7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth

Wired has a posted a tour of the Earth's potential tipping points...a few brief notes below, and more on their site:

But when the IPCC meets in 2014, tipping points — or tipping elements, in academic vernacular — will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but the possibility can’t be ignored.“The problem with tipping elements is that if any of them tips, it will be a real catastrophe. None of them are small,” said Anders Levermann, a climate physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Levermann’s article on potential disruptions of South Asia’s monsoon cycles was featured in a series of tipping element research reviews, published December 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also discussed were ocean circulation, polar icecaps, Amazon rainforests, seafloor methane deposits and a west African dustbowl. Each is stressed by rising planetary temperatures. Some are less likely than others to tip; some might not be able to tip at all. Ambiguities, probabilities a limited grasp of Earth’s complex systems are inherent to the science. But if any tip, it will be an epic disaster.

Read original article - '7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth'

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Food Mobilities Split?

Here's some news on the growing 'mobility of food' debate on how there is a schism between the increase in localized farmer's markets and local-sourced food; and the rigid dominance of corporate food giants:

As 2009 closes out, the dominant issues in the world of food could be lumped into two competing paradigms that have framed much of the decade. In one corner we have Big Food: factory farms, fast food restaurants, mystery meat, biotechnology and other examples of when the economics of scale are applied to how we feed ourselves. In the other corner is Small Food, whose players include farmers' markets, ecology-based agriculture and seasonal diets of minimally processed food. In a victory for small food, 2009 will perhaps be remembered as the year gardening returned to mainstream consciousness..

...In addition to kitchen gardens, another beneficiary of the recession is a 93-year-old great-grandmother named Clara Cannucciari, whose YouTube videos combine salty commentary about life in the Great Depression with hands-on demonstrations on how to crank out simple delicacies that average 50 cents a serving...

...It's impossible to discuss the year in food without an update on the activities of biotech giant Monsanto, whose year can be summed up in a single word: "chutzpah." In April, the company sued the sovereign nation of Germany when its agriculture minister banned the planting of a type of Monsanto corn engineered to thwart the advances of the corn-borer moth.

Read more at - 'Growing Local Takes Off, As Giant Agribiz Becomes More Dominant'

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The sinister powers of crowdsourcing

Here's a post From NewScientist that looks at some of the 'darker' sides to crowdsourcing... a taste of how this phenomenon will be appropriated?

So far crowdsourcing has been associated with well-meaning altruism, such as the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia or searching for lost aviators. But crowdsourcing of a different flavour has started to emerge.

Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico. To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010. An Iranian website is offering rewards for identifying people in photos taken during protests over June's elections.

Crowd chilling

Some people have declared those examples chilling. Now Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says the next step may be for such efforts to get web users to help out covertly.

Read more - 'The sinister powers of crowdsourcing'

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More Publications Moving To Digital Only

Here's some recent news following the (inevitable) trend of print publications gradually moving over to digital-only format:

The Online Information show at Olympia earlier this month coincided with a decision by the Guardian newspaper to cease print publication of the Technology supplement. From next year this will be available online only. So far there has been very little comment about this except for some extracts from Twitter and blogs that the Technology Guardian has republished in print. However the event could be seen as marking a new confidence for online publishing.

Academic journals have been moving towards a digital default for several years. Highwire Press, based at Stanford University Libraries, have started to promote e-books as well. They offer a hosting service for many university presses and journals. Oxford University Press (OUP) have added some handbooks alongside journals. OUP is also about to launch a series of online bibliographies with Web links selected by experts.

At a seminar presentation, Kristen Fisher Ratan explained (see YouTube video) that while it is important to make journals easy to discover, it is also important to make e-books more visible. They need to be seen within the workflow of students and professionals needing knowledge.

Read 'online'! at - 'More Publications Moving To Digital Only'

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Controlling the TV with a wave of the hand

Apparently the new word on the street is 'Touchscreens are so yesterday. Remote controls? So last century. The future is controlling your devices with a simple wave of the hand.' So..what do 'they' have to say about this? Well...

A wiggle of the fingers will change television channels or turn the volume up or down. In videogames, your movements will control your onscreen digital avatar. It's called 3D gesture recognition and while it may not be in stores this Christmas a number of technology companies are promising that it will be by next year. Softkinetic, a Brussels-based software company, is one of the leaders in the gesture-control field and has teamed up with US semiconductor giant Texas Instruments and others to make this touchless vision of the future a reality...

..."We're in that transition to a time when gestural input will be quite natural," Kay said. "From what I've seen of the demos they're pretty close."On the gaming front, "using a camera in real time to capture motion and then take the representative avatar from that and play it on a screen with other elements in a virtual world is a pretty compelling experience," he said.

Read more - 'Controlling the TV with a wave of the hand'

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The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology

This is a video - a TEDtalk India - with Pranav Mistry. 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.

