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On this blog I like to throw a wet blanket on tech news. Today will be no different.
Soon, your phone will be able to “know” when you are feeling blue. How will it be able to tell? By how you are using your phone – or rather, how you are not using your phone.
From an article: [The app] would rely on a bevy of data–location, social activity, physical activity, what a user is doing, etc.–to determine behavior patterns and recognize if they are behaving normally or seem to be deviating from their normal behavior, particularly in ways that suggest depression.
In other words, if you aren’t using your phone enough, you may be deemed depressed by the phone. I’m not sure yet what the phone will do upon realizing that you are not constantly entertaining yourself with your phone. Maybe it will extend a robot . . . → Read More: A phone that tells you when you’re sad
This month’s Wired magazine hypes the coming of the self-driving car (Let the Robot Drive, Feb 2012). The cover honks the advantages: No traffic jams. No crashes. Unlimited texting.
First of all, the idea that there will be no crashes or traffic jams with software-enabled navigation ignores the fact that all software has bugs. Systems and networks go down, passwords expire, connections to the database are lost, geese may soil the camera, ice may cause miscalculations – I’ll stop there. In short, there will be bugs and jams and accidents (unless this will be a system that is unlike every single other piece of software ever devised).
Still, the idea of self-driven cars does seem overdue. Even the flying car seems late in arriving, come to think of it. But once the gee-whiz moment wore off about self-driving cars, I thought of a side effect of this innovation that . . . → Read More: The self-driving car: what will robotic vehicles do to jobs?
If you haven’t heard of grey goo yet, let me introduce you. A “Grey Goo” scenario is an end of the world scenario where some biochemical concoction disassembles all carbon-based matter, leaving all living things in an anti-climatic pile of dirt (no meteor or mushroom clouds, just a goo). Sounds crazy of course, until you consider that synthetic materials, diseases, and bad things will be created in the future that we currently cannot comprehend. The goo, as advertised in tales of fear, like Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” warns of worst-case-scenarios.
The “best” tale of a grey goo-like happening is Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, where the chemical is called Ice-nine. A good science fiction ploy, Ice-nine is a seed crystal that on contact with water, causes all H20 to instantly freeze at abnormal temperatures. It can instantly freeze oceans, and of course, rivers . . . → Read More: Bird Flu and Science Fiction
 One of the remaining mysteries in science related to the big questions about “how did we get here” is: By what process did a single-cell organism change into a multicellular structure?
Today, the University of Minnesota reported that a simple lab test can answer that question. In a primordial broth of yeast cells, with lab equipment no more extravagant than their two hands, the researchers shook their yeasty container once a day, according to Wired News. Within two months, the single-celled yeast had clumped and formed multicellular structures ‘displaying all the tendencies associated with “higher” forms of life: a division of labor between specialized cells, juvenile and adult life stages, and multicellular offspring.’
Looking forward to more on this topic.
Image: Go Gophers!
I know I am supposed to feel deep chagrin at the possibility of the SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill being peddled in Washington. If the worst-case-scenarios are true, I have to wonder about my own site being targeted for takedown, since I blog about TV shows and usually take screen shots of the DVDs that I watch on my computer. Would this be a kind of piracy, or would the studios only take offense if I bash the show? (Fortunately, I only blog about shows that I really enjoy, so it’s mostly fanboy musings.) 
I am an all-things-Google user. Given the Google motto of “Don’t be evil” and its Edison-like power of innovation, I would like to believe in this company as a protectorate of the internet-as-we-know-it. Given that Google opposes SOPA, the hair on . . . → Read More: If SOPA passes, can I still blog about TV shows?
The market seems to be forever blowing bubbles. The cheerleaders create prophecies of absurd price heights. Then the prophecies become self-fulfilling amid a collective hysteria of easy money. Later, those in the know, the cheerleaders who created the hysteria in the first place, dump their holdings just before everyone realizes that the value solely exists in the imagination.
At least the current gold bubble centers around a single commodity, perhaps making its certain crash less painful to a wider audience than the crashes heretofore: the dot-com, the subprime, and the oil spike(s).
Like the ghosts of bubbles past, a quick Google search will bring up articles touting gold going to $5000 an ounce listed on bubble-cheerleader sites like CNBC. More modest cheerleaders, more nerdy cheerleaders with glasses, suggest that an ounce will only reach $2400.
Whenever these . . . → Read More: Did the gold bubble just have its Dow 36000 moment?
Not long ago, I picked up the book The $1,000 Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine. This book, only published in 2010, may have been eclipsed today with the announcement of the ION Proton DNA Sequencer which can reportedly sequence a personal genome for the magical sum of $1,000.
Why is this important? The pros and cons of having your genome sequenced are almost endless. Both sides can argue for utopia and dystopia. The utopians promote the idea of personalized medicine and clairvoyance about your health matters. The dystopians see wide potential for abuse of privacy. For instance, a pre-existing condition could be found at birth if someone will develop a disease, or is prone to cancer.
Insurance companies will leverage genome data for policies and have insight into each person on a . . . → Read More: The thousand dollar genome has arrived
One of the major scenes in Accelerating Returns centers on a product release that marries the mind to a device that can instantly allow people to learn any subject they desire. Not only learn the subject, but comprehend it with the ease of a Ph.D. Once again, the news keeps pace with science fiction. An article in Science released this month (Dec 2011) suggests that not only may this be possible, but a proof-of-concept already exists.
This is where my navel-gazing pursuit of writing fiction feels impotent. While I imagine wild products that could make everyone on earth an instant genius, someone in Kyoto already has enough data on the actual science to make the Matrix kind of learning possible.
Who wouldn’t like to learn Taekwondo like Neo does in the Matrix, or like Trinity (in the same movie) when she downloads the specs and . . . → Read More: Learn calculus and how to play piano instantly! Download to your head…
I thought of various science fiction ideas today when I came across an article on camera-toting beetles. From the Telegraph:
“Minute cameras and microphones mounted on the backs of beetles will help emergency services find victims trapped or buried underneath rubble…The bugs can then be released into collapsed buildings or other areas seen as too dangerous for human rescue teams.”
After my gee-whiz moment on the positive possibilities of this new technology, I experienced the usual unnerving thought that these bugs will be used in applications very different from rescue missions. For example, law-enforcement is the first thing that comes to mind, not to mention national and corporate espionage. Even football coaches would love to have a bug transmitting images of the opposing coach’s list of plays (remember the NFL version of Spygate?).
 First thing I thought of . . . → Read More: Spy bugs: Minority Report spider bots no longer far-fetched
The name C-Path almost sounds like an ancestor of C-3PO. A Stanford research program has taken the first step toward replacing physicians in the imaging field with a software program called Computational Pathologist (C-Path). Recent news reports that “…engineers and pathologists have trained computers to analyze breast-cancer pathology slides — and the machine is more accurate than the assessments of man (and woman).”
This is of interest to me because in my concoction of a sequel to Accelerating Returns, I plan to have a support group with people whose occupations have been replaced en masse by rapid advancements in technology. My imagined unemployed group includes truckers, pilots, teachers, nannies – but most important, among the members of the support group is a radiologist, whose skills, once so highly sought and paid for, has been reduced to the fate of the low-skilled. Stanford may beat me to the punch…in . . . → Read More: Is the Deep Blue of medicine on its way? Software pathologist beats human assessments of breast cancer
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