Sustainable development is not about national security or energy independence. This is about leaving in harmony with our environment globally and enabling the next technological revolution beyond the 21st century.
SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics standard, has been held-up hostage of its lack of support in Internet Explorer for the last 6 years since SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation.
Google is now fixing this with SVG Web, a Javascript library that emulates SVG but it still requires the Flash plugin.
The other option is to use Raphaël, an outstanding Javascript dynamic vector graphic library that relies on SVG in SVG-capable web browsers and VML in IE. Raphaël which is currently at version 0.8.6 is growing fast as the solution for Plugin-free vector graphics on the web. I use Raphaël for my current project for dynamic charts.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTTP, HTML and URLs, tells us about the genesis of the World-Wide-Web. Then Tim reminds us that there is still very little data available on the web. From there he explains that we need data relationships, what he calls Linked Data.
Wikipedia contains a lot of data. DBpedia extracts that data out of the text and make it available as Linked Data.
Governments around the world hold a lot of data, once this data becomes available, new services can emerge.
Lots of data is also in social networks, although it is still not liberated from services, i.e. it is not available as Linked Data.
Over the last few years, user interfaces are showing signs of evolution to brake away from the keyboard, mouse and display. GPS, motion sensing appeared into everyday mobile phones enabling a new range of powerful application.
Siftables are much more aware of their environment than any device before them, they can: - sense the proximity of other devices, - know where they are compared to each other - know their orientation, tilt, - display and sound their understanding of the world around them
I like to think of these devices as computing cells for which I can 'sense' yet another new range of applications. Adding new senses to these cells opens the door to unforeseen applications that the next generation of startups will build.
Imagine the applications of cells that would have a combination of senses: - physical pressure applied on them, strain, viscosity, - electric, magnetic, electromagnetic - sounds - temperature, humidity, atmospheric presure, flow, - chemical - optical radiation, - ...
But also, what if these cells had the ability to move either by themselves - e.g. by altering their shape like early organisms - or by communicating with their carrier - e.g. a robot arm, a human being - ?
What if these cells could physically attach to each other, then detach? This could be done using electromagnets, physical hooks, altering their surface, or chemical or electro-chemical structure.
What if these cells could be even smaller, much smaller, each with a single sense, and built cheaply enough that millions of them could interact to form complex systems?
What if these cells could get the energy they need to function directly from their environment or energy-producing surrounding cells?
What if these cell systems could 'build to order' new cells to duplicate themselves, possibly with slight variations, or even random errors?
Do you think current patent laws would allow patenting most of the above in the next few years, or even decades, although this blog is public?
On a philosophical note, I'd like to add that this is evolution in the making. Although our ego likes to believe that us, humans, create these objects, I believe that nature is using us as part of the environment to enable a new step in evolution. Just like early sea organisms created much of the oxygen required for us to breathe, life is currently evolving from analog (biological) to digital by using humans as a catalyst.
"... it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."
If what they claim is true, Wolfram Alpha may be the first usable technology that "understands" and that therefore I could accept as being an intelligent system.
This is not just a knowledge base. What Wolfram does is (to try to) understand a question in order to compute an (hopefully) accurate response based on knowledge available in built-in models.
The system is based on models meaning that it will be limited by the actual power of these models. Also it is designed to answer questions for which there is a consensus and factual answer.
It will not be able to give opinions about which social network is the best but it might be able to give a comparative GDP graph of 3 countries over a set period of time, much like an intelligent report generator could do.
The system is not a search engine although it might be able to provide sources related to its answers, in which case this would make it a very valuable tool.
I started blogging not very long ago, at http://jean.posterous.com. Over the months this first blog has narrowed into a sustainable development blog and I am not comfortable anymore to post articles regarding technology there. Hence this new blog dedicated to technology that really matters.
Technology that matters is technology that have the potential to profoundly change the world that we live in. This should not be yet another technology business news blog, there are plenty of those already available. I hope to discuss very early stage startup technologies or even better pre-startup technologies, unfounded ideas and concepts, core-technology open source projects, universities breakthroughs.
Another very important thing is that this blog is open to other posters, I will only moderate based on the following criteria that may slightly evolve over time:
- It has to be about technology that really matters, see above,
- it should explain why this matters if this is not obvious,
- if this is about a breakthrough it should be scientifically understandable, no perpetual-motion machines here,
- no hype, this is not a place for advertizing new products or startups, unless it makes a real difference
- no technology receipes about how to achieve some effect, even if this is briliant
If I decide to not publish an article, and I hope I will not have to, I will reply to the sender with the reason and if possible with recommendations to modify the article for it to comply.
Comments will also be moderated with a very simple rule:
- no insults
To post to this blog, just send your post in an email to post@techmatters.posterous.com. But before you can post I need to add your email address to the list of contributors. For that you can contact me on skype at uiteoi or directly send an email to uiteoi on the popular web mail service from google.
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