For the video, see here -  'The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology'

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CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones

Oh dear, things seem to be going from bad to worse in the UK in terms of state surveillance. Here's some of the latest news (from The Guardian):

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Read more - 'CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones'

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Augmented reality is on its way

Charlie Brooker over at the Guardian has written a post on the 2010 coming of augmented reality. But then again, it has always been coming... just never fully birthed. But it may now be 'more ready than ever' to enter into our everyday gadgets:

Cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavements staring at your augmented-reality app. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.

Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.

Read more at - 'Augmented reality is on its way'

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Designing highways the slime mould way

New Scientist has an interesting post on how slime mould has been used as a way of mapping new transport routes.. here's goes, the slime's guide to the M25!

Take the slime road (Image: University of the West of England)

Jeff Jones and Andrew Adamatzky, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, wondered if biology could provide an alternative to conventional road planning methods. To find out, they created templates of the UK using a sheet of agar on which they marked out the nine most populous cities, excluding London, with oat flakes. Then, in the place of London, the pair introduced a colony of P. polycephalum, which feeds by spawning tendrils to reach nutrients, and recorded the colony's feeding activity (see picture).

Most of the resulting "maps" mimicked the real inter-city road network, but some offered new routes. For instance, the motorway between Manchester and Glasgow passes along the west coast of the UK, but the slime mould preferred to travel east to Newcastle and then north to Glasgow (arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967). "This shows how a single-celled creature without any nervous system - and thus intelligence in the classical sense - can provide an efficient solution to a routing problem," says Jones.

Read original article - 'Designing highways the slime mould way'

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Technology predictions for 2010

Charles Arthur from The Guardian has revealed his annual list of tech predictions including the year ahead for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Internet and social sites... here's an example:

Government

18) The Digital Britain bill will fall as the election (in May?) intervenes and kills off legislation in progress.

19) The freeing of Ordnance Survey map data (in April) will see rival companies vying to produce paper maps specialised for various niches such as ramblers and climbers, and an explosion in websites that mash all sorts of government content against maps.

20) If elected, the Tories will also back the freeing of Ordnance Survey data (rather than privatising it) and of other government data.

Being social

27) Facebook's growth will level off in the western world. There's only so many people you can encourage to poke and friend you.

28) Twitter will start making money – not just through searches (it charges Google and Bing), but also through charging companies for various sorts of access to its network and data.

29) AOL will sell Bebo and/or News Corporation will sell MySpace; in either or both cases, at a substantial loss.

Read more here - 'Technology predictions for 2010'

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A street-legal airplane

Here we go again, more developments in the 'flying car'... or rather I should say, in 'personal transport'. Because now when you land your personal commuter airplane at the airport, you can just fold up the wings and drive home. Conversion from plane to street-legal auto takes less than 30 seconds. And it flies on regular petrolium.... yet with an anticipated price of around $200,000 - all ready for delivery in 2011.!

See here for more info and pictures: Terrafugia

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Chips in brains will control computers by 2020

Here we are.. a glimpse of the future.. when dictating is dead, and replaced by 'thinktate' - the art of mentally transferring your thoughts to the computer. Sci-fi? Well, not really - according to Intel's new chip design:

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- Big Brother won't be planting chips in your brain against your will. Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

The beginning of a microchip future.... for the sake of progress.

Read more at - 'Chips in brains will control computers by 2020'

How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

Now that airport security is on a new drive for further scanning methods after the appallingly concocted 'underpant bomber' episode, this development in terahertz waves is interesting. It has been said that new scanning methods were set to employ terahertz waves - lets hope this is not the case after these recent findings:

Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance. The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material...

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable....

Go to original site - 'How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA'

'Road trains' get ready to roll

Welcome back all readers to another year! 2010 looks set to be an uncertain and unpredictable year indeed - yet mixed with there it seems that the year ahead will also be open to tremendous opportunities and vision. Some things are already on a 'roll', including this plan for cars on EU roads to be linked together in a 'train' using wireless sensors:

An EU-financed research project is looking at inexpensive ways of getting vehicles to travel in a 'platoon' on Europe's motorways.Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles - cars, buses and trucks will be mixed in each one.

The EU hopes to cut fuel consumption, journey times and congestion by linking vehicles together.

Early work on the idea suggests that fuel consumption could be cut by 20% among those cars and trucks travelling behind the lead vehicle.

Spanish trials

The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train. Those in following vehicles could take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV, while they travel along the motorway. Their vehicle would be controlled by the lead vehicle. Funded under the European Commission's Framework 7 research plan, Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) is aimed at commuters in cars who travel long distances to work every day but will also look at ways to involve commercial vehicles.

Read original article - ''Road trains' get ready to roll'

Festive Wishes

I wish to send warm festive greetings and say HAPPY CHRISTMAS to all readers of this blog. And to all and every person too - so please pass on this message.

