TheHotSpring.net » Web 3.0

Pranav Mistry Explains Paradigm-shift ‘SixthSense’ Technology

Joseph Robertson — Sun, 23 May 2010 19:11:11 +0000

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Kindle DX: Beautiful, Focused, Comfortable, Imperfect, Inspired & Worth ‘Reading’

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:28:18 +0000

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.

Apple Projected to Release 10-inch Touchscreen Tablet, September 2009

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:14:14 +0000

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.

H1N1 Preparedness: Vaccines & Social Media, Tackling Pandemic on Multiple Fronts

staff — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:09:29 +0000

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.

Airtight Online Security Against Identity Theft (discussion)

staff — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:41:28 +0000

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.

The Internet’s Effect on the Human Mind (discussion forum)

admin — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:06:03 +0000

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 [...]

Scientists Have Built the World’s First ‘Invisibility Cloak’

Denver Lessing — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:20:28 +0000

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.

Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines

Joseph Robertson — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:48:24 +0000

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.

De-centralization New Rule in American Politics, New Media Key Empowerment Tool

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:01:16 +0000

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.

Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:19:07 +0000

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.

Google Looks at Making Mobile TV for ‘Android’ Platform

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:11:45 +0000

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.

Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

Joseph Robertson — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:24:22 +0000

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.

In Defense of Essay-length Online Writing

Joseph Robertson — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:50:58 +0000

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.

Recovery.gov to Track Recovery Spending, because “Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant”

Joseph Robertson — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:52:10 +0000

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.

Resilient Complexity versus Exposure to Entropy

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:33:47 +0000

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.

Transparency Network as Means of Restoring Financial Confidence

Joseph Robertson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:40:26 +0000

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.

Conventional Hybrid Super-computer Reaches 1,000 Trillion CPS

Joseph Robertson — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:44:04 +0000

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.

Zero-downtime Must Be a Standard of the Open Web

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:17:07 +0000

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.

FCC Chairman Says He Will Take Action to Prevent ISPs from Controlling Users’ Activities

Joseph Robertson — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:33:11 +0000

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.

Relational Data, the Semantic Web & Key Security Priorities

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:42:18 +0000

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.