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7/22/2009 Permalink
  This article will self-destruct after you have read it  Until now, computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview. A lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating, inconvenient or just embarrassing details from the past. The University of Washington has developed a way to make cloud information expire after a set time period. Not even the sender can retrieve them. "If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place," said UW computer scientist Tadayoshi Kohno. The team of UW computer scientists developed a prototype system called Vanish that can place a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. After a set time text written using Vanish will, in essence, self-destruct. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
7/17/2009 Permalink
Using the cloud to replace the old, obsolete academic journal system The myExperiment Virtual Research Environment is an attempt to replace the old, obsolete academic journals for sharing research breakthroughs with a 21st century cloud-based social networking site for scientists. myExperiment enables scientists to share digital Research Objects associated with their research. Rearch Objects contain everything needed to understand and reuse a piece of research, including workflows, data, research outputs and provenance information. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
7/08/2009 Permalink
Google cloud-centric new Chrome OS leaves WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers) behind A Google operating system, called Google Chrome OS, is on the way, the web giant announced last night. The open-source operating system will be an extension of the Chrome browser and will initially be targeted at netbooks. The first devices running the Chrome OS will be released in the second half of 2010, Google says. The new operating system isn't just Windows-by-Google. It's Google's answer to the question of how the Internet and the desktop ought to relate. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
7/01/2009 Permalink
World's smallest LCD screen for Reality Enhancement System (RES) devices  The Kopin Corporation has created a Cyberdisplay only 0.27 inches along its diagonal with a resolution of 600 x 480. The device is said to be the smallest full-color VGA screen in the world,and hopefully, will give a boost to the Reality Enhancement System (RES) market.  Experiencing life with a smart bot constantly overlaying the reality around us with useful information will radically boost the capabilities of humans. RES is likely to be the net cloud's most powerful killer app. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/22/2009 Permalink
Your cell is transforming into a smart bot RES - Reality Enhancement System Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example. Two slick new just launched cell phones continue the trend towards your cell phone morphing into a smart bot RES (Reality Enhancement System). Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/17/2009 Permalink
Reality gets a higher resolution with the Layar RES - Reality Enhancement System  The Layar RES (Reality Enhancement System) browser goes live in Amsterdam, Netherlands with five Dutch content providers participating. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/16/2009 Permalink
Pictures from the front line of the war on religious/state tyranny and how cloud-crowd is helping The latest pictures from the front line of the war on religious/state tyranny. And Clay Shirky gives a TED talk about how the world's cloud-crowd net is helping us all push back against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt elites running the world's nation states and the other failing old order institutions. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/15/2009 Permalink
Breakthrough could super-size your personal cognitive computation capabilities  When Physicists Yulin Chen, Zhi-Xun Shen and their colleagues tested the behavior of electrons in the compound bismuth telluride they discovered a breakthrough that could revolutionize cognitive computation with dramatically faster, smaller and far more power efficient computational electronics. The results show a clear signature of what is called a topological insulator, a material that enables the free flow of electrons across its surface with no loss of energy. This is another step towards the powerful RES - Reality Enhancement Systems - that will eventually make each of us dramatically more intellectual capable, but giving us our own awesomely capable personal bot assistant. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/15/2009 Permalink
Could we fix the US economy by retaking our former lead in connectivity Researchers say that running fiber to homes could boost productivity, innovation, employment and add trillions to the economy in the years ahead. Scaling to Gigabit access could increase GDP by about an extra 3% per year. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
6/12/2009 Permalink
Bot can intelligently extract data from millions of pages in the cloud A software bot that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million web pages has been developed by researchers at the University of Washington. The tool extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. Some experts say that this kind of "automated information extraction" will likely form the basis for far more intelligent next-generation Web search, in which nuggets of information are first gleaned and then combined intelligently. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/08/2009 Permalink
Get your degree for free -- UN launches free cloud university  The UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) has launched University of the People, a non-profit institution offering higher education to the masses for free. Admission opened just over two weeks ago and without any promotion some 200 students from 52 countries have already registered. A high school diploma and a sufficient level of English are the only entry requirements. If Gates or Buffet or someone would fund a crowd-based free university development effort it would rock. One created by UN bureaucrats, not so sure, bu this needs to happen. Be sure to also read: Is the campus obsolete - students learn better from podcast lectures than live ones Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
6/03/2009 Permalink
Doctorow & Stross talk about your data and the cloud  Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow and science fiction writer and reformed computer programmer Charlie Stross talk about your data and the cloud. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
6/02/2009 Permalink
The Coming Urban Terror - systems disruption, networked gangs, and bio-weapons 2009 is the year, researchers estimate, that humanity crossed over, with more of us now living in cities than in rural areas. Unfortunately, living in cities may prove to be incompatible with the super-empowerment of individuals and small groups offered by new technologies like smart machines, networks and genetic manipulation. Some comments worth thinking about: Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.Most bio-terror experts seem to believe that a single clever microbiologist could probably already mod a virus to wipe out much of the population of a city and the technology for doing mods of this kind improves with each passing day. As we have seen recently in a number of cities, such concentrations of people, make attractive terror targets. Until we learn more about the shape of the threat matrix created by the amazing wave of smart bot, nano, bio, and cloud technologies sweeping in on us today, choosing to live outside the large cities might prove to be a wise decision. Labels: Bots, Cloud, Nano, Next Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
6/01/2009 Permalink
Google demoes breakthrough communication, collaboration & social networking bot Google has demoed the WAVE bot, an extremely impressive advance in cloud communication, collaboration and social networking designed by the guys that gave you the exceptional Google MAPS bot. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
6/01/2009 Permalink