MAY 2010 BRING HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS TO EACH ONE

Each person matters - so a BIG THANK YOU for everyone who has visited this blog.

Night vision for cars

New technology for those late-night drives... it seems that Bosch has now released an enhanced version of its night vision system, first featured in this year's new Mercedes E-class:

The new system can identify pedestrians and alert the driver to their presence.Like its predecessor the system, dubbed "Night Vision plus" by the German electronics giant, provides a high-contrast image of the area immediately ahead of the vehicle. The difference is that the image is also analysed in the latest version. As pedestrians are identified and highlighted on the screen, the driver has much more time to take action than they would if relying on the beams of headlamps alone.

The technology, known within Mercedes-Benz as "Night View Assist Plus" is also available on the latest S-Class.The Bosch active night vision system uses four main components to provide an accurate reproduction of the area immediately ahead of the vehicle. Infrared headlights with a range of 150 metres – three times further than conventional dipped headlights – "illuminate" the road, and what they pick up is recorded by a camera behind the windscreen. The images are then processed by a control unit and shown on a high-resolution display in the cockpit.

Read more - and see the video - at: 'Night vision for cars'

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HAL's bells: IBM makes 'thinking computer' breakthrough

Not there yet...but the tech-boffins are scurrying to get closer to the Tech-Holy-Grail... here's the latest over at IBM:

Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain - an effort that tests the limits of technology.Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different colour, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks - by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things - they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near.But this week researchers from IBM are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory - 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 per cent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 per cent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.

Read more at - 'HAL's bells: IBM makes 'thinking computer' breakthrough'

US to take greater control of the Internet

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has an article on the proposition to increase US government control over the Internet - in the name of increasing competition and expanding service!

Federal regulators are considering whether the government should take greater control of the Internet and ask consumers to pay higher phone charges in order to provide all Americans with cheaper access to broadband Internet service.The Federal Communications Commission Wednesday will lay out the case for expanding broadband Internet service, outlining current obstacles to making it widely available. The agency is considering whether to force Internet providers to share their networks with rivals and raise fees charged on consumer phone bills to pay for the broader access.

The proposals, which have sparked criticism from telecommunications and cable companies, represent a reversal from the Bush Administration, when regulators cut back on government control of Internet and telephone service.

The new commission, controlled by Democrats, is considering whether more government control is needed to ensure competition and more affordable Internet service.

Read original article - 'US to take greater control of the Internet'

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Secret CCTV cameras fitted INSIDE people's homes to spy on neighbours outside

Another step on the road to a complete surveillance state... as civil surveillance takes its test:

Town halls are installing cameras inside suburban homes to spy on the neighbourhood.The Big Brother tactic - which is allowed under the anti-terrorist Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - is being used by Croydon council in South London to catch those suspected of 'anti-social behaviour'.The CCTV cameras are placed inside the house of a willing resident, but trained on the street.If deemed successful, the £1,000 cameras could be installed across the country to catch low-level offenders...

...Charles Farrier, of the campaign group No-CCTV, said: 'There is no evidence they act as a deterrent and we should be concentrating on the root problem anyway and working to gel our communities.'

Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said: 'Unless the public are aware of where these cameras are, I believe this council should be taken to court for a breach of human rights.'

The cameras are used to look for anti-social behaviour (file picture)

Critics say the scheme has echoes of the East German Stasi secret police, which recruited members of the public as spies.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1228876/Secret-CCTV-cameras-fitted-INSIDE-peoples-homes-spy-neighbours.html#ixzz0XIIUOJKe

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Read article - 'Secret CCTV cameras fitted INSIDE people's homes to spy on neighbours outside'

India to have 'billion plus' mobile users by 2015

First it was all about China and its rise of mobile & Internet users.... now India is back on the map:

India could have more than one billion mobile phone users by 2015, with the bulk of that growth in rural areas, one of the country's top telecom executives said Wednesday. Manoj Kohli, chief executive of India's biggest mobile phone group Bharti Airtel, told an industry conference in Hong Kong that his firm is aiming to almost double its customer base to 200 million people in the next few years. "Achieving a billion plus (Indian mobile users) by 2015 is possible," he told the Mobile Asia Congress, the region's largest telecom industry gathering.

"The largest growth will happen in the rural market," he said, adding that pricing wars between providers were knocking down rates in the Indian market and making phones affordable to more people. Competition in India has become even more aggressive as new players unleash deeper price cuts with innovative per-second billing plans that have pushed call costs down to less than a cent a minute.

"There is hyper-competition like no other place in the world," he said.

India is the world's second-biggest cellular market with more than 400 million users, lagging behind only China, which has over 600 million users.

Read more at - 'India to have 'billion plus' mobile users by 2015: executive'

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