The Robots are Coming!

Robots and humans have begun working alongside each other in Japan's Aizu Central Hospital. We still have a long way for them to go, but an early foothold for our new benevolent servants has been established.

The Misinformation Super Highway

Tim Berners-Lee has raised attention to the issue that the Internet may become a misused force if left unchecked. It could be used for misinformation and undemocratic purposes. I do believe that this is a very real concern, especially when you see explosions in trends like MySpace and Digg. While being extremely open for communication, they are potentially manipulatable, even Google has this power, but we are fortunately in the position of them being somewhat trustworthy and benevolent. This is a courtesy though, not a right.

So how do we address this problem, well one way is through democratic systems like Digg. However, it suffers what I call the Digg effect - as it grew and became more popular the content got strange, and stupider, leaving Slashdot on top for intellectual tech news despite losing it's throne for a short period. How can this be addressed? By building a democratic meritocratic system for content prioritization, and deliver it based on global and peer networks.

Why has nobody built this? No idea. Could Yoans use it? Definately. Would it be hard to build? Not really. Could I do it? No. If anybody wants to help build this, half of it is already done in PHP with Pligg.

Robot Fish

I'm not entirely sure why we need it, but I thought this video of a robotic fish was pretty cool. If you didn't get the Robot Chicken reference, it is seriously something you should watch.

Cuban smoking for the GooTube Victory

Google, omnipresent and all powerful. Well, all powerful might be a stretch, but think about this.

Money is power - Google controls plenty of that.

Knowledge is power - Google controls plenty of that

People are power - with this new YouTube acquisition, Google has this in spades.

On the plus side, Google has attained all of this power without guns. How? Because they are pretty damn smart, as is suggested in this article by Mark Cuban, outlining the nitty gritty of the Google YouTube deal.

Are we ready for E-Democracy?

I think the answer to that is a pretty obvious no, and a very worrying one at that. When our votes and our democracy are the basis of our freedoms, it is important that any changes we make to the system have fail safe mechanisms and are open, transparent and tested. Security through obscurity is no security at all. These machines should be developed as open source projects with heavy funding and clear, authenticatable paper trails produced. Until this happens, the Government is in the hands of Diebold.

Music takes a cultural leap

Jamendo is basically a streamlined version of the music part of MySpace, only designed much better. I can see this speeding up cultural spread to a whole new level.

Meet George Jetson

For those of you that thought the Segway was a transport revolution, here is something more likely to take off. A perosnal helicopter. It is also a lot more practical than a rocket pack since they are incredibly limited by distance, and the fuel supply they can take.

This runs on gasoline, so while it won't put a stop to global warming, it will cut down traffic, which will reduce emissions and I'd have to imagine this is more economical than pushing one person around in an SUV, or sedan for that matter.

Who killed the electric car?

I was amazed to find out that many of the energy goals that we are seeking to achieve had already been solved but were hampered from adoption for a myriad of political reasons. This documentary (who knows how long it will be hosted at Google) is a real eye opener about the future/ present that we could be living in today thanks to technological advances.

You can find out more about the movement to get "plugged in" at http://www.pluginamerica.com/

Here is a Daily Show interview with the director Chris Paine

Behold the Rubens Tube

This is a neat little physics experiment that made me think about how radically education has changed to favour the autodidact today. Places like http://cnx.org/ (Connexions) are redefining education and delivering it freely to people. Which makes me start to question the place of our institutions like univesities and schools. Whilst they are still obviously important, how should our qualifications be assessed? How should education be assessed?

Gogo Gadget Girl
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/actroid_der2_fembot.php