IT organizations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Charged with protecting their company's information, IT organizations have established aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) that impact the manner in which they implement data protection by setting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
Organizations struggle with shrinking or non-existent backup windows, the need to recover quickly, often to a specific point in time, and even meeting compliance or regulatory guidelines. Backing up to tape is no longer adequate; not only is it difficult to administer for backups and recoveries, but it lacks the speed, reliability, flexibility and simplicity IT needs to meet stringent SLAs. Backing up to disk using virtual tape emulation or virtual tape libraries also falls short as the administration of the solution is tape-centric and schedule driven. Add in the explosion of data, along with the challenge of protecting remote offices, and you have the challenge facing many of today's business--with IT sitting on the front lines of aligning business needs with today's technology.
As a result, a growing number of IT organizations are augmenting their traditional backup and recovery strategies with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. CDP dramatically improves RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. What's more, CDP not only reduces the need for tape in the backup and recovery process but it also makes recovery easy enough that users can often recover their own files, without help from IT.
What is CDP?
CDP is a process that lets organizations continuously capture or track data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from specific points in the past. CDP systems may be block, file-, or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points in time.
CDP reduces the complexity of the data protection system and eliminates the classic challenge of theing backup window because it eliminates the need for full, incremental, or differential backups by protecting data immediately and then continuously backing it up to disk. CDP is not a complete replacement for traditional backup but rather an important component of a well-rounded backup and recovery strategy.
Can CDP be leveraged for backing up and recovering email? As the predominant form of communication for business transactions, email is an application that is mission-critical to organizations of all sizes. It generates a huge amount of information that must be immediately available and protected. The loss of a single message may generate hours of unnecessary and frustrating labor for administrators and/or users and can lower productivity or affect business operations. And with the introduction of Exchange 2007, organizations need protective solutions that can support the latest offering from Microsoft.
Not surprisingly, the amount of email data requiring protection and availability is growing exponentially. IT, in turn, is faced with the challenge of backing up this critical data within the existing backup window and recovering it quickly. Moreover, they must not only be able to back up and recover whole email databases but they also require a system which enables recovery of individual mailboxes or emails. However, if administrators want to back up email databases for complete disaster recovery purposes and be able to recover individual email, folders, or mailboxes, they typically have had to do separate backups.
New granular recovery technologies have emerged that enable mail messages, mailboxes, and folders to be restored individually without having to restore an entire email database, and without separate and redundant mailbox backups. In an Exchange environment, for example, only a single-pass full or incremental backup of Exchange is required, which dramatically decreases the time required to protect all mailboxes while also reducing the backup storage requirement.
Selasa, 18 Maret 2008
An overview of continuous data protection
iPhone the Ultimate Blogging Device
Kiltak at Geeks are Sexy points to this iPhone advertisement and asks if the iPhone is the ultimate blogging tool. The girl in the video explains that the iPhone can be used to take pictures and blog them directly from the phone:
But is it the ultimate blogging device? No.
The Palm Treo is a better device for the hardcore blogger. Take a look at the dancer's situation to understand why.
If she had a Treo, she could take much higher resolution photos using a typical point & shoot camera like the Canon SD line, then swap her SD card into the Treo to share a much higher resolution photo of an event. This would also allow her to take better low-light photos than the iPhone could handle. I have a hard time believing she captures great photos of ballet considering the light conditions and speed involves.
She could also use the point & shoot camera to take video clips of dancing rather than just stills. The clips could be blogged by emailing them to Blip.tv and posted directly to her blog from Blip. The iPhone can't do video, and it wouldn't be as high of resolution as what you could get from the point & shoot.
The Treo, on Sprint or Verizon, has faster data speeds than the iPhone which makes it possible to upload large photos in relatively tolerable times.
The keyboard on Treos makes it easier to type more descriptive blog posts to accompany your photos or videos in less time than one could type on an iPhone.
Will this always be the case? Probably not. Networks will get faster, future iPhones will have better cameras, and they'll surely add video support at some point. But for now, I don't think the iPhone is the ultimate blogging device.
Decide for yourself. Here are links to two ballet related posts I found on Kristin's blog in the past 5 months. Capturing indoor photos of people moving would be nearly imp
Three Tips For Handling PDF Conversions
1. Zamzar launches a pretty nifty file conversion service
I wanted to scrape a graphic from a PDF file and I was searching online for my options. Normally one looks for a packaged option, downloadable, and I was sorting through the free and not so free, the working and not so working and I came across this little gem called Zamzar. It’s a service, rather than software, and they do one or two of the niftiest things going. First, they translate my PDF files into just about any file format I could wish for. This was what I wanted in the first place, but they also offered to do little other things that were neat, like send me a file that they can scrape off Youtube! I like that. Let me go aside for a paragraph and then back to Zamzar.