Cloud cognitive behavioral therapy proven effective 81 percent of treated participants (30 of 37) reported at least mild improvement in their sleep after completing a five-week program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for chronic insomnia over the Cloud, including 35 percent (13 of 37) who rated themselves as much or very much improved. Thirty percent of treatment group completers were receiving an additional hour of sleep at the end of the program. An early chat bot was coded to act like a therapist, when bots are smart enough, they will likely do most cognitive behavioral therapy. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
5/29/2009 Permalink
First 'intelligent personal assistant' bot to run on iPhone platform  Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an "intelligent agent" for Apple's iPhone that would, the company said, be able to find movie theaters, book restaurant reservations and airline flights, buy from online retail sites and even answer trivia questions like "How many calories are in a banana," all by understanding spoken commands. Dag Kittlaus, CEO of Siri, which emerged from stealth mode to announce the product, said, "The future of search isn't search. It is a conversation with someone you trust." Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/29/2009 Permalink
Connect your computer to a cloud of others to create an artificial brain  Can a cloud of computers create an artificial brain? That's the basic reasoning behind Intelligence Realm's Artificial Intelligence project. By reverse engineering the brain through a simulation spread out over many different personal computers, Intelligence Realm hopes to create an AI from the ground-up, one neuron at a time. The first waves of simulation are already proving successful, with over 14,000 computers used and 740 billion neurons modeled. Singularity Hub has an interview with the project's leader, Ovidiu Anghelidi. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/28/2009 Permalink
Cloud cuts paper -- readers trust blogs over newspapers According to research by a Brigham Young University political scientist, people who closely follow both political blogs and traditional news media tend to believe the content on blogs is more accurate. Bloggers hold the edge with shared readers on the trust factor. - 30 percent said blogs are more accurate - 8 percent said traditional media are more accurate - 40 percent said they’re about equal - 21 percent were not sure Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
5/28/2009 Permalink
Global Catastrophic Risks Conference talks now available free in cloud Clips of many of the talks given at the recent Future of Humanity Institute's Global Catastrophic Risks Conference are now freely available in the cloud. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/28/2009 Permalink
Move over rover - bots will soon take over as man's best friend  The evolution of chatbots, artificial entities designed to have interesting or entertaining conversations with us -- also named 'conversational agents' -- now has the support of a worldwide community for chatbot developers and users. Business interest in chatbots has been growing rapidly in recent months, as the economic downturn has businesses seeking to cut payroll costs in their customer service centers. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/27/2009 Permalink
As globalization connects us more, natural selection will favor more virulent and dangerous pathogens  Our connected, globalized world is giving viruses and other human parasites the edge over us, new research led by Geoff Wild of the University of Western Ontario concludes. "As human activity makes the world more connected," warns Professor Wild, "natural selection will favor more virulent and dangerous parasites." The old order's globalization strategy makes humanity far more vulnerable to an extinction level biological event, either natural or man made. Talk to any bio-weapon expert, and they will inevitably tell you that the unleashing of an incredibly virulent new bio-engineered bug is only a matter of time. New technology is just making it so easy to produce such things that it is bound to happen. The only way to survive such a virus engineered to be especially deadly and contagious, would be to isolate your community completely for months. However, with the old order's infrastructure, designed to deliver us food from 2,000 miles away using fuel obtained from 12,000 miles away, even if we avoided the bug, we'd all starve. Civilization 2.0 infrastructure should be multi-nucleated and Cloud based. Sharing design data with the Cloud, globally, while produce goods from that design data, locally, gives a civilization the resilience to survive that is completely lacking in our current, obsolete old order. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/26/2009 Permalink
Why two billion people around the world are learning English  Answer: Opportunity. English has become the world's second language. The language of the Cloud, with which we can all communicate to find solutions to our common challenges. So many people have learned English in China, that this year China will become the world's largest English speaking country. Watch a TED talk by Jay Walker exploring the extraordinary power of the English phenomena, where good English teachers can draw stadium-sized classes. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/26/2009 Permalink
Pentagon seeks to close growing 'hacker gap' with China and Russia High school and college hackers, Uncle Sam wants you and is willing to teach you how to steal data from the Cloud. The Pentagon's Cyber Challenge initiative creates new national competitions for high school and college students designed to create better cyber-warrior skills. These skills include things like mounting denial of service attacks, defending databases, stealing databases, and tracing down others that have stolen databases. The Pentagon sees the program as necessary to close the 'hacker gap' that has developed in America as compared to Russia and China, both of which have mounted cloud attacks against organizations and countries that have displeasing their leaders. Of course, as has happened often in the past, this program could well come back to bite us. Like when the CIA former program to train many future members of Al-Qaeda in terror tactics to help them fight the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, came home to roost at the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11/2001. Or when the F.B.I. discovered that the anthrax used to attack prominent members of the media and prominent Democrat members of Congress came from the Pentagon's own top bioweapon lab. So now all the world's most powerful nation states appear to be competing to see who can train the most database stealing hackers. I wonder how much damage this will do to our civilization in the years ahead. Military initiatives of this kind come back to harm and kill the citizens of the nation that created them so routinely, that nation state military/security apparatchiks even have a name for this effect. They call it blowback. Having already helped to destroy the World Trade Center, blowback has proven itself to be a formidable force. Perhaps the training these kids are being given in stealing financial databases, might finish off what is left of the world's financial system and put the final nail in the coffin of the corrupt old order and its elites. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/26/2009 Permalink
Free cloud course on creating iPhone apps is downloaded by over a million students  In a stunning example of how broadly and cheaply knowledge can be disseminated by offering courses in the cloud. Free videos of Stanford University's wildly popular course on creating applications for the iPhone and iPod touch have now been downloaded over a million times. All of the million downloads have come in just seven weeks, since the course began on April 1. Cloud, not campus, represents the future of education. See also: Is the campus obsolete - students learn better from podcast lectures than live ones Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/22/2009 Permalink
