July 28, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.
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July 27, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The Financial Times is the latest publication to weigh in on mounting expectations that Apple will release a touchscreen tablet computer this fall. There are rumors the computer maker is hoping to counter the rise of cheap netbooks with something lower-cost than their standard Macs and with a larger screen based on the model of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The news could mean a breakthrough in personal computing standards and even portability of the workplace.
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July 16, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The influenza A/H1N1 virus, popularly known as “swine flu” was officially declared a pandemic in June. Shortly after the pandemic declaration, it was confirmed that H1N1 was confirmed in human patients in 74 countries. In the 5 weeks since then, it has spread rapidly and is now confirmed to have caused human infection in 140 countries.
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June 10, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
How can we reach the state of affairs in which online activity is entirely secure against identity theft? Hyper-convergence means media and services of all kinds will be increasingly integrated across a broad-spectrum multi-media fabric, where one’s actions and interests, private information and financial data, will be increasingly widespread.
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May 31, 2009 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Any communicative medium allows us to deliver cognitive information into a shared space of consciousness, and ideally, to deliver much of our “known” reality to another mind. Media shape information, decide how it can be delivered, and, how we receive and interpret it.
“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is [...]
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May 8, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: No Comment Yet
The tiny surface of the first effective ‘invisibility cloak’ allows light to bend around it in such a way that the optical density of an object underneath it is altered, generating the illusion of invisibility. There are ongoing efforts to build computerized overlays or built-in cladding that would allow even large vehicles like military tanks to appear invisible at a distance.
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May 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Amazon.com’s Kindle and Kindle 2 devices have revolutionized the market for electronic books. Wireless devices allowing download of new books in just minutes, for reading on a high-resolution e-paper screen, which reads much like real paper, they have made the experience of hosting and paging through e-books much more user-friendly. Now, Amazon has introduced the Amazon Kindle DX, which will ship this summer, with a screen 2.5 times larger, to make it possible to read magazines or PDF documents as designed.
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April 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The election of 2008 is historic for a variety of reasons: it saw the election of the first African American president, a second consecutive “wave election” —not seen since 1930 and ‘32—, saw two women come very close to the most powerful job in the world, mobilized millions of voters and saw record amounts of fundraising from “small donors”. It was, however, also a watershed moment in the fundamental decentralization of the American political process.
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April 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Electronic medical records (EMR), like health insurance, benefit from being spread over the widest pool possible. A system that aggregates and cross-references data from hundreds of millions of patients can find statistical evidence far more efficiently than today’s statistical modeling for health problems and solution improvement.
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March 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told PBS’ Charlie Rose that the search juggernaut is looking at applying its mobile phone OS Android to enabling phones to act as mobile TVs. Noting that within years, up to 5.5 billion people may be using mobile phones, Schmidt told Rose that the technology now empowers people the world over with access to huge amounts of information, and that TV functionality will add transparency to the positive outcomes of this development.
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March 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
The Amazon Kindle is a nice device, and it handles its job well, but it is just a very clumsy start to what will be a technological convergence few in mainstream media (and publishing) are anticipating, though it may not be far off. The page-perfect, for lack of a better term, e-reading device will make portable electronic reading easier and more comfortable than ever, packing huge amounts of data, as well as wireless downloading and even browsing capability, into an ultrathin tablet touchscreen.
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February 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Brevity is the soul of wit. True enough. But, information that brings us to a more enlightened approach to understanding the world often needs to “play out” in a substantial interaction of ideas, a “testing” of logical thought-processes as relating to concept and interpretation, an essay. There has long been a presumption that online writing must be brief, due to the “above the fold” bias of attention-span deficient online readers, but I would argue that the medium is actually ideally suited to something very different.
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February 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.
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January 31, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.
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December 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets. An open banking transparency network would reduce the motivation for wrongdoing and privilege more reliable sources of information, creating confidence and motivating sound market dynamics.
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December 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.
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July 27, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Freedom of information and the standard of net neutrality —connection providers not controlling content or access to content in any way— require that information posted online not be removed, blocked, or made unavailable to readers, so long as the publisher wishes to include that content. For content publishers and content consumers to shape the web experience they desire, not only do we need an ethical standard of total net neutrality, but we need a technical standard of zero-downtime bandwidth guarantees.
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July 12, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take regulatory action to prevent internet service providers (ISP) from blocking or controlling users’ access to online content. The announcement came from the FCC chairman after Comcast moved to manipulate internet access —limiting their freedom to navigate— who had engaged in file-sharing online services, presumably in an effort to control access to content for which the cable provider was not being paid per-content-access.
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July 2, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.
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May 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.
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May 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers. Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics.
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May 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.
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May 2, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.
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April 23, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.
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March 23, 2008 :: jr3o :: 6 Comments
The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm”, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.
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March 17, 2008 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.
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March 17, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
A revolutionary web-based social networking project, Witness.org has created a platform for delivering evidentiary video documenting human rights abuses for the collective conscience of the online world. ‘The Hub’, as the video sharing platform is called, is designed to ensure that individuals who have documented potential human rights abuses, or who are able to give their testimony via video, can put their message before the eyes of the world.
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January 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The potential for broad-scope “electronic agents” —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.
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September 10, 2007 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
HotSpring is a new debate and discussion forum, aimed at providing users with the flexibility to pool their resources, spout outlandish ideas, and test the ability of readers to suspend their disbelief long enough to contemplate new directions in science, technology and communications.
The project is aimed at anyone with a mind for getting beyond the obvious and embracing the subtleties of truly innovative thought, and our ultimate goal will be to create a deep-running current of talent and criticism that will lead to opportunities for the implementation of complex technological solutions and genuine conditional compensation for those who contribute materially to their development.
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