Future Salon

Virtual March on Washington ...

Have the organizers of today's Virtual March on Washington read Howard Rheingold's book SmartMobs? It is possible, but more likely is that Howard saw the signs on the interwall before us. Although, if I remember correctly his prediction was, that the Christian Coalition is so organized, that they will be the first ones to use these techniques. Thinking about it, they probably do, just below my radar screen.

You will be able to ask Howard Rheingold all about it at our next Futurist Salon, where he will introduce the book as well as answer questions. You can also check the SmartMobs weblog. Mark your calendar: Friday the 21st of March Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo 7-9pm. (Map although the star is slightly misleading, the store is right at the El Camino across the Caltrain station.)

Equally interesting will be our April Futurist Salon:
"Genetic and evolutionary computation" will be the theme that Mike Korns will prepare. 

His companies Korns Associates/Invest by Agent live and breath these things, see this excerpt from their webpage: "...R&D company that develops and uses sophisticated agent technology to build artificial intelligence applications for securities analysis and stock ranking"

The basis will be the book Emergence from Steven Johnson. If you are really interested in this area Mike also suggested "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" by Kevin T. Kelly. He will use these books as an intro to what's happening in the world of self-programming software. Can't wait.

Notes from last night's Futurist Salon ...

It was a great evening last night's Futurist Salon. Thanks Wayne for presenting Steven Pinker's book 'How the Mind Works'. and to everyone who came and participated.

Here is a link to the speculation I talked about, that Google is trying to built the 'Memex' by buying Blogger. Mike's responds was, that Google is crawling all weblogs, therefore has all that information already and that the real reason for them to buy Blogger is to have additional space for their ads. 

On Daypop yesterday you got a hint, that he may be right. The first two most popular posts where off the charts with "Advertise on Blog*Spot" and "Pyra Labs". (Screen shots capture of the Daypop status Feb. 22 2003) Check out the citations of these posts and you realize, that all of them are pointing to blogs from blogger. Apparently they changed the standard signature line to:

"Blog*Spot™ is a service of Pyra Labs™. Copyright © 2000-2002.
Terms of Service | Advertise on Blog*Spot | Upgrade your Blog*Spot blog"

Looks to me that one of the first things that Evan et al are working on since joining Google is positioning advertising better on Blogger.

Doesn't this screen shot I just took from one of the blogger weblogs look very much like Google text ads integrated into blog*spot?

 

 

 

Conclusion: Mike is right, Google crawls blogs, derives the theme/category of these weblog and then posts targeted ads on them. 

Dave Winer writes: "They bought Blogger, apparently, without talking to the field of competitors." Well, only Blogger was offering centralized access to 200.000 active weblogs with available ad space (although many pay for not having ads). All others major players work decentralized without ads, therefore are not in 'the field of competitors'.   

One more thing, the high ranking of these links on Daypop is an error, Blogdex does not even track these posts at all. But without it I wouldn't have noticed.

Yesterday my first reaction to Mike's comment was: "Oh, so it's only the mammon". Reality is of course, Pyra as well as Google have to pay rent too.  The Google ads are so far non intrusive and often help me find the things I am looking for, it is a fine line and I hope they can keep on finding and walking this line within Blogger.

Accelerated Times ...

The wait is over, John Smart our brother (or should I say father in LA) released the latest issue of Accelerated Times. Of course the question is, what kind of Accelerated Times is it, when it took over a Year to come out :-) But I must say it was worth the wait. 71 pages full with interesting futuristic stuff covering the whole spectrum from Community over Universal to Individual Dialog. Check it out.

The Computer gets a face ...

A British scientist is working on the most sophisticated robot head. K-bot. At the moment K-bot is only copying your facal expressions.

They better study Dr. Paul Ekman's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to get the emotions right. At one of our Futurist Salons Mary Beth told us, that this is the Bibel for film animators.Would like to check out too, but the stiff price tag of $260 dampens my interest a bit. Back then John Abbe posted a great New Yorker article regarding facial expressions.

Futurist Salon this Friday the 21st of Feb: How the Mind Works ...

Mark you calendar, this Friday the 21st of February, for the next Bay Area Futurist Salon.

The theme is 'Understanding the mind, consequences for the future'.  As a base for our discussion Wayne Radinsky is kind enough to introduce Steven Pinker's book 'How the Mind Works'.

As always you don't have to have read the book to take part in the evening's activities. We will do half an hour of news about things that happened since last month.

Please bring stories like this one that the weblog community is abuzz about today: Google buys Pyra the company that is running the most popular weblog software: Blogger.  The speculation is that Google is going to build the Memex. (See point 5, here more info regarding the Memex, very interesting stuff)

Come on out this Friday 7-9 pm Barnes and Noble Bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center. (Map although the star is slightly misleading, it is right at the El Camino across from the Caltrain station.)

If you are up for it, we always continue the discussion and extend the evening next door at Romano's Macaroni Grill with some good wine and Italian food.  