Big brother to track citizens by cell phone GPS to 'prevent pandemic'  Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will soon begin testing a mobile phone-based GPS tracking system that constantly monitors each individual's location and sends text alerts to participants if they cross paths with anyone who is later identified as a flu victim. The proposed system relies on mobile phone providers to constantly track the subjects' geographical locations and keep chronological records of their movements in a database. It comes into the open. This capability exists, so don't be surprised to one day learn that your government has been secretly capturing and storing all the GPS location data from your cell phone. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/22/2009 Permalink
Serving your data to the world has never been easier or cheaper  The Pogoplug is a tiny computer that can connect any of your USB drives directly to the Cloud. Letting you set up to share and access your files from anywhere in the world easier than ever. Just plug in this tiny net server, run a cable to your router, slip in any USB drive and your files are good to go to any net node in the world. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
5/20/2009 Permalink
I.B.M. unveils bot able to find trends in vast amounts of real-time streaming data  A new bot from I.B.M. called System S can hoover up vast amounts of data from many streaming sources and quickly identify all correlations within it. The company says that the bot provides: an execution platform and services for user-developed applications that ingest, filter, analyze, and correlate potentially massive volumes of continuous data streams. It supports the composition of new applications in the form of stream processing graphs that can be created on the fly, mapped to a variety hardware configurations, and adapted as requests come and go, and relative priorities shift. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/20/2009 Permalink
Watch iRobot's Ember swarming local mesh network bot in action  Now there is a webmovie of iRobot's newest military bot, the Ember, in the field. Ember is a cheap little disposable bot that can deploy by the hundreds throughout a city. Embers can link into a wireless mesh network to bring the Cloud to an urban area where communications have been knocked out. What the world needs is a civilian city mesh net bot that could end the tyrannical cable/phone duopoly that has been fleecing Americans for years. Congress will never free the Cloud, not with all their sons, daughters and wives in cushy cable/phone industry jobs, but dirt cheap pirate wireless local mesh net bots could make it happen. Free the Cloud! Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/20/2009 Permalink
Moore's Law and Cloud power advance solar energy  Enphase's Microinverter System brings the power of Moore's Law and the Cloud to solar power for the first time. The solar power system monitoring and control bot has hardware, software and Cloud components: 1. The Microinverter that attaches to the racking beneath each solar module and converts DC power to grid-compliant AC power. 2. The Envoy Communications Gateway (EMU) that collects and transmits performance information from each solar module to a proprietary website for use by the customer. 3. The Enlighten website where Enphase customers can monitor and manage their solar power systems 24 hours a day. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/19/2009 Permalink
Cloud-based consultations can reduce doctor referrals to specialists by 20% An experiment that gave 46 general practitioners easy cloud access to specialists regarding patients with skin conditions reduced referrals to dermatologists by 20.7 percent. Using the cloud in every possible way in the medical field is the only way to make our health care system affordable again, while simultaneously offering improved patient care. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/19/2009 Permalink
Crowd-cloud open science breakthrough - 13,000 genome database Northwestern University is reporting that 13,000 people are in the process of enrolling in the project to have the coding region of their genomes sequenced. To be shared, along with their medical records and other information, in an open-access database for analysis by geneticists and others around the world. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/18/2009 Permalink
Project Lifelike : simulacrum avatar bots that can substitute for you  Have you ever wished you had a simulacrum avatar bot that looked and acted just like you to interact with the world. Freeing you up to get some real work done. Project LifeLike is a collaboration between the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Central Florida and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. LifeLike aims to create visualizations of people, or avatars, that are as realistic as possible. While current results are far from perfect replications of a specific person, the work opens up a host of possible applications. See it in action. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/18/2009 Permalink
Swarm of $100 mobile bots can roll in and bring WiFi mesh to a city  Ember is a prototype developed by iRobot, makers of the Roomba, under Phase 1 of DARPA's ongoing LANdroids program. The goal of which is to provide warfighters operating in dense urban environments with tools to deploy and maintain an ad-hoc communication infrastructure.  Ember is about the size of a paperback book and weighs about one pound. It features a flipper mechanism for self righting and obstacle climbing and accepts USB and SDIO based payload modules, including radios and sensors. One soldier can carry and deploy multiple robots that will be inexpensive to the point of being disposable but robust enough to allow them to be throw onto a rooftop. The Ember bot is smart enough to detect and avoid obstacles while navigating its environment. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/18/2009 Permalink
Cloud site lets writers sell downloads of their works Imagine a place in the cloud where anyone from professional publishers and authors to students, scientists, and artists can sell written works to a potential buying audience of more than 60 million. With 80% of the revenue going to the writer and no monthly membership fee. It now exists at Scribd.com, the world's first online document store. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
5/10/2009 Permalink
The shape of things to come: Jack Rabbit by Isaac Espriu Jack Rabbit is a work of flash fiction (stories under 1,000 words) that has an interesting take on the future that I found well worth the few minutes it took to READ. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
5/08/2009 Permalink
A Wi-Fi connection for up to 5 PCs you can carry anywhere in your pocket  The MiFi is a Wi-Fi router with a twist: it's battery powered and has a cellular modem built in. So just turn it on anywhere Verizon has a signal, and pow, you're broadcasting Wi-Fi to up to five PCs.... READ A similar but slightly less elegant device, the PHS300, which works with any cell net connection, is available from Cradlepoint. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
5/04/2009 Permalink
Bad news for newspapers thinking of going cloud only It might seem like shutting down the print edition of a newspaper would increase traffic to the cloud edition, but a recent study shows just the opposite can happen. When the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat stopped producing a print edition, cloud-site unique users dropped 22% and page views dropped 11% in the five months after the print edition closed.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/30/2009 Permalink
Scanning the cloud for early warning of in-coming threats Veratect scans the cloud to build an accurate threat matrix that allows the company to give advanced warning of events like the swine flu outbreak to clients. Ihsan Azzam, the State Epidemiologist of Nevada, noted that Veratect's tracking services provided "The very first alerts I received regarding this Swine Flu Epidemic, as well as the most detailed, accurate, timely and comprehensive.".... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/30/2009 Permalink
Turn any web cam into a remote spy cam  A new cloud bot called Ugolog allows you to turn any web came into a remote spy camera that automatically detect motion and begins recording. The clips are stored on their cloud site for you to screen at your leisure.... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/30/2009 Permalink
