Tag Archives: technology

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Cutting without cutting – surgery goes zen

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Cavitation - it's not just for Red October Straight out of Star Trek comes a potential new breakthrough in medical surgery – being able to operate inside a person without making an incision.  By focusing ultrasound waves – the same used by OB/GYNs in prenatal care – in a way similar to focusing sunlight in magnifying glass, doctors may soon be able to disintegrate tissue several centimeters below the skin.

The new technique, called histotripsy (try saying that three times fast), causes cavitation – an effect that makes Sean Connery playing a Russian believable to American audiences.  It also creates tiny bubbles that grow and collapse, releasing energy that liquefies the tissue at the desired site.  While laser beams can be more powerful, what they cannot do is penetrate the skin without leaving burn marks.

(via SciTechDaily, image from youngdoo)

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The new advertising age – there is no escape!

Culture-jammed billboard The ongoing efforts of the advertising industry to make it impossible to escape from promotional material for products that no one really needs continue apace, with the full weight of modern technology behind them.

Warren Ellis points us at a report about a billboard that uses a technique called “audio spotlighting” to beam sound directly into your head … the only redeeming feature of which is the thought of the fun that culture jammers will be able to have once they figure ways of hacking them. [Image by rick]

Of course, the real frontier of advertising is right here on our beloved intarwebs, and it appears that some ISPs are keen to have a piece of the pie that Google has baked for itself. So some of those ISPs are selling your clickstream data to a company called NebuAd to make it easier to target you with “appropriate” ads. Nothing like a captive data-set to boost accuracy, eh?

Not quite as cheeky as a Canadian ISP called Rogers, though, who’ve been plastering their own ad content on Google’s homepage. That’s probably going to backfire, but if you look at it as a proof-of-concept job, it’s plain to see that web ads aren’t going to get any less intrusive any time soon – can you say “digital turf-war”?

On the subject of Google, recent research suggests that Google’s PageRank algorithm is actually a pretty good model of the way the human mind determines the relative importance of related concepts, and may provide a new route forward for artificial intelligence. How ironic would it be for us to reach the Singularity only to discover that the omnibrain of the human species is essentially interested in selling us things …

[tags]advertising, marketing, Google, AI, technology[/tags]
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The Kindle – not so closed as might have been suggested?

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The smoke has cleared after the Kindle’s launch (although our evaluation devices are still lost in the mail, it appears), and people have been poking through the detritus. One such person is sf author Gary Gibson, who’s been following the Kindle’s media trail quite closely … and has found a review that suggests Amazon’s new ebook reader may not be anywhere near as restricted in function as Amazon themselves may have claimed:

… the implication to some is that back-doors to the device’s software have been more or less left deliberately left wide-open. Not only that, but many of the purported limitations – you can only read books downloaded through Amazon’s website, you can’t copy books, it doesn’t work as a web browser – are, according to some, manifestly not true. For instance, the majority of blogs you purportedly have to pay to be able to read are accessible for free using RSS feeds through the Kindle’s basic web browser, as in fact are the free online contents of many of the newspapers now selling Kindle subscriptions.

Interesting stuff – though I think we’ll need some more corroboration on these points before getting too excited. And, wider functionality or not, it’s still very ugly … but I guess I could live with that.

[tags]Kindle, ebook, reader, functionality, technology[/tags]
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Computing as commodity – an economic singularity approaching?

Asus Eee notebook computer Charlie Stross has been shopping – and he’s pretty impressed with the Asus Eee notebook he bought. Not because it’s particularly powerful (which by current standards it isn’t, really) but because he feels it represents a turning point in the commoditization of computer technology:

“The Eee isn’t an order of magnitude cheaper than a normal laptop but it is close to an order of magnitude cheaper than previous ultra-lightweight subnotebooks. And I think I’m going to use it as a pointer to a future trend in the computer business, at the low end. The Eee is about 8 times as powerful as that 1998 Omnibook, at a quarter the price. That’s an improvement of half an order of magnitude in one direction and close to a full order in the other. And it’s a tipping point, I think, showing that the price points that have defined the goal posts for the personal computer business aren’t set in stone.”

As Stross points out, client-side power is becoming less necessary as well as cheaper – at least outside of boutique markets like the one Apple has staked out for itself. And this is a good thing, surely? Well, it would seem so at first. But with the science fiction writer’s instinctive “what if?” chops, Stross looks beyond the immediate:

“… how deep will be the recession that follows once the personal computing industry deflates to its natural value (i.e. peanuts)?”

Ouch. Double-edged sword. [Image by UnwiredBen]

[tags]computing, technology, commodity, economics[/tags]
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Amazon’s Kindle – Luddite technology?

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You’d have had to be hidden under a very large interweb-proof rock to have missed the fact that Amazon have launched the Kindle, their long-anticipated wireless e-book reader device, this week.

While we at Futurismic Towers are still awaiting our evaluation devices (which the Amazon people seem to have inexplicably forgotten to mail to us), we cannot pass judgement on the reading experience the Kindle offers – though we’d agree with the consensus that it’s not the prettiest machine ever. [Image from Engadget article]

Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

So, in the meantime, we’ll refer you to the inimitable Nick Carr, one of the most reliable contrarians of the modern age, who points out that Jeff Bezos’s vision for the Kindle is possibly the best one for the future of books as a platform:

“… Kelly and his fellow-travelers are wrong, and Bezos is right. The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.”

What do Futurismic readers think? Will e-book ubiquity save the novel, or destroy it?

[tags]Kindle, e-book, technology, fiction[/tags]