras and microphones in Adelaide allowed Dr Bradlow to see and hear his subjects from 725kms away as his audience watched his high definition image projected onto a transparent screen or "foil"."

The system needs comparatively low requirement infrastructure, is quite easy to set up, can save on executive time and contribute to saving the planet as well.

Holographic conferencing sounds like the real tele-vision. It will literally add a new dimension to remote work.

Fantastic new ways of data visualisation

Smashing Magazine has a fantastic web page on how to present data in novel and visually stunning ways. Three examples:

1. The 200 most successful websites on the Internet ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective in a mindmap. (And you know I love mindmaps) (see original article.

2. US population by density (Time magazine) (see original article).

3. Defense view of the earth: each country is represented by a circle that shows the amount of money spent on the military (size of circle) and what fraction of the country’s earnings that uses. 

There are tons more. If you want to see some colourful information - this is a good place to start.

This should be a foretaste of what our powerpoint presentations could look like in the years to come. 

One can always hope!

The 150 year old computer

Thought I'd look into the past once, rather than the future. It does put things into perspective.

Thought we had just invented the computer? Think again: the Scientific American describes the Babbage engine:

"Designed nearly 150 years ago but never actually built until recently, the Difference Engine No. 2 designed by Charles Babbage (1791 to 1871) is a piece of Victorian technology meant to tussle with logarithms and trigonometry long before the first modern computer...

Babbage's automatic computing engine consists of 8,000 bronze, cast iron and steel parts, weighs five tons, and measures eleven feet (3.4 meters) long and seven feet (2.1 meters) high. ...

Babbage is also credited with inventing the cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge and heliograph ophthalmoscope as well as uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses and Greenwich time signals."

For the full article and a slide show, click here

And, if you fancy a trip to California, you can even see the real thing. Those who like clocks are gonna love this.

A380 cockpit 360° view

Have a look at this stunning 360° view of the new Airbus A380 cockpit.

Morphing nanotech phone of the future

Nokia and the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre have come up with a concept for the mobile phone of the future, based on nano technology. They posted a joint video on YouTube.

Here is the link. It is worth watching.