Will self-sustaining military robots feed on corpses?

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There’s always a story behind the story.

The Economist magazine this week points to an online story with the headline: Vegetarian robots: Munching machines – Robots that forage for fuel and run on steam power.

I was most interested in the description given of robots that sustained themselves by searching for fuel, but I also wondered why it specified ‘vegetarian’ robots. So I searched for EATR (the acronym for the robots) and found a great story about how the original story was that the robots could eat biomass, including dead human bodies. This video tells the story.

In short, Fox News released a story with the headline: Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies.

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Is Google a vampire sucking the blood out of media and the web?

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Here is a nice video of the highly-respected Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand speaking at Web 2.0 Expo SF about how Google plays fair and less fair, giving a balanced view of the accusations of vampirism from media tycoons such as Mark Cuban and Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton.

The video is well worth watching. Each of the many examples show how Google is using and potentially abusing its power in specific areas. Small choices, for example in showing related sites against a company website, could point to competitors and thus erode value for advertisers even as they may help consumers. It is also very easy to favor its own initiatives. Why wouldn’t you? But if you lose trust that you are providing the best search results, you lose everything.

Danny suggests that Google doesn’t want to do evil, but its initiatives have an enormous impact. Many caught in its enormous field of influence feel squeezed by its actions.

He ends up by proposing that all search engines should honor the “content compact”: Give as much or more than you take. Danny believes that Google is giving far more than it is taking, particularly in terms of giving traffic to websites.

What is most important is that the quality of search increases. I have to say I thought we would have far better search than we do today. The degree of competition in search is not quite what it should be to push Google. Hopefully the state of search can get better faster as the right sort of pressure is put on Google – not from media empires, but from people searching for the information and services they want.

What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department

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Our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is intended as a practical guide to how to create business value with web technologies inside the organization.

One of the key issues is the implications of these approaches for the organization and its key functional areas. Not surprisingly, there are a particular set of pressing issues for the IT department. These are covered in the report – we have excerpted Chapter 19 on the implications for IT below.

WHAT ENTERPRISE 2.0 MEANS FOR IT

Enterprise 2.0 has significant implications for the IT function of organizations. It is of course generally the responsibility of the IT function to facilitate the adoption of technologies that create value for the enterprise. However Enterprise 2.0 technologies both have significant cultural aspects to their use and uptake, and can have a significant impact on the underlying business processes and even value creation inside the organization.

Following are the primary issues that need to be understood and addressed, both by the CIO and his or her team, and the senior executive team and board of the organization.

1. Increased user expectations

One of the most important implications of Web 2.0 for organizations is that staff are increasingly exposed to very useful and well designed applications on the open web. The contrast with existing enterprise applications is usually stark.

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Mediagazer becomes the reference source for the media industry

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I have long watched technology news aggregator Techmeme, first mentioning it in 2006 as an example of user-filtered content and then writing about how it helps to find interesting conversations, and later discussing how it’s sister site Memeorandum was the best place to watch the US presidential elections (and US politics in general). We were also delighted to get Gabe Rivera as a speaker at our Future of Media Summit 2007.

Mediagazer was launched early last month to provide the same insight into the most prominent discussions on the media industry. This Compete chart of Techmeme’s and Mediagazer’s traffic shows that in its first measured month the site has achieved 112,000 visitors, a fantastic start from scratch.

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Is 3D TV dangerous?

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This morning I bumped into neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce at our local cafe. He was on interviewed on the 7pm Project last night about the dangers of 3D TV (see the video here) so we chatted about that.

Mark has been involved in 3D for close to two decades, most famously in creating Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), and before that helping Sega to develop a head-mounted display in the 1990s. When it was sent for testing by Standord Research Institute, problems arose for users. Yet the research was never published.

In an article titled Keep doing that and you’ll go blind, (which was taken up by Boing Boing among others), Mark writes:

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Extending the scope of augmented reality to what you CAN’T see

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To many people, augmented reality is about annotating what you can see. Names of landmarks, reviews of restaurants, the sale price of houses, and so on.

However with a little imagination, augmented reality can allow us to see what is around us but invisible, or what our environment will be like at another time.

As a follow up to the award-winning augmented reality iPhone app SunSeeker, which shows the direction of sunlight at any time on any time, Graham Dawson has released See Breeze, an “Augmented Reality Wind Visualizer” which shows the direction of the wind. Graham has a detailed write-up of See Breeze on his blog. The video demo below gives a feel for what it can do.

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The rise of robot journalists

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I have an abiding interest in robots and the role they play in our future. I am also a keen observer of where journalism is going. As it happens, the two domains are intersecting.

Robotic journalist conducting interview. Pic source: Singularity Hub, Charlie Catlett

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Singularity Hub reports:

Researchers at the Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab (ISI) at Tokyo University have developed a journalist robot that can autonomously explore its environment and report what it finds. The robot detects changes in its surroundings, decides if they are relevant, and then takes pictures with its on board camera. It can query nearby people for information, and it uses internet searches to further round out its understanding. If something appears newsworthy, the robot will even write a short article and publish it to the web.

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Location-based dating is FINALLY hot, Hot, HOT!

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Some ideas take a while to come to reality. Urban Signals is a New York-based company whose iPhone app notifies you when compatible singles are nearby and would like to meet. The iPhone app is free to download but requires a monthly subscription after the first month.

While some suggest that this was only a matter of time, this has in fact been happening for at least eight years.

Back in 2002 I wrote about proximity dating in my book Living Networks.

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A visit to Malaysia: perspective on technology, innovation, and growth

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I recently spent three days in Kuala Lumpur, running a two-day workshop for a client and meeting a number of very interesting people. I hadn’t been to Malaysia for six years, so it was great to get back. I thought it was worth sharing a few top-of-mind impressions and thoughts from my brief time there.

The first impression is how rapidly KL has developed in the last years. The glamorous new airport, wide highways everywhere, and the extraordinary Putrajaya area, which houses the federal government, are testament to the massive investment in infrastructure over the last years.

However traffic in KL remains abominable at rush hour. People sometimes choose to wait a couple of hours before driving home, and expect to get home at the same time anyway.

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Pic: CEO and PA of Malaysia Industry-Government Group for High Technology, Ross Dawson, Nik Hasyudeen, with Putrajaya landmarks in the background

I was very fortunate to have Nik Hasyudeen, the former president of the Malaysian Institute of Accountants and recently announced executive chairman of the Audit Oversight Board, as my guide for part of the trip. Nik is a connector extraordinaire, and adds to his broad experience in business strategy a great appetite for innovation.

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Yes, internet bandwidth IS a key driver of economic growth

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A commenter on my last blog post The latest country comparisons in that key economic driver: broadband speed questioned whether bandwidth does drive economic growth.

While it is easy to take that for granted, there are in fact many studies that have demonstrated this fact. One of the more interesting is a Booz & Co study that compared labor productivity growth over 5 years with bandwidth, titled Digital Highways: The Role of Government in 21st-Century Infrastructure.

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