Your phone knows a lot about the world around you. If you take that intelligence and combine it in the cloud with that of every other phone, we have an incredible snapshot of what is going on in the world right now. Weather updates can be based on not hundreds of sensors, but hundreds of millions. Traffic reports can be based not on helicopters and road sensors, but on the density, speed, and direction of the phones (and people) stuck in the traffic jams.
The exponential growth of the Web — from Web 2.0 to 20.0 — coupled with the explosion in digital-physical systems convergence via sensors and mobile broadband is turning the Internet inside out… and turning it into the Outernet.
Scientists have come up with the first comprehensive map of global shipping routes based on actual itineraries. The team pieced together a year’s worth of travel itineraries from 16,693 cargo ships using data from LLoyd’s Register Fairplay and the Automatic Identification System, which tracks vessels using a VHF receiver and GPS.
Javid Muhammedali, Monster.com Director of Product Management, explained two ways that semantic search can help. First, it can understand the meaning of words and use the context to help determine meaning. Second, it understands the hierarchy of concepts in such areas as job titles, skills, industries, etc. The context allows it to understand the different uses of a word like, Washington, when used in an address, school, company, person, etc.
Torben Mikkelsen, of Risoe DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark, and his colleagues [are] working on a way for individual generators to scan the air upwind and adjust the position of their blades in anticipation.
Today…the familiar letters of the alphabet are more abundant than ever. One of the most astonishing consequences of the rise of digital media, and particularly the Internet, is that we’re now surrounded by text to an extent far beyond anything we’ve experienced before. Web pages are stuffed with written words. Text crawls across our TV screens. Radio stations send out textual glosses on the songs they play…I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing. Even if we come to be outfitted with nifty Web-enabled brain implants, most of the stuff that’s beamed into our skulls will likely take the form of text. Even our robots will probably be adept at reading. What will change — what already is changing, in fact — is the way we read and write. In the past, changes in writing technologies, such as the shift from scroll to book, had dramatic effects on the kind of ideas that people put down on paper and, more generally, on people’s intellectual lives. Now that we’re leaving behind the page and adopting the screen as our main medium for reading, we’ll see similarly far-reaching changes in the way we write, read, and even think.
“The new ecology of things (NET) is a research initiative to explore emerging forms of interactive communication brought about by pervasive networked technologies. The project began as a studio class run by Art Center’s Graduate Media Design Program and has evolved into a conceptual model, a forum for discussion, an ongoing series of projects, technological inventions, and new issues for design pedagogy.”via ryvarga
According to Ed Brill, IBM chief of product management for Lotus software, Project Vulcan represents the future direction for Lotus Notes. It’s described as combining email, profiles, calendars, and social analytics in one spot, and it will use analytics engines and business-specific scenarios to make collaboration more relevant and focused. It also promises to include developer-friendly services and APIs. Shades of Google Wave, with a bit of IBM’s analytics oomph behind it. But user interface-wise, it’s all Facebook - judging by the “conceptual representation” graphic Mills supplied:
(via TechCrunch) Extracting meaning from the Web is huge project that is very difficult to do at large scale. Keyword search only skims the surface of meaning locked in Web pages. Various semantic search technologies try to go deeper by adding structured data to web pages so that the Web can be treated more like a database. But adding semantic metadata to the Web is laborious and time-consuming. Just look at Twine. It’s approach so far has been to add semantic data only to the Web pages members save to the service.
![Green energy: Smarting from the wind | The Economist
Torben Mikkelsen, of Risoe DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark, and his colleagues [are] working on a way for individual generators to scan the air upwind and adjust the position of their blades in anticipation.](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kx28ecDQj81qzs4rbo1_250.jpg)