One supervisor controls cleaning bots in dozens of homes  The Readybot Cloud Robotics Collaborative Control (CRCC) system monitors a semi-autonomous home cleaning robot via a cloud connection. When faced with a particularly tricky task, such as opening a cabinet door, the bot requests a human supervisor to take over. The CRCC system is designed to let a single supervisor control a large team of house cleaning bots. Readybot can clear a kitchen table, load a dishwasher, transport objects, paint walls, vacuum and clean and dry surfaces using a combination code and remote supervisor control.... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/28/2009 Permalink
Android invasion coming your way As more of our work gets done in the cloud, our computers can get smaller. Many more phones and net books will soon begin arriving running Google's Android operating system. Net books using Android and a processor from ARM, the top mobile phone processor maker, are expected to push net book prices under $200.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/27/2009 Permalink
Cloud swine flu tracking bot available What a weird little bug this one is. Apparently, it has pig genetic material that has only been seen in swine flu strains in Asia, and pig genetic material that has only been seen in flu strains in the Americas, and bird genetic material, and some human genetic material all combining in a way that appears to make it transmit easily between humans. With the recent improvements in the state of the art, hacking together a bug like this one would probably not be difficult. Unless I am mistaken, Homeland Security is still operating under a Bush administration order that nothing is to be called an attack, unless the experts are 100% sure. This standard is likely to be impossible to achieve for a virus of this type. The best that experts could probably do is give their bosses a percentage. And under Bush's rule even if that assessment was 5% natural vs 95% engineered, the public would still be told natural. If this policy is still in effect it ought to be changed immediately. Because knowing the US gov is likely to call an attack a natural outbreak, seems like it would embolden potential adversaries to do just this kind of a low level pandemic attack. It is probably natural, but the first major flu pandemic in 40 years that hits at the worst possible moment for the reeling US economy. If things shut down here like they have in Mexico City, our economy is likely to be toast. It does just get you wondering a bit about the origins of this organism. Especially since our government has previously told us that they might lie to us about an event like this. Politicos may routinely deceive us, but at least the cloud can be counted on to come up with an effective swine flu tracking bot.... TRACK BOT Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/23/2009 Permalink
The next killer app - smart bot personal assistants Theoretically, my compute infrastructure should learn, automate repeated tasks (automatically), figure out what information I actually want, and make sure I get it when I want it.... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/23/2009 Permalink
Centralization of the net has made it highly vulnerable to attack The original DARPA research that lead to the creation of the Internet wanted to design a multi-nucleated communication system that was so resilient, it could continue to function even after a nuclear attack wiped out most of America's cities. Nodes on the net would operate independently, so any number of nodes could be taken out without destroying the system's ability to forward messages. But having been taken over by phone and cable companies in recent years, this ability has been lost, leaving the net vulnerable to attacks like the recent one in Morgan Hill, where several fiber optic cables were cut.... READ .... READ If every WiFi router had code inside it to make it function as a node of a mesh network, the original resilience of the net's design could exist into every home. If fiber optic cables were cut to a section of a city, the net would continue to function by using the mesh net of WiFi routers to passed along packets one to the next until they reached an area that was still connected to fiber. Mesh networks eliminate all the choke points, making the net impervious to vandalism and terrorism and making it harder for a local cable monopoly to overcharge you for net access. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/22/2009 Permalink
"Using EEG to send tweet" "USUsing EEG to send tweet"," Adam Wilson posted to Twitter recently using a direct mind-twitter connection.... WATCH .... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/21/2009 Permalink
Using the cloud to fight government oppression & atrocities Tor is an open-source Internet anonymity system--one of several systems that encrypt data or hide the accompanying Internet address, and route the data to its final destination through intermediate computers called proxies. It is used by those living under oppressive regimes, like that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, to published accounts and photographic evidence of government atrocities and oppression.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/11/2009 Permalink
The cloud makes protein research cheap & accessible to scientists worldwide Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center in Milwaukee have developed a set of free tools called ViPDAC (virtual proteomics data analysis cluster), to be used in combination with Amazon's inexpensive "cloud computing" service, which provides the option to rent processing time on its powerful servers; and free open-source software from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Manitoba. The cloud system mades the very expensive and promising area of protein research more accessible to scientists worldwide.... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/10/2009 Permalink
Learn without the debt burn -- watch cloud lectures from world's best professors Over 100 universities have signed up to put lectures on the YouTubeEDU channel and many, like the MIT OpenCourseWare Project, are making course material available free on their own web sites. Expect the huge ripoff of the young that is campus-based education to fade rapidly as Civilization 2.0 arrives. Why take on a huge debt burden to support an obsolete campus system, when with a little self discipline you can get a marvelous MIT education for free in the cloud. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/09/2009 Permalink
Data-mining techniques could make it easier to locate expertise Computer scientists have demonstrated techniques for finding experts more accurately using data-mining bots able to determine what skills a person practices regularly and how likely she or he is to respond to requests for help.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/09/2009 Permalink
While real worlds collapse, virtual worlds continue to thrive Showing the fate that may be ahead for all of the old order nation states as Civilization 2.0 unfolds, Iceland has collapsed so thoroughly that at this point its currency is virtually worthless. The people there owe ten times the value of everything they own. But the currency used in the EVE Online multi-player spaceship game created by the Icelandic company, CCP hf is still thriving. The game's money is more real and valid and valuable currency than the actual country's fiat money and the same thing is ahead for the dollar, the euro and all other fiat monies. Fiat money is a failed concept that should never have been tried.... READ .... READ Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/09/2009 Permalink
The wisdom of Bucky Fuller "Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It’s time we gave this some thought." -- Bucky Fuller. Working over the cloud from a smart living pod is where we are going as the old order collapses and Civilization 2.0 arrives. The sooner you get there, the better you will do in Civilization 2.0. The central question Bucky Fuller devoted his life to solving was: "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?" We have learned since Fuller's death that it simply can't be done without moving off world, so the question for us is: "Can humanity survive lastingly and successfully in our cosmos, and if so, how?" Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/08/2009 Permalink
