Category Archives: The Brain

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Virtual Annotation … Aura at Microsoft
This is one of the Microsoft projects that I have been reading about and studying for the last week or so. I believe that this *is* going to be a big deal.

A number of year ago, some friends and I were reading an article in Wired magazine about “Virtual Graffiti”. The idea was that as more people in the future are wearing “augmented reality” glasses (glasses that allow a computer to overlay additional information into your view) then “Virtual Graffiti” becomes possible. I can simple “draw” a picture on a building, or add my comments to a sign using specialized software. The graffiti will not actually exist on the building or sign, instead being stored on my server on the Internet. Other people, when tapped into my server, would then “see” my graffiti when they looked around the world.

Aura research is moving in this same direction … and beyond. They are using a wider range of input devices to allow for the identification of an item or place, and then allowing for others to add annotations or information to that item or place.

This is another good article about Aura … and this is another good article.

This is extending our ability to “see” more about something we are near or can “scan” … adding to the saying about “… more than meets the eye!”

ETCon 2004: Eat Me and I’ll Kill You. Every product has a story to tell and some of them say “If you
eat me, I’ll kill you.” So says
Marc Smith,
Microsoft’s resident sociologists. Marc is describing a research
project called

AURA. Combine a PocketPC, a barcode reader, and Wi-Fi or mobile
wireless and you’ve got the ability to find out lots of information
about any product with a barcode. The project maps barcodes to
names. Once that’s done, all kinds of things are possible: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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More power in your phone
This is another great presentation … and I really like the “miniGPS” link that Phil posted. Over the last week or so I have seen numerous new applications for Cell Phones that are really extending the capabilities of the phone. GPS and Location Based Services are the biggest.

The miniGPS link is really fascinating as they are using a completely different model for location detection and notification. They have an application that monitors the actual cell towers that you are connected to, and the signal strengths. They then allow you to assign events to particular towers, etc. The example that the author uses is that his phone will alarm when it comes into the cell near his house … notifying him that his train station is coming up …

Kill Apps for Your Cell Phone. Rael Dornfest and others are talking mobile hacks. There was lots of fun things, but here’s a few killer cell phone apps I didn’t want to lose track of: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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Digital Communities, their Laws and Hierarchy
I would have liked to hear this presentation. This is covering an area that I am very interested in … digital identity and digital communities.

The hierarchy within a digital community is extremely important to maintain order, and to prevent chaos from spreading. If there is no hierarchy and “law” then the community will collapse. This looks like it was a fun presentation!

ETCon 2004: Robert Kaye on Social Networking-Based File Sharing Networks. Robert Kaye (slides) is describing social network file sharing systems.
The primary purpose of the social group is to share, discover, and
protect network. He proposes a hierarchy or tribes, chiefdoms, and
states with leaders at each level and “tribal elders” who set the
policies about who gets in. This sets the trust network. [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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Technorati and tracking the world of blogs
I really liked seeing that Technorati has developed a set of APIs for developers to begin to integrate with this site. This is also a major emergence in “Web Portals” … they are not just “human consumable” but are now becoming more and more “machine consumable”. IMHO, all of this contributes to the “soft take-off” that Vernor speaks about in his thoughts about the Singularity.

ETCon 2004: Dave Sifry on Technorati. I’m at the session being done by Dave Sifry, creator of
Technorati.com [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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The future applications run on … the Internet!
I didn’t go to ETCon this year … but Phil has been blogging his experience. I am catching up on reading and saw this one about Tim’s presentation. I agree completely. The next generation applications are emerging and the Internet is becoming the platform.

In addition, many of these applications are being developed in abstracted languages like Java, Perl, and/or PHP … so they are not even being developed on a particular operating system … but instead in virtualized environments above the operating system.

This is the future …

ETCon 2004: Tim O’Reilly Keynote. What’s on Tim’s Radar: [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

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Evolving perspectives of ‘science’ and ‘technology’
There are a couple of very powerful sentences in this article that I like. Both of them relate to how we perceive the universe, and how we believe the universe “works”.

Theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler has coined the phrase it from bit to convey the idea that the entire universe is the result of a series of yes-or-no choices that take place at the level of quantum mechanics.

I agree with these thoughts and believe that humans underestimate our ability to ’cause’ the universe. Consider the possibility that humans have the ability to cause quantum decoherence more than we believe. This is an area that borders on what we call “faith” …

“Scientific theories are more properly viewed not as discoveries but as human constructions. It’s already happening in physics: Philosopher of science Andrew Pickering suggests that the quark, which in its unbound state has not – and some say cannot – be observed, should be regarded as a scientific invention rather than an actual particle.”

This is another spin on the same theme. Consider the possibility that we create stories about the world that we perceive … and that these stories are then ‘true’ due to the fact that we live that they are true. This is often a very difficult concept for people to accept. It places considerable responsibility on the individual and the community. It would mean that we are where we are because of who we are being, and what we believe.

Most people are more comfortable being a ‘victim of the world’, instead of owning what they have created. We are starting to learn that maybe there is proof that Wheeler is accurate in his models …

The Computer at Nature’s Core. Think technology is just applied science? You’re wrong. It’s the other way around. A commentary by David F. Channell from Wired magazine. [Wired News]

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Wired about US jobs going to India
Yes … this is a well written article. When I grew up, I was lucky enough to live in Pittsburgh, PA. I grew up as the US steel industry was hitting some very hard times … and steel jobs were going off shore. I remember the arguements and anger … I remember how people suggested that it could be stopped … and *should* be.

Eventually people accepted the inevitable …

Jobs to India — A Broad Look [Slashdot]

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Planet-Lab … planetary-scale applications platform
While looking around at some interesting monitoring software (Ganglia link below) I came across an Intel Research sponsored project that I hadn’t seen before … PlanetLab. The home page of their web site states:

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. PlanetLab nodes support both short-term experiments and long-running network services. To date, more than 200 research projects at top academic institutions have used PlanetLab to experiment with such diverse topics as distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and distributed query processing.

This is a very impressive project, and I downloaded a lot of their documentation and courseware to read through. I can only imagine what is going to occur as we all contribute our computers into communities of machines like this!

The link below is the distributed monitoring system that I was checking out …

Ganglia 2.5.6 (Monitoring core). A scalable distributed monitoring system. [freshmeat.net]

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Another result of plentiful processing power
This is an article that takes a slightly different look at what we can expect from all of the processing power that is being made available by the evolution of microprocessors. I have commented on why I think this makes ‘virtualization’ more and more probable, however this article explores what we’ll get from the ability to ‘brute force’ analyze data.

The Rise of Intelligent Agents: Automated Conversion of Data to Information. Automated tools that can make sense out of mounds of information are just a few years away, consultants Martha Young and Michael Jude predict. Will your network be ready for the deluge? [Computerworld Software News]