Internet Debris
A collection by Neal McKenna
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Internet Debris
A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
To add your comments,
click here.
NOTHING posted here is mine!
Internet Debris does not claim rights
to any of the photos or media content posted to the site.
No copyright infringement is intended.
A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
To add your comments,
click here.
NOTHING posted here is mine!
Internet Debris does not claim rights
to any of the photos or media content posted to the site.
No copyright infringement is intended.
IBM’s Top Five Predictions
for 2011-15
IBM has unveiled its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” – five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. This list is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible. In the next five years, technology innovations will change people’s lives in the following ways:
You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
In the next five years, 3-D interfaces – like those in the movies – will let you interact with 3-D holograms of your friends in real time. Movies and TVs are already moving to 3-D, and as 3-D and holographic cameras get more sophisticated and miniaturized to fit into cell phones, you will be able to interact with photos, browse the Web and chat with your friends in entirely new ways.
Scientists are working to improve video chat to become holography chat – or “3-D telepresence.” The technique uses light beams scattered from objects and reconstructs them a picture of that object, a similar technique to the one human eyes use to visualize our surroundings.
You’ll be able to see more than your friends in 3-D too. Just as a flat map of the earth has distortion at the poles that makes flight patterns look indirect, there is also distortion of data – which is becoming greater as digital information becomes “smarter” – like your digital photo album. Photos are now geo-tagged, the Web is capable of synching information across devices and computer interfaces are becoming more natural.
Scientists at IBM Research are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data, working on technology that would allow engineers to step inside of a designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across an interactive 3-D globes, and visualizing trends happening around the world on Twitter – all in real time and with little to no distortion.
You’ll be able to see more than your friends in 3-D too. Just as a flat map of the earth has distortion at the poles that makes flight patterns look indirect, there is also distortion of data – which is becoming greater as digital information becomes “smarter” – like your digital photo album. Photos are now geo-tagged, the Web is capable of synching information across devices and computer interfaces are becoming more natural.
Scientists at IBM Research are working on new ways to visualize 3-D data, working on technology that would allow engineers to step inside of a designs of everything from buildings to software programs, running simulations of how diseases spread across an interactive 3-D globes, and visualizing trends happening around the world on Twitter – all in real time and with little to no distortion.
Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
Ever wish you could make your lap top battery last all day without needing a charge? Or what about a cell phone that powers up by being carried in your pocket? In the next five years, scientific advances in transistors and battery technology will allow your devices last about 10 times longer than they do today. And better yet, in some cases, batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices.
Instead of the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful, the result will be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery capable of powering for everything from electric cars to consumer devices. But what if we could eliminate batteries all together?
By rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the transistor, IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor to less than 0.5 volts. With energy demands this low, we might be able to lose the battery altogether in some devices like mobile phones or e-readers.
The result would be battery-free electronic devices that can be charged using a technique called energy scavenging. Some wrist watches use this today – they require no winding and charge based on the movement of your arm. The same concept could be used to charge mobile phones for example – just shake and dial.
Instead of the heavy lithium-ion batteries used today, scientists are working on batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful, the result will be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery capable of powering for everything from electric cars to consumer devices. But what if we could eliminate batteries all together?
By rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the transistor, IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor to less than 0.5 volts. With energy demands this low, we might be able to lose the battery altogether in some devices like mobile phones or e-readers.
The result would be battery-free electronic devices that can be charged using a technique called energy scavenging. Some wrist watches use this today – they require no winding and charge based on the movement of your arm. The same concept could be used to charge mobile phones for example – just shake and dial.
You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet
While you may not be a physicist, you are a walking sensor. In five years, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet and even your tweets will collect data that will give scientists a real-time picture of your environment. You’ll be able to contribute this data to fight global warming, save endangered species or track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world. In the next five years, a whole class of “citizen scientists” will emerge, using simple sensors that already exist to create massive data sets for research.
Simple observations such as when the first thaw occurs in your town, when the mosquitoes first appear, if there’s no water running where a stream should be – all this is valuable data that scientists don’t have in large sets today. Even your laptop can be used as a sensor to detect seismic activity. If properly employed and connected to a network of other computers, your laptop can help map out the aftermath of earthquake quickly, speeding up the work of emergency responders and potentially saving lives.
IBM recently patented a technique that enables a system to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis of seismic events, such as earthquakes, as well as provide early warnings for tsunamis, which can follow earthquakes. The invention also provides the ability to rapidly measure and analyze the damage zone of an earthquake to help prioritize emergency response needed following an earthquake.
The company is also contributing mobile phone “apps” that allow typical citizens to contribute invaluable data to causes, like improving the quality of drinking water or reporting noise pollution. Already, an app called Creek Watch allows citizens to take a snapshot of a creek or stream, answer three simple questions about it and the data is automatically accessible by the local water authority.