Letting the buggy whip companies build our highways? If 100 years ago, we had put the nation's buggy whip companies in charge of building out the America's roads systems, probably horses would still be pulling us through roads too muddy for cars to pass. Cable companies in places like Japan have already put in next generation 160-megabit-per-second service over cable systems just like ours, and the upgrade cost was considerably less than $100 per household. While in America, until the much more expensive to install FiOS system from Verizon makes it to your neighborhood, your cable monopoly instead of upgrading you, will try to limit your bandwidth to prevent you from getting any HD entertainment over the net. They want your bandwidth hobbled, so you'll be forced to get your entertainment from their obsolete (horse and buggy on muddy roads) channel-based system. It is going to be very hard to do anything this monopolistic rip off that is putting our nation's competitive future at risk, because by an amazing coincidence, many serving in CONgress have a spouse, son or daughter in a cushy cable industry job.... READ (reg req) Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/07/2009 Permalink
Stephen Wolfram talks with Rudy Rucker about his Alpha cloud smart bot Alpha is a smart cloud bot you will be able to ask about anything. If it works as claimed, it will be the first cloud bot to show the full potential of cloud bots to radically enhance human cognitive abilities. Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, "Wolfram|Alpha isn't really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before."Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
4/02/2009 Permalink
The era of a perfect Internet computer for $99 is coming this year By the end of the year, consumers are likely to see laptops the size of thin paperback books that can run all day on a single charge and are equipped with touch screens or slide-out keyboards. The industry is buzzing this week about these devices at a telecommunications conference in Las Vegas, and consumers will see the first machines on shelves as early as June, probably from the netbook pioneers Acer and Asustek. "The era of a perfect Internet computer for $99 is coming this year," said Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, a maker of PC graphics chips that is trying to adapt to the new technological order. "The primary computer that we know of today is the basic PC, and it's dying to be reinvented." ... READ (Reg Req) Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
4/02/2009 Permalink
Skype cloud calling now on Apple, Nokia, Android, Windows Mobile, & BlackBerry cells Cloud phone company Skype is aggressively moving onto mobile phones with free software available for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, Nokia phones, along with phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Google's Android operating systems, and soon to be announced says Skype, software for your BlackBerry.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/30/2009 Permalink
Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/29/2009 Permalink
How to make money from online content, even after it gets pirated Copying is unstoppable, so content creators are developing tools that allow them to get money from advertising even when content ends up in unexpected places.... READ Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/25/2009 Permalink
In Civilization 2.0 all markets, all data accessible in the cloud Regulators can't stop corruption, an offer of a $10 million per year job after they leave government is too enticing. Only the total transparency that can be achieved by moving all markets and economic data into the Cloud, freeing the Crowd do the do its own regulation has any real chance of stopping corruption.... MORE Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/25/2009 Permalink
Google adds first semantic search bot capabilities to its engine Google say: we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).... MOREHome + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/24/2009 Permalink
Moving games off consoles and into the Cloud OnLive, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup wants to do away with gaming consoles, game resellers, and the need to buy any more expensive graphics chips and move gaming into the Cloud. Today the company announced a service that lets any computer run the sorts of graphics-intensive video games traditionally reserved for high-end gaming systems. Games can also be played on a TV using a small device offered by the company that connects a television to a broadband Internet connection.... MORE Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/21/2009 Permalink
Yahoo is becoming evil Since I upgraded Firefox recently, three upgrades to Firefox add-ons have, without asking my permission, added a Yahoo bar to my browser. Some won't know how to remove this and won't just waste their time, but will have to pay money to get their computers restored to their original condition. This is the same kind of outrageous behavior that has destroyed the world's financial system, don't let Yahoo's new bosses use it to also destroy the Cloud, send a message -- dump Yahoo! (Tools + Add-Ons + Uninstall + Restart Firefox to get rid of the Yahoo bar) Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/17/2009 Permalink
Seattle's newspaper leaves the paper behind for a new home in the cloud  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer upgrades to Civilization 2.0 tomorrow, with their last dead tree edition rolling off the presses today. The 117,600 readers of the 146 year-old newspaper, Seattle's oldest business, will now find it exclusively in the cloud at seattlepi.com, making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift entirely to cloud-based delivery.... MORE Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/15/2009 Permalink
From Gutenburg to Youtenburg - everyone a publisher Shifting from Civilization 1.0's filter - publish model to Civilization 2.0's publish - filter model. The NY Times should be studying Digg.com, ... MORE Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/13/2009 Permalink
From the web's inventor: forget web pages, the future is smart bots filtering & displaying the data cloud  Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web 20 years ago, explains in a TED talk how we can revolutionize our lives far more powerfully than we did by creating the web. By linking all our raw data out in the cloud, and building bots that can filter, interpret, intelligently display and generally maximize the usefulness of all the world's data to each of us.... watch Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/12/2009 Permalink
A bot for tracking how stories unfold in the media cloud  Media Cloud is a new bot for tracking how news stories unfold across the old media and in the cloud .... watch .... more .... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/10/2009 Permalink
MUST WATCH TED DEMO of RES cloud interface from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT  It was the buzz of the 2009 TED conference. This true vision of a cloud interface is similar to but much better than the fictional interface seen in the movie Minority Report. This is getting very close to the long dreamt of RES -- Reality Enhancement System -- ultimate cloud interface that most humods are prepared to sign over their souls to MIT in order RES-up their life with this baby. And, [deep breath to calm down] the price of the components that went into the prototype [another deep breath] only $350. If you haven't watched this yet, watch it.... watch ....more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/08/2009 Permalink
Military gets first bendable touch-screen displays  Researchers have developed the first computer display that is both flexible and touch sensitive. The breakthrough makes possible better RES (Reality Enhancement Systems) and other small Cloud access devices ... more ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/08/2009 Permalink
