Tag Archives: technology

Future Imperfect

The Top Ten Substitutive Pieces List

Sven Johnson reports back from the Future Imperfect once again, rounding up the hottest body-mods, elective surgeries, prosthetic add-ons and extensions of the human condition from a year that’s probably less distant from our own than we suspect.

Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

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I don’t normally care for lists, especially at this time of year when we’re inundated with “Best of the Year” lists, “Worst of the Year” lists, and of course the obligatory “New Year’s Resolution List” lists. However, as a pre-emptive strike, I thought I’d jump in with my own contribution; something perhaps a bit different than the usual fare. So without further delay, here’s my “Top Ten Substitutive Pieces List”. Continue reading The Top Ten Substitutive Pieces List →

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What will reading look like in 2010?

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Well, it’s been a lively year for changes in the publishing industry, hasn’t it? This time last year, I wrote a post titled 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? – and over here in the UK, Borders has just gone into receivership, a few days before Amazon claimed to have sold more Kindle ebooks over the holiday period than dead-tree books. The times, they are a-changin’.

I still don’t have an ebook reader myself, because I’ve not seen one that’s open enough for my tastes – I don’t want to be tied to one retailer (same reason I don’t have an iPod), and I want to be able to read multiple formats without jumping through hoops. But 2010 looks like the year that the tablet computer makes its presence felt (if Apple are going to release one, you can bet your boots that cheaper and more open devices will follow close on its heels), and that means all we need is a decent platform for reading ebooks.

Enter inventor and Singularitarian Ray Kurzweil, who has a track record of disruptive developments in an assortment of industries; his new company knfb Reading Technology (a cooperative venture with the National Federation of the Blind) is set to debut an ebook software platform called Blio at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show next week. It’s already available for free download, with versions for PC, iPhone and iPod Touch, and (according to the linked article) it trumps pretty much all of the competition on features and accessibility. Blio may well turn out to be the grenade in the ebook punchbowl… I’m hoping an Android-native version appears pretty soon.

And what of the humble magazine? Distribution and print costs are killing off all but the most tenacious print publishing niches at a ferocious rate, but there’s plenty of people trying to find a new paradigm for the format – here’s a video demo of Mag+, the result of a collaboration between a Swedish publisher and BERG, the London-based design outfit [via MetaFilter]:

Of course, you may be thinking that all these developments are attempts to saddle a horse that has already fled the stable… after all, no-one reads any more, do they? Well, actually, they do – the consumption patterns and preferred media have changed rapidly, but a recent University of California study shows that the amount of text consumed by the average American has actually tripled since 1980, and social networks like Facebook have ordinary people writing more regularly than ever before (although the quality and nature of the material they write is admittedly pretty variable).

The one thing we can probably say for certain is that people are still going to be reading in 2010, and for a long time afterwards. The challenge for writers and publishers (of fiction or otherwise) are to find the channels that work best for the material they produce, and then to find a way to leverage that channel to make it a viable business model.

Interesting times ahead, don’t you think? 🙂

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Climate change might not starve us after all

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oatsIn the hugely polarised sphere of debate around climate change, there are a few thinkers who float outside the two core camps of belief and skepticism. One of those would be Brian Wang, who seems pretty convinced that AGW is a genuine phenomenon, but who also thinks it’s not going to be an unmitigated disaster. For example, he has a post responding to suggestions that a global temperature increase would lead to mass famine and starvation, in which he lists currently available or imminent technologies and scientific developments that could cope with the changed climate and keep the planet’s belly full. [image by sarniebill]

Of course, it’s worth remembering that a large percentage of the Earth’s population doesn’t have enough to eat already… and that a small percentage consumes way more than it actually needs. Keeping up production levels will be important, sure, but efficient and fair distribution of food resources would go a long way toward helping us ride out the rough patch. But then the same applies to energy resources, and we’ve already seen how popular the redistribution idea is with those who have the most to lose…

[ Feel free to discuss Wang’s points in the comments, but as always with this sort of post, unqualified trumpeting of ideologies from either side of the fence will be deleted without prejudice – that applies to climate change denial and climate change doomsaying. I have better things to do than referee an unwinnable slapfight, I’m afraid, so check the comments policy before you post. ]

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Homeopapes: journalism by machine

Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:

NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.

Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.

Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.

[…]

Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.

Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).

Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.

The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.

The first knee-jerk question here is “can (or should) we trust those algorithms to remain uncorrupted? How easy would it be for such a system to create news that wasn’t true, or that spun the truth in a particular direction?”

The instant counterargument would be to ask how much more prone to corruption and error an automated system would be compared to the existing human-based systems… all trust needs to be earned, after all, and (speaking for myself) I’ve little trust in the worldview of any media outlet when viewed in isolation. I aggregate my incoming news already through a bunch of semi-manual processes and routines; would something that removes the drudgery of that be inherently bad, or does the risk lie in our laziness and subconscious gravitation toward echo-chambers of our own ideas? Is there any such thing as objective news (at least about anything that really matters, a category which I feel sports doesn’t really occupy)?

All this talk of truth, trust and objective realities puts me in mind of Philip K Dick – more specifically “If There Were No Benny Cemoli”, with its homeopapes churning out news of a planetary adversary who may or may not actually exist. Can anyone recommend more stories that deal with similar themes?

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Fighting back against the advertising overload

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behind the billboardsSo, welcome back! Did you have a good holiday? I did… though the season comes with its share of annoyances, and if you’re anything like me you’ll be a happy human if you never see a perfume or aftershave advert again for as long as you live.

But pity the Los Anglelinos for a moment, because at least you can turn off (or away from) the glare of television advertising. Not so with the spreading crop of digital billboards; the LA Times reports on the efforts of local residents to combat the 24-hour lightbath they provide, most of which involve questioning the legality of the permits acquired by the billboard companies [via @Ballardian, who in turn got it from @BLDGBLOG].

Sadly, I suspect the protesting residents will end up looking like King Canute over the long haul. But I also fully expect we will see digital signage become a target for activist hacker types, as speculatively predicted by Lauren Beukes in her recent near-future post-cyberpunk novel Moxyland (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons a little while back, and heartily recommend to readers who enjoy the sort of fiction we publish here at Futurismic). Everything Can And Will be Hacked, after all… and digital advertising media offer all sorts of new and cunning opportunities for a smart adbuster or subcultural counterpropagandist.

Naturally, the billboard companies will push back hard against their opponents (and I’d fully expect legal grey areas to be colonised by both sides of the fight). But there’s one company that makes its money through advertising that doesn’t seem too worried about people trying to prevent ads intruding on them. That company is Google (of course), who’ve cheerily announced that they’re unconcerned about people building ad-block extensions for their Chrome browser… and that they suspect ad-blocking will actually save online advertising as a business model by a sort of Darwinian selection process [via SlashDot]. Says Google engineering director Linus Upson:

“It’s unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying.

“There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won’t want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.

“I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself.”

An unfashionable faith in market forces, there, but I rather suspect it’ll be vindicated in the long run. And hey, let’s be positive – maybe the arrival of ubiquitous augmented reality will spell the end of ugly billboards, digital or otherwise. Who’s gonna build them once it’s easy to ensure you never see them? [image by Omar Omar]