Simple observations such as when the first thaw occurs in your town, when the mosquitoes first appear, if there’s no water running where a stream should be – all this is valuable data that scientists don’t have in large sets today. Even your laptop can be used as a sensor to detect seismic activity. If properly employed and connected to a network of other computers, your laptop can help map out the aftermath of earthquake quickly, speeding up the work of emergency responders and potentially saving lives.
IBM recently patented a technique that enables a system to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis of seismic events, such as earthquakes, as well as provide early warnings for tsunamis, which can follow earthquakes. The invention also provides the ability to rapidly measure and analyze the damage zone of an earthquake to help prioritize emergency response needed following an earthquake.
The company is also contributing mobile phone “apps” that allow typical citizens to contribute invaluable data to causes, like improving the quality of drinking water or reporting noise pollution. Already, an app called Creek Watch allows citizens to take a snapshot of a creek or stream, answer three simple questions about it and the data is automatically accessible by the local water authority.
Your commute will be personalized
Imagine your commute with no jam-packed highways, no crowded subways, no construction delays and not having to worry about late for work. In the next five years, advanced analytics technologies will provide personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and route information to travelers than is available today.
IBM researchers are developing new models that will predict the outcomes of varying transportation routes to provide information that goes well beyond traditional traffic reports, after-the fact devices that only indicate where you are already located in a traffic jam, and web-based applications that give estimated travel time in traffic.
Using new mathematical models and IBM’s predictive analytics technologies, the researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that can affect commuters to deliver the best routes for daily travel, including many factors, such as traffic accidents, commuter’s location, current and planned road construction, most traveled days of the week, expected work start times, local events that may impact traffic, alternate options of transportation such as rail or ferries, parking availability and weather.
For example, combining predictive analytics with real-time information about current travel congestion from sensors and other data, the system could recommend better ways to get to a destination, such as how to get to a nearby mass transit hub, whether the train is predicted to be on time, and whether parking is predicted to be available at the train station. New systems can learn from regular travel patterns where you are likely to go and then integrate all available data and prediction models to pinpoint the best route.
IBM researchers are developing new models that will predict the outcomes of varying transportation routes to provide information that goes well beyond traditional traffic reports, after-the fact devices that only indicate where you are already located in a traffic jam, and web-based applications that give estimated travel time in traffic.
Using new mathematical models and IBM’s predictive analytics technologies, the researchers will analyze and combine multiple possible scenarios that can affect commuters to deliver the best routes for daily travel, including many factors, such as traffic accidents, commuter’s location, current and planned road construction, most traveled days of the week, expected work start times, local events that may impact traffic, alternate options of transportation such as rail or ferries, parking availability and weather.
For example, combining predictive analytics with real-time information about current travel congestion from sensors and other data, the system could recommend better ways to get to a destination, such as how to get to a nearby mass transit hub, whether the train is predicted to be on time, and whether parking is predicted to be available at the train station. New systems can learn from regular travel patterns where you are likely to go and then integrate all available data and prediction models to pinpoint the best route.
Computers will help energize your city
Innovations in computers and data centers are enabling the excessive heat and energy that they give off to do things like heat buildings in the winter and power air conditioning in the summer. Can you imagine if the energy poured into the world’s data centers could in turn be recycled for a city’s use.
Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. New technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office or houses.
A pilot project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.
Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. New technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office or houses.
A pilot project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.
Text via Kurzweil
Footage shows
world's first mobile phone?
British film archivists have released footage which apparently shows the world's first mobile phone being used - in 1922. |
The silent black and white film displays two women walking along an American street carrying a bulky flip-top phone. They then attach a wire from the device onto a fire hydrant before erecting an umbrella which has been converted into an aerial. One of the women then uses the phone to connect to the operator, who plays a gramophone record into a microphone for her enjoyment.
The rare film was recently unearthed in a dusty archive by British Pathé, which is trying to discover more details about the technology involved. Spokesman Mark Harris said: ''It's amazing that nearly 90 years ago mobile phone technology and music on the move was not only being thought of but being trialled."
''One of our researchers came across the clip and we were amazed that the idea was so old, we are used to budding technologies appearing in the 1950s and 60s but this is four years before television was first demonstrated. ...The phone even has a lid which makes it the first flip-phone we are aware of, although it is probably not going to win any design awards."
The footage appeared in Eve's Film Review issue 41, a cinemagazine for women which was run by Pathé between 1921 and 1933. A canister discovered with the film contained limited notes describing the silent action to viewers. It reads: ''Bless us, they're never still - always up to something new. And Eve's latest invasion is in the wireless world. ''It's Eve's portable wireless 'phone - and won't hubby have a time when he has to carry one!''
It is believed wireless phone technology was being experimented with in the 1910s and 1920s. Anyone who knows anything about the film, actors or phone should contact British Pathé.
Text via The Telegraph
15 Internet Predictions for 2015
Ten 100-year predictions
that came true
By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine
John Watkins predicted Americans would be taller, tanks would exist and
C, X and Q would no longer feature in our everyday alphabet
In 1900, an American civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000. How did he do?As is customary at the start of a new year (or reasonably close before or after it) the media is full of predictions about what may happen in the months ahead. But a much longer forecast made in 1900 by a relatively unknown engineer has been re-circulating in the past while.