Alpha cloud bot will offer reasoned answers not just keyword lookup Stephen Wolfram, of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science fame, says that his team has built a computational knowledge engine for the cloud that will go live in May. Alpha is a bot that doesn't merely return documents that based on keywords. Alpha, Wolfram claims, will actually understands the nature of your question, and using all the data in the cloud, Alpha will compute an answer to your question based on actual evaluation and understanding of all the data it finds. If Alpha works as claimed, and Wolfram has an impressive track record, nothing will be quite the same after starts living in the cloud this May. Said one blogger that has seen it: it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Of course, since the cloud is only the sum of all human knowledge, there could be drawbacks: You: "Alpha how do I restore all the money I've lost in the current stock market and real estate collapse?"... more ... more ... Alpha Home Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
3/07/2009 Permalink
Cloud bot lets you animate your own webmovie in just minutes This animated webmovie, revealing for the first time the true nature of the future, was created in about 10 minutes using a cloud bot ... more Labels: Bots, Cloud, Memes, Mods Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/06/2009 Permalink
For instant cloud access the magic word is Presto  Presto is a light version of Linux designed for cloud computing that runs on your Windows laptop. When you need Windows it is easy to boot with it, but if you just need to check email, browse the cloud or call with Skype, then Presto logs you on in seconds. When the Windows operating system loads, it loads device drivers and sets up to run every type of software and device and this can take a very long time and chew up a lot of your precious battery power on trips. When you first install Presto, it figures out which drivers you need for your devices and only loads those when it boots up in the future, providing a nearly instant cloud log on ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/04/2009 Permalink
Millimetre-wave photonics 12.5Gb/s wireless data access coming European researchers are working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s. The technology, known as millimetre-wave photonics, achieves a quantum leap in performance by combining the latest radio and optics technologies to produce mm-wave components. The mm-wave band is the extremely high frequency part of the radio spectrum, from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz), and it gets it name from having a wavelength of one to 10mm. Until now, the band has been largely undeveloped, so the new technology makes available for exploitation more of the scarce and much-in-demand spectrum ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
3/01/2009 Permalink
R.I.P. campus-based education - killed by the cloud Universities are starting to realize that their ability to find new marks for their ridiculously expensive campus-based biz model is coming to an end. Where will higher education be the day after the current global economic crisis passes? If you think things will simply go back to the way they were once the economy recovers in a year or two, think again. We now have an educational economy of information abundance confronting an educational delivery system that was built for a time of information scarcity ... The Chronicle of Higher EducationCloud-based education works better than classroom lectures and can cost only a fraction as much. Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
2/25/2009 Permalink
Web site uses crowd to track censorship of cloud  Internet censorship occurs worldwide, but until now the exact dimensions of the problem has been unknown. A new website is designed to solve that problem by tapping the power of "crowd sourcing" -- fielding and aggregating reports from volunteers -- to collect and provide real-time data on the activities of those trying to control your access to data ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
2/25/2009 Permalink
Microsoft demos augmented vision RES device Microsoft researchers have developed Reality Enhancement System (RES) software that can, in real time, superimpose computer-generated information on top of a digitized view of the real world. Smart RES software that could find in the cloud, filter and present exactly the localized data we need as we travel through the real world has long been one of our dreams here at Humods.com. Imagine, for example, going house hunting and having interior pictures and floor plans automatically overlay as you look at home exteriors, along with the asking price and fair market price based on all available market data in the cloud ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
2/24/2009 Permalink
How to use COG (Cloud Organization Generation) to create a cloud crowd to solve any problem too big for you to solve alone  Here is a great talk architect Cameron Sinclair gave at the 2006 TED, where he explains how he successfully used COG (Cloud Organization Generation) to spawn an open cloud crowd organization of designers and architects covering 104 countries, dedicated to finding locally constructable and affordable habitat solutions for every part of our world. Nothing could illustrate the bankruptcy of our old institutions and the need for COG solutions any better than the story he tells of how it took the UN 20 years to add a flap to the standard tent they send to disaster areas to stop their tents from getting too hot to use inside. While the new cloud crowd that he triggered into existence was able to generate many far better tent designs, raise resources, manufacturer and started deploying a tent customized to the locality and circumstances in just a matter of days. Our old institutions are far worse than merely inept. Many have a fundamental flaw in their design that causes them to often generate immoral results. As when food relief is rushed in willie nillie after a famine, such that prices for local farmers' output collapses, they are unable to plant the next year, and the cycle of famine-rescue-famine-rescue gets forever perpetuated ... watch Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
2/18/2009 Permalink
Is the campus obsolete - students learn better from podcast lectures than live ones  New psychological research shows that university students who download a podcast of a lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person. Podcast lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts and therefore take better notes, explained Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York and leader of the study ... more Now consider that this study compared live vs. podcast using the same instructor. While as every student knows well, the reality is that there are only a handful of great lecturers at any university. A precious few, like the late Richard Feynman, who's legendary lectures could teach quantum mechanics to a fifth grader. While all the other lecture halls are filled with legions of mediocre to pathetically bad hacks, who may have tenure but lack any actual talent for teaching. In the world of the cloud, campuses are nothing more than enormous, obsolete money pits. Pits that students and their parents are forced to go billions more into debt refill annually. Instead of filling brains with wondrous knowledge that makes a bright future possible. Campus-based education needlessly mortgages the output of those brains under a crushing pile of debt. It is time for something better, an open source university system. Imagine if podcasts of all the best lecturers in the world, on every subject, were routinely posted in the cloud. Available to any student, anywhere who wants to listen to any one of them. Students could register in the cloud for any course they want, for only a nominal fee. Then listen or watch podcast lectures and get any other course materials free in the cloud. Tutors could be available for those that need a little extra help over a skype two-way vid-link. Then the student goes in to a local supervised center to take the exams. An open source university system could do a better job than our current campus-based system for only a small fraction of the cost. It would free our kids from being saddled at the very start of their careers with the enormous loads of debt it takes to maintain our pathetically obsolete campus-based system. Parents would no longer need to see their retirement funds being consumed to pay for their kid's college expenses. Kids win, parents win, taxpayers win, competent professors win. And even the incompetent professors can win, by grasping the simple truth, that there is far more satisfaction to be gained from a job you can actually do well, than one you will always do poorly. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
