Future Salon

Adult Stem Cells from Whiskers

Well, I was tempted to do another tasteless title about adult stem cells and dandruff. I refrain.

Still it is interesting where on the body these adult stem cells are hiding and probably doing adult stuff until they get lured out by these excellent researchers.

This time stem cells from mouse whiskers, that can be used to grow tissue and smooth muscle cells, neurons and other nerve cells. [via The Register]

Update: While composing this post linstrum1 has posted about it already on the Future Salon Yahoo Group

Wow, Future Salon Feedster Feed of the Day Today :-)

Thanks, Scott and Team. We are honored and hope it introduces more people to our events and may be some want to be part of the digital revolution in fabrication on the 15th of April.

Neil Gershenfeld on C-Span: Internet Zero

I am so looking forward to our next Future Salon on Tax Day Friday 15th of April: FabLabs: Make Almost Anything. Personal fabrication brought to a garage/desk near you.

The presenter professor Neil Gershenfeld, heads MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His ETech talk got written up in Business Week:

Technology, he says, isn't the main obstacle anymore. It's money. There's not just a digital divide, but a tools and instrument divide. He thinks there needs to be "micro-VC," or small amounts of venture capital as lilttle as $10,000, to encourage entrepreneurs around the world to use these personal fabs to create interesting new products.

He is on C-Span right now:  Digital Futures Series on C-SPAN 6:30 e.t. talking about Internet Zero: Extending the internet protocol to give every electric device an address. 

At an opening event one of the architects of the high-speed Internet 2 project kept coming back to ask how fast data could be sent through the building infrastructure. After being reminded that light bulbs don't need to be able to watch broadband movies, he was jokingly told that the emerging network of everyday devices was part of an Internet zero, not Internet 2. The name stuck. I0 is not a replacement for the current Internet (call that Internet 1); it is a set of principles for extending the Internet down to individual devices.

You can read the draft Internet Zero paper from 2004 on the MIT site.

Video of Digital Identity Future Salon Online

Finally the video of the Future of your Online Identity Salon is up for eternity :-) at the Internet Archive. We have to find a way to mark the spot where the different presentations start. At the beginning you are getting the round of introductions, which is also a good intro into the big problem space, but it would be good to be able to skip that if you like.

Thanks again to the presenters: Jeff Hodges from Liberty Alliance; Fen Labalme from Identity Commons and Eric Sachs from Google for having made that Future Salon such an interesting and memorable evening.

New Interesting AI Company: Numenta

Numenta a company developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex has just been formed by the team that brought you Handspring and the Treo: Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins.

The company is based on the insights described in the book On Intelligence that Jeff wrote last year together with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee.

It describes a new theory of what intelligence is, a complementary theory of how the neocortex works, and how we can build intelligent machines.

And now they start to build them. A new approach to AI. Would love to know more about it. Anyone out there that can convince Donna, Jeff and or Sandra to present at a Future Salon? Or even better speak at the Accelerating Change Conference AC2005. After all this year's theme is Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification and it is in their backyard, at Stanford September 16-18.

Chris Scott said after the last Future Salon, your audience asks the best questions. Numenta should get out there too, to get to get some good questions asked and I know especially in AI we would shine.

So please if you know them, tell them about the Future Salon and AC2005 and ask them kindly to be part of the fun.

John Smart Gets Out There

John Smart is Founder and President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. His late-night talk from Accelerating Change 2004, Simulation, Agents, and Accelerating Change: Personality Capture and the Linguistic User Interface, is up for free audio download at IT Conversations.

It's a must-hear for anyone interested in the deep direction of world systems and their social, technological, and business implications. Glad to work with you, John, and very happy to see your many original contributions and bold, critical synthesis getting out there (now finish writing your book! :-)

From the abstract (which doesn't do justice to the range and depth of the talk which explores many facets of accelerating change, developmental evolution, human experience, and coming technological emergences):

"One of the most important accelerating transitions occuring today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like? It seems clear that it will include sophisticated software simulations of human beings as part of the interface. First-world culture today spends more on video games than movies. These "interactive motion picture" technologies are more compelling and educating, particularly to our youth, the fastest-learning segment of society, than any linear scripts, no matter how professionally produced."

Make Almost Anything Future Salon

Update: Video recording of this Personal Fabrication Future Salon with Neil Gershenfeld is available on the Internet Archive. 

This one is very special. MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld stops his Fab book tour at the Future Salon. You can't get it yet and official sale is only starting on the 30th of April, but we will have copies available.

What the PCs did to publishing Fab Labs are doing to the production process: Make it personal. Neil Gershenfeld is at the center of this revolution that goes way beyond production, it changes the way people learn, think and see the world.

Fabrication Laboratories (Fab Labs) currently still $20.000 but rapidly becoming cheaper enable you and me and the third world is three to produce almost anything. (Still hard working on the zero gravity room :-) What that all means at the next Future Salon.

Even the economist wrote an article about it with a nice little cartoon, and you know that the message is out when they cover it.

If you are not in the Bay Area that day, don't despair. For our Webcast point your Quicktime player to the following address: rtsp://207.105.30.90/salon.sdp

We will also have an IRC chat session running:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #futuresalon

Nose Boogers contain Adult Stem Cells

Australian Scientists Grow Adult Stem Cells from Nose

SYDNEY (Reuters) - With the help of the Catholic Church, Australian researchers have successfully grown adult stem cells harvested from the human nose, avoiding the ethical and legal problems associated with embryonic stem cells.

But nobody is taking about the new ethicals problems, where to put your boogers now? If you are not careful you may end up with Fleshy Creatures. Takes the fun out of flicking them, does it. Something tells me I didn't totally get that correctly with harvesting stem cells from the nose. :-)

And who would have thought my good old Catholic Church did some good with the billions they have horded.

It really smells promising.

Announcing The Second Life Future Salon

It's official: The date for the inaugural Second Life Future Salon is set for Thursday, April 28th. The user created 3D world of Second Life now joins Los Angeles, Palo Alto, San Diego, and Las Vegas as a home to the monthly foresight, networking and all-around-good-times mini-conferences known as Future Salons.

I have a more thorough post at Setpoint Originator for those who are interested. Stay tuned for specifics (speakers, times, and a preliminary practice event will be announced soon). And please write me at jerrypaffendorf [at] accelerating [dot] org if you'd like to get involved or have any ideas or questions.

If you're in Second Life and want to catch up with me, search for SNOOPYbrown Zamboni. If I'm not there, leave me an IM and I'll get back to you. Money-wise, Second Life has a free 7 day trial and $9.95 will get you in for life. Hope to see a bunch of you "in-world" for the first Future Salon foray into the metaverse frontier.

Three interesting SL resources (more in the Setpoint post):

•New World Notes, a blog by embedded SL journalist James Au aka Hamlet Linden
•Living the Dream: Business Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds, audio of keynote presentation by Cory Ondrejka at Accelerating Change 2004
•Snapzilla, Second Life's version of Flickr (amazing)

Below: Here I am keeping the future safe for Second Life (note my avatar's Accelerating Change 2004 t-shirt by Jeff Thompson—consider your mind blown! :-)

Power of an open API

You never know what crazy stuff people out there com up with:

Spell with Flikr (via Jeff Nolan)