In December of 1900, at the true start of the 20th Century (1901), John Elfreth Watkins wrote a piece published on page eight of an American women's magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, entitled: "What may happen in the next hundred years."
He began the article with the words: "These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible", explaining that he had consulted the country's "greatest institutions of science and learning" for their opinions on 29 topics. Watkins was a writer for the Journal's sister magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, based in Indianapolis.
The Post brought this article to a modern audience last week when its history editor Jeff Nilsson wrote a feature praising Watkins' accuracy. It was picked up and caused some excitement on Twitter. So what did Watkins get right - and wrong?
10 predictions Watkins got right...
1. Digital colour photography
Watkins did not, of course, use the word "digital" or spell out precisely how digital cameras and computers would work, but he accurately predicted how people would come to use new photographic technology.
A scan of the original article can be found onlineThis showed major foresight, says Mr Nilsson. When Watkins was making his predictions, it would have taken a week for a picture of something happening in China to make its way into Western papers.
People thought photography itself was a miracle, and colour photography was very experimental, he says.
"The idea of having cameras gathering information from opposite ends of the world and transmitting them - he wasn't just taking a present technology and then looking to the next step, it was far beyond what anyone was saying at the time."
Patrick Tucker from the World Future Society, based in Maryland in the US, thinks Watkins might even be hinting at a much bigger future breakthrough.
"'Photographs will be telegraphed' reads strikingly like how we access information from the web," says Mr Tucker.
2. The increased height of Americans
"Americans will be taller by from one to two inches."Watkins had unerring accuracy here, says Mr Nilsson - the average American man in 1900 was about 1.68-1.70m (66-67ins) tall and by 2000, the average was 1.75m (69ins).
Today, it's 1.76m (69.5ins) for men and 1.63m (64ins) for women.
3. Mobile phones
"Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn."International phone calls were unheard of in Watkins' day. It was another 15 years before the first call was made, by Alexander Bell, from one coast of the US to the other. The idea of wireless telephony was truly revolutionary.
4. Pre-prepared meals
"Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today."The proliferation of ready meals in supermarkets and takeaway shops in high streets suggests that Watkins was right, although he envisaged the meals would be delivered on plates which would be returned to the cooking establishments to be washed.
5. Slowing population growth
"There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in the United States."The figure is too high, says Nilsson, but at least Watkins was guessing in the right direction. If the US population had grown by the same rate it did between 1800 and 1900, it would have exceeded 1 billion in 2000.
"Instead, it grew just 360%, reaching 280m at the start of the new century."
6. Hothouse vegetables
Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer, said Watkins, with electric wires under the soil and large gardens under glass.
Large gardens under glass were already a reality, says Philip Norman of the Garden Museum in London, but he was correct to predict the use of electricity. Although coloured lights and electric currents did not take off, they were probably experimented with.
"Electricity certainly features in plant propagation. But the earliest item we have is a 1953 booklet Electricity in Your Garden detailing electrically warmed frames, hotbeds and cloches and electrically heated greenhouses, issued by the British Electrical Development Association.
"We have a 1956 soil heater, used in soil to assist early germination of seeds in your greenhouse."
7. Television
"Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span." Watkins foresaw cameras and screens linked by electric circuits, a vision practically realised in the 20th Century by live international television and latterly by webcams.8. Tanks
Tweets praised Watkins' accuracyLeonardo da Vinci had talked about this, says Nilsson, but Watkins was taking it further. There weren't many people that far-sighted.
9. Bigger fruit
"Strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren." Lots of larger varieties of fruit have been developed in the last century, but Watkins was over-optimistic with regard to strawberries.10. The Acela Express
"Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour."Exactly 100 years after writing those words, to the very month, Amtrak's flagship high-speed rail line, the Acela Express, opened between Boston and Washington, DC. It reaches top speeds of 150mph, although the average speed is considerably less than that. High speed rail in other parts of the world, even in 2000, was considerably faster.
And here are four predictions
he didn't do so well with...
1. No more C, X or Q
"There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because they are unnecessary."This was obviously wrong, says Patrick Tucker of the World Future Society, but also remarkable in the way that it hints at the possible effects of mass communication on communication itself.
2. Everybody will walk 10 miles a day
"This presents a rather generous view of future humanity but doesn't seem to consider the popularity and convenience of the very transportation breakthroughs - moving sidewalks, express trains and coaches - forecast elsewhere in the article," says Mr Tucker.3. No more cars in large cities
"All hurry traffic will be below or above ground when brought within city limits."However, many cities do have pedestrian zones in their historic centres. And he correctly forecast elevated roads and subways.
4. No mosquitoes or flies
"Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been exterminated."Watkins was really getting ahead of himself here. Indeed the bed bug is making a huge comeback in the US and some other countries. Maybe the end of the mosquito and the house fly is something to look forward to in 2100?
Text and images via The BBC
Spoooky Reading
What lies beneath...
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