2/16/2009 Permalink
Daemon - a tecnho thriller that takes a realistic look at how bots in the cloud might be used to bring down civilization  What with hulu, netflix, all the audio fiction and other available diversions out in the cloud these days, my use of the public library as a source of entertainment has dropped to almost zero. With all of the library's utility as a research tool having long ago evaporated into the cloud, most of my library visits lately aren't visits at all. Just quick stops in their parking lot to check my feeds, email and perhaps do a post or two over their wifi. But purely out of nostalgia last week I went inside and spotted something there that the cloud had not yet told me the signifcance of. On the new books shelf was an novel called Daemon by Daniel Suarez, which speculates in a fairly realistic way, on just what could happen if someone turned lose a destructive AI into the cloud. No far out and unreal notion in this novel, like the one in Snowcrash of a cloud-spread mind virus. Nope, the enemy in Daemon is much more really than that. It is a very limited AI derived from a very good one developed to control all the enemies in a video game. This is an enemy that you can well imagine a clever coder actually being able to cook up tomorrow, which for me anyway, made this book far more interesting, exciting and disturbing than that previous look at how the cloud might one day byte the hand that feeds it ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
2/05/2009 Permalink
System-on-chip (SoC) designs for net devices Intel is designing new specialized chips for smart phones, netbooks, and other mobile Internet devices that can perform various specialized net device tasks on top of general-purpose computations. One SoC design features a new type of digital wireless radio that operates over a number of standards, including Wi-Fi, WiMax, and cellular-phone frequencies ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
1/21/2009 Permalink
Just tell the system what you want and it will understand you The automated speech recognition you face when you call a company today is only able to offer customers a series of options to slowly and fitfully narrow down the issue that prompted the call, before any solution can be supplied. But soon, thanks to the work of a European-wide effort to dramatically advance the power and intelligence of speech recognition called the Luna Project, you will be able to just tell the system what you want and it will understand you ... more Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
1/20/2009 Permalink
Cloud computing still lacks necessary level of resilience Cloud computing represents a technical strategy that's the very opposite of resilient, dangerously so. Current cloud computing sites fall short in terms of decentralization, graceful failure, flexibility, redundancy, transparency and openness ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
1/08/2009 Permalink
Can eTEN's new web technologies dramatically boost participation in local politics?  The eTEN project to bring politics to the people set itself a well-defined target of increasing by 25% the total physical attendance in a council chamber and online viewing of public proceedings. The results exceeded the project’s wildest expectations. Afterits web services deployed in ten local authorities across Europe, chambers of participating local authorities were standing room only, heralding the potential for a complete renewal of the local political process ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
12/22/2008 Permalink
Happiness really is contagious, spreading rapidly in social networks New research from James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School shows that happiness spreads far and wide through a social network - traveling not just the well-known path from one person to another but even to people up to three degrees removed. A key determinant of your level of happiness is the happiness of your friends and associates ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
12/17/2008 Permalink
Will mobile phones be the primary net device by 2020? The mobile phone will be "the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world," the Pew Internet & American Life Project writes in a new The Future of the Internet III report based on a survey of net activists. Actually by 2020, this milestone will be long past. Already mobile net use dominates in the third world and among the young everywhere. By 2020 you won't even think of your mobile net device as a phone. It will be much more of a personal assistant and a Reality Enhancement System (RES), capable of intelligently filtering out and presenting to you the geospacial data that you most need to live your life effectively. Many of your communications with friends and collaborators will be entirely automatic with your net unit automatically adjusting your schedule, if a friend's unit reports they are running late for lunch. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
12/15/2008 Permalink
Politicos block free wireless net for most Americans Silicon valley entrepreneurs want to offer DSL-speed wireless internet access to 95% of Americans for free, FCC chairman scheduled a vote on allowing service. Then the wireless phone companies led by T-Mobile get the many politicos in their pay to put a block on it. America grew great by rewarding entrepreneurs who created new stuff, but now those that control old stuff are able to buy politicos to hold back the new so they can keep overcharging you ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
12/12/2008 Permalink
Always up-to-the-minute textbooks with open source net education Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute this open source educational material ... more ... watch Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
11/19/2008 Permalink
Inventing investigative journalism that is truly of, by and for the people  Corporate print and broadcast journalists love to complain that net news sites only feed off the news they dig out through their investigations, but the net is evolving a whole new way of democratizing investigative journalism. Now anyone can point out a matter that needs investigating and pledge their support. A net journalist can take up the challenge and propose a budget, which concerned citizens can support to complete the project and expose all the facts ... Spot.us Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
11/18/2008 Permalink
Are Second Life, podcasting, & Web 2.0 the future of education? Educators will met in Berlin to consider how Web 2.0 technologies like social networking, blogs and wikis are changing the nature of education and how the old educational organizations and institutions need to respond to stay relevant. Hopefully, the Europeans will follow MIT's lead in establishing their open courseware project ~ free lectures, notes and videos from MIT, no registration required ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
11/15/2008 Permalink
Open spectrum breakthrough may bring wireless revolution Researchers and engineers say that the FCC recently declaring a large chunk of radio spectrum open means that future wireless gadgets will be able to blast tens of megabits per second of data over hundreds of kilometers. "This is a beginning of a wireless revolution," says Anant Sahai, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the UC Berkeley ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
11/12/2008 Permalink
Google flu tracker using search terms works much better than CDC's system We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems used by the Centers for Disease Control ... more  Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
10/17/2008 Permalink
Is the next big thing in wireless net technology LED lights? "Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires," said Prof. Thomas Little. "This could be done with an LED-based network that also provides light." ... Boston University  Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
10/17/2008 Permalink
Breakthrough net bot lets you keep streaming movies From YouTube.com to Hulu.com, numerous stream movie sites are popping up all over, but few will let you download and keep a video. The KeepVid.com is a breakthrough net bot that solves this problem for you. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