Metaphors and the Brain ...

In one of his posts Mike Korns wrote the following: "Nevertheless, we find ourselves at war once again."

In my opinion this was one of the biggest mistakes we did after 9/11 to frame the terror attack as declaration of war and then the whole responds to it as 'War on Terror'.

Georg Lakoff a Berkeley Linguistic Professor wrote an excellent peace about "The Metaphors of Terror" 

It fits quite nicely to the theme of our next Futurist Salon: How the Mind works. (This Friday the 21st 7pm Barnes and Noble Hillsdale Shopping Center) "Our systems of metaphorical thought, interacting with our mirror neuron systems, turn external literal horrors into felt metaphorical horrors."

Lakoff writes about 9/11: "The initial framing was as a "crime" with "victims" and "perpetrators" to be "brought to justice" and "punished." The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before "crime" changed to "war" with "casualties," "enemies," "military action," "war powers," and so on."

If feels somewhat strange, but I am agreeing with Rumsfeld, again quoted from Lakoff: "Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials have pointed out that this situation does not fit our understanding of a "war." There are "enemies" and "casualties" all right, but no enemy army, no regiments, no tanks, no ships, no air force, no battlefields, no strategic targets, and no clear "victory." The war frame just doesn't fit."

Because we framed the terror attack as war, we had to find a country to fight it with: Afghanistan first and now Iraq. What if the UK used the same war frame the first time a bomb from the IRA went off in downtown London? Terry Jones of Monty Python fame made that case in his brilliant satire: "OK, George, make with the friendly bombs".  

In an earlier piece Georg Lakoff shows how the family metaphors:The conservative Strict Father Model and the liberal The Nurturant Parent Model influence our worldview and our day to day politics.

Draw again ???

As Kramnik against Deep Fritz last October so did Kasparov against Deep Junior last weekend boring draw four : four. (What is up with that 'Deep' thing? Shallow machines don't play chess? Or there are all this shallow machines that play chess, but I am different, I go to the deep, throw me the ball Joe Montana. Why don't they call the Chess Game Jerry Rice then?)

"In the final game, Kasparov played himself into a superior position but offered a draw on the 23rd move, surprising chess experts. Deep Junior turned down the offer but offered its own draw five moves later. There were boos in the crowd when Kasparov accepted ..."

What a chicken. Didn't want to loose face again. Boring. If you go down, go down in style. Not that I would have any chance, I used to loose 90% of the games when playing against my palm pilot and that on the lowest level. The fun was to switch side, when it looked helpless for me. Still sometimes the chess game would find a way to fight back and win.

Japanese scientist invents 'invisibility cloak'

Mary Beth was mentioning something like this about half a year ago at one of our Futurist Salons. To be almost invisible one takes a camera to film what is happening behind you and wears more or less an LCD film that displays what the camera is filming.

At first glance this Japanese scientist invention looks exactly like that, but then you read the details: "The photograph was taken through a viewfinder that uses a combination of moving images taken behind the wearer to give a transparent effect."

So it is a projection that is created in a viewfinder, that then of course only works when you are wearing such a thing. To project something else in the background of the actors has been done for ages in movies. The new thing is, I guess, to be able to do this in real time. Less exciting then it first looked.

 

William Gibson tonight at the Booksmith in San Francisco...

I heard him yesterday being interviewed on the radio. I will probably check out his reading tonight at the Booksmith in San Francisco.  

They post the following:  Pattern Recognition is the eagerly awaited new novel from William Gibson, as well as the author's first book set entirely in the present. It's themes - globalism, surveillance, secrecy, paranoia - reveal the story of Cayce Pollard, who falls under the spell of a strange body of fragmentary footage found on the Internet. "Gibson's best book since he rewrote all the rules in Neuromancer." --- Neil Gaiman.

William Gibson is credited with having coined the term "cyberspace," and envisioned the Internet-and its effects on daily life-before any such things existed. Many of his descriptions and metaphors have entered the culture as images of human relationships in the "wired" age. His earlier books include Mona Lisa Overdrive, All Tomorrow's Parties and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

*** This event will be held at the Park Branch Library (1833 Page Street). Please call 863-8688 for details.

Here also a bookreview from Wired Magazine.

See you there tonight.

How the mind works ... (From the library)

The advantage of covering a book that is out for a while is, that one can find it in the library. If it has been very successful, there is also an audio version available. I had to hunt down the West Portal branch of the San Francisco Public Library, but now I have borrowed Steven Pinker's 'How the Mind works' on tape.

It is like a flash back to my childhood, I dim the light, tuck myself in bed and instead of my father's or mother's, Grover Gardner sonorous voice fills the room. It goes like: "Let me tell you a story about a Turing Machine ..." Very nice. (One day I will also find a way how to stay awake for more then 10 minutes :-)

Looking forward to our next Futurist Salon.