Technology

Blogging has been around since the late 1990s and email (effectively) for a decade prior to that - both are now on the wane, according to recent claims (email by social media and blogging by...social media again) and while it's true I wouldn't start a standalone email company today, having it as part of a suite seems like a good idea.  Since practically the day we began we have had @science20.com email addresses available to columnists and featured authors but one more email address is not really helping most people. I was an early adopter of email, though it was more of a novelty.…

Back in December, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a “Report and Order” specifying new rules related to network neutrality. The rules have since been challenged in court in separate suits by Verizon and Metro PCS. They’re also under attack by the House of Representatives, though whatever they do is unlikely to pass the Senate and the president. The Report and Order is quite long and involved, a typical federal document that runs to 194 pages (here’s a PDF of it, in case you’d like to read the whole thing). On page 135 there begins a statement by FCC Chairman Genachowski…

If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve likely used one or another of the URL shorteners out there. Even if you’re not, you may have run across a shortened URL. The first shortener I encountered, several years ago, was tinyurl.com, but there plenty of them, including bit.ly, tr.im, qoiob.com, tinyarrow.ws, tweak, and many others. The way they work is that you go to one of them and enter a URL — say, the URL for this page you’re reading: http://www.science20.com/staring_empty_pages/blog/url_shorteners-76826 ...you click a button and get back a short link, such as this one: http://bit.ly/guj9xJ ...…

Remember when there were two well-funded start-ups competing to sell you dog food over the Internet?  And AOL could buy Time-Warner? The good old days of pretend Internet money may be back.  Despite having no revenue, Twitter is supposedly valued at $10 billion.   And Facebook is supposedly more valuable than Ford. What does that say to you?   It says a new dot com bubble, that's what.    But we remember the bubble bursting and all of the bad stuff.   Before then a whole lot of people made a whole lot of money so if the folks behind Farmville can be valued…

Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let’s take a look at the problem here. We basically have three ways to address spam, in our goal of reducing the amount of spam in our inboxes: Prevent its being sent in the first place. Refuse to accept it when it’s presented for relay or delivery. Discard it or put it into a “junk mail” folder at (or after) delivery. The last is handled by what we usually think of as “spam filters”, which analyze the…

Ran into this ironic juxtaposition of 2 webcomics, released at nearly the same time.  Which to share?  They negate each other. vs AlexTuesdays at The Satellite Diaries and Friday at The Daytime Astronomer (twitter @skyday) p.s. too bloggish, want space-science-y content?  Visit my other blog this week for "Mission Lifetimes".

The following segments were written one per day, as I watched the three days of IBM’s Watson computer play Jeopardy!. I’ll post my notes here now, for the three or four people who haven’t already seen more analyses than they care to think about. The first day Interesting. Watson did very well on its first day. In order to have time to explain things and introduce the concept of Watson, they set it up so that only two games are played over the three days. The first day was for the first round, and the second day (this evening) will have the Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! rounds. It wasn’…

OK, by now everyone's familiar with "Watson", the IBM Jeopardy machine with all the hype and drama associated with Artificial Intelligence and what it means for the future of humanity.  Is it HAL or Skynet?  Not by any definition. So what's the point?  At present, as a proof of concept, "Watson" has demonstrated that it is possible to use algorithms to produce some understanding of natural human speech.  I don't place much stock in "Watson" winning at Jeopardy since that seems as much a function of how quickly the buzzer can be pushed as it is in having an answer. A recent…

A week or so ago, New Scientist told us about some new research technology by Toshiba, a system that recognizes fruits and veg at the self-checkout station: Its system, developed by Susumu Kubota and his team at Toshiba’s research centre in Kawasaki, Japan, uses a webcam, image recognition and machine-learning software to identify loose goods, such as fruit. The company claims the system can tell apart products that look virtually identical, by picking up slight differences in colour and shape, or even faint markings on the surface. When shoppers want to buy, say, apples at existing self-…

Many of those involved with transhumanism desire to accelerate the development of some sort of ‘higher consciousness’. Although the topic is mostly approached with the most serious input of the persons’ specific fields, for example cutting edge fascinating neuroscience, it is nevertheless too often handled philosophically naïve. Thinking more rationally, bigger memory, adding ultraviolet light receptors for a four dimensional color space, enabling global workspace to contain more than about 7 items, … All this are nice enhancements, but none of these seem to be what people lust after when…