10/17/2008 Permalink
Quantum encryption about to go commercial A group of international researchers and Siemens Austria has demonstrated in Vienna the transmission of quantum-encrypted messages across commercial telecommunication links. An achievement that will help to bring quantum encryption into commercial deployment ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
10/06/2008 Permalink
Not just a few web sites, make the entire net peer-to-peer If an internet connection is unavailable, congested or even just unaffordable, it shouldn't prevent a group from networking. We need to move away from the centralized, rigid client-server paradigm and fixed communications infrastructure and create a peer-to-peer internet. This is exactly what researchers on the EU-funded POPEYE project are working on ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
9/30/2008 Permalink
Most net users consult Dr. Google for 2nd opinion Reliance on the net has become so prevalent that 'Google is the de facto second opinion' for patients seeking further information after a diagnosis, according to Susannah Fox the author of a recent survey report ... Pew Internet and American Life Project (pdf) Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
9/22/2008 Permalink
Making EVERYTHING smart and net connected A group of leading technology vendors including Cisco and Sun Microsystems and end users have formed the IP for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance, whose goal is to promote the Internet Protocol (IP) as the networking technology best suited for connecting sensor- and actuator-equipped or "smart" objects and delivering information gathered by those objects. Smart objects are objects in the physical world that - typically with the help of embedded devices - transmit information about their condition or environment (e.g., temperature, light, motion, health status) to locations where the information can be analyzed, correlated with other data and acted upon ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
9/18/2008 Permalink
Google's top scientists predict the future of the net Computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans. They will get smarter, gleaning relationships between objects, nuances, intentions, meanings, and other deep conceptual information ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
9/10/2008 Permalink
It had to happen, Blackberry finally flips out  The last holdout surrenders: The new BlackBerry Pearl Flip provides flip phone fans with all the power of a BlackBerry smartphone in a fun and familiar design. One quick flip of the handset opens up a world of possibilities with the industry’s leading mobile messaging solution and a wide range of impressive Internet and multimedia capabilities, all in one powerful yet approachable smartphone. You can send a message to your friends or family, make a call, browse the web, snap a picture, watch a video or listen to your favorite song. It’s all in your control with a simple flip ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - -
9/08/2008 Permalink
The meme-set of the HUMODS open source worldview Humods are beings able to proactively modify and enhance their own designs : seekers of more resilient designs for their own minds, bodies and meme-sets : homo novo - the species one step beyond homo sapiens on the phylogenetic tree. [Latin : homo = man : sapiens = wise, rational : novo = to make anew, refresh, revive, change, alter, invent] The Humods open source meme-set Meme 1: Our Cosmos generates within itself an endless abundance of unique lifeforms and places those lifeforms in a survival of the fittest threat matrix that spawns the constant evolution of increasing levels of complexity and resilience. Meme 2: By intermittently generating mega-challenges for the lifeforms and systems within it, our Cosmos functions as an generation engine for resilient intelligence. Rogue asteroids, comets and black holes, ice age causing super volcanoes, species-ending plagues, atmosphere stripping cosmic dust clouds, planet scorching mega solar flares and gamma ray burst -- all serve to insure the extinction of any species that fails to quickly enough develop sufficient intelligence to anticipate and deal with such threats.Meme 3: In our Cosmos, extropy is life. Using our open minds and open science to delve into the nature of the Cosmos is the key to our survival. Those that constantly rethink, refine and adjust their techniques to better meet the opportunities and challenges ahead are richly rewarded with knowledge that cures their diseases, lengthens their lifespans, makes their tools more powerful, their toils less burdensome and their lives more rewarding.Meme 4: Dogmas are death, the destroyer of extropy. Struggles over idealogical and religious dogmas have taken an uncountable millions of innocent lives, often plunging entire civilizations into darkness, superstition and famine. Meme 5: Fostering, embracing and thriving on rapid change is essential to developing the resilience necessary for you to thrive and our species to avoid extinction. Meme 6: Pursue and apply technologies that empower you by extending your cognitive capability and lifespan. Constantly improving these upgrades is vital to the survival of our kind. As is striving to discovery, develop and maximize your own unique talents. Meme 7:Oppose the utilization of super-empowering technologies for destruction, terror, surveillance and control. Meme 8: Systems should be designed to be open, resilient, and foster the fastest possible creation of new knowledge, innovation and utility. Meme 9: State intellectual property monopolies said to foster innovation, actually tend to stifle it. Meme 10: Large concentrations of power are a form of entropy, power concentrations should always be kept as small as practical. Meme 11: Regularly reassess the material clutter around you. If you don't use it, lose it. If you use it often, get the best quality you can afford. Meme 12: Spreading these memes to as many other capable minds as possible is vital to the survival of our kind. Pass them on at every opportunity. CLICK HERE to forward a link to these memes to your crowd. Or suggest revisions to this open source meme-set by writing to HUMODS at GMAIL dot COM. Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
9/08/2008 Permalink
Dogmatic old science geezers holding back open science future Many young scientists and older scientists that are less concerned with protecting their own prerogatives and more concerned with advancing science are fed up with the dogmatic old, net-clueless, geezers that are delaying the move to open science. Kudos to those that value the acceleration of scientific progress enough to risk the ire of the geezers to speak out. Despite the value - and the impact - that blogging can have in communicating science to the public or in engaging the community to discuss ideas, university hiring committees and others who evaluate scientists are more likely than not to have a negative view of it. Time spent not researching is considered time wasted ... moreAnd even more kudos to those that are simply bypassing the old farts and their ossified institutions by creating the open science tools of tomorrow, see: Open source science is the wave of the future and The wikiomics movement is the future of science ~ open Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon - - - - - - - - -
9/06/2008 Permalink
Smart radio can give you an always solid wireless connection  Researchers at Virginia Tech have developed wireless connection technology that performs like a living creature, maintaining a constant awareness of spectrum, understand system capabilities, and jumping across bands to avoid interference. "We are very optimistic that this technology will begin to show up in products within the next five years," says Jeff Reed, director of the Wireless@VT project. Smart radios and open spectrum could revolutionize our connectivity, but our telco, cable and broadcast companies are paying for golf junkets and giving the wives and kids of our politicos high paying jobs to keep it from ever arriving. America's checkbook democracy has allowed other countries to leave us in their connectivity dust ... more Labels: Cloud Home + What are Humods? + Subscribe + Twitter + Post To: Delicious + Digg + Facebook + Reddit + StumbleUpon- - - - - - - - - Send comments to: humods [at] gmail [dot] com |