I pulled Paul Tobey’s Music Box Dancer, which is a jazzed up version of the classic off and now I can listen to it on my PDA when I don’t have internet access. One of the comments said it best for me: “I like both versions. These guys are just having a great jam session having fun with a tune that lends itself to such things.” Over 22,000 views can’t be wrong! Paul is an interesting guy. I met him at one of his Internet Marketing Courses, and after about three hours, realized that he wasn’t just teaching me how to do Search Engine Optimization, but he was also teaching me about copy writing, etiquette, strategy, how to close sales, and just plain Internet business sense. His Music Box dancer is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmqgNKB1uog and you can look over his internet marketing course at http://www.trainingbusinesspros.com/. But that’s not why I’m writing this. Through Paul, I found a great practical use for Zamzar and this is how it fits usefully into my life.
Zamzar is a pretty neat converter. It's free. You go to www.zamzar.com and simply upload your file. Shortly afterwards, Zamzar emails you a link back. You follow that link and download the converted file. It's free, and pretty easy!
Zamzar does the following conversions to PFD and back. The entire list, which includes images, audio and video!
• convert PDF to doc - Microsoft Word Document
• convert PDF to html - Hypertext Markup Language
• convert PDF to odt - OpenDocument Text Document
• convert PDF to pcx - Paintbrush Bitmap Image
• convert PDF to png - Portable Network Graphic
• convert PDF to ps - Postscript document
• convert PDF to rtf - Rich Text Format
• convert PDF to txt - Text document
and
• convert csv to PDF Comma Separated Values
• convert doc to PDF Microsoft Word Document
• convert docx to PDF Microsoft Word 2007 Document
• convert odp to PDF OpenDocument presentation
• convert ods to PDF OpenDocument spreadsheet
• convert odt to PDF OpenDocument Text Document
• convert ppt to PDF Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation
• convert pptx to PDF Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Presentation
• convert ps to PDF Postscript document
• convert rtf to PDF Rich Text Format
• convert wpd to PDF WordPerfect Document
• convert wps to PDF Microsoft Works Document
• convert xls to PDF Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet
• convert xlsx to PDF Microsoft Excel 2007 Spreadsheet
The thing that I really like about Zamzar is that they are new and coming up with new stuff all the time. It also seems to convert WordPerfect documents into Word documents and Word documents into WordPerfect Documents which can be very handy if you are in a WordPerfect shop.
I'll use Zamzar occasionally. However, I'm not sure I want to ship my corporate or personal information to Zamzar or off into some unknown place in the Interweb, but I sure like it for what it does. I'll stick to MyPDFCreator for the business critical and personal stuff, but Zamzar is a great tool in the toolbox!
2. PDF Etiquette: It's the right thing!
Just because you have PDF doesn't mean you have to use it! When should one use PDF and when should one stick to POT (Plain old Text)
PDF is great when you want to send an uneditable document. Examples include quotations, invoices, legal documents, and ebooks PDF is also outstanding for sending documents for which the presentation layout is crucial, like annual reports.
However, anytime that you email an attachment, it requires extra clicks to open it, and people tend not to do extra clicks. They miss the attachment, or they don't want to open attachments for fear of viruses, or, if they are on an old computer, opening up large PDF or other files can slow down and stop a computer. If you are sending a birthday party initiation or something casual, put it in the email. Don't use any attachment at all.
3. In Software, "Feature Rich" can be a "Bloated Pig"!
Make sure that the software you are using isn't loaded down with options you'll never use. If you buy, for example, Adobe Professional for $449.00 you are getting the most complete feature rich, product available. This is great when you want to "Design forms to collect and aggregate data through e-mail or on the web" for example. But if 100% you are going to do falls in the realm of "create a Word Document or a PowerPoint show and convert it to PDF and back" then you don't need to spend most of the $449.00 and you don't need to have to struggle through the myriad of options that the "Feature Rich" software offers you, and you don't need to go on a three day training course. Buy the bacon, not the whole hog!
Senin, 17 Maret 2008
Protecting Children Online With Internet Parental Controls
The World Wide Web is a fascinating place. It has obliterated geography in terms of education and business. It facilitates learning by allowing kids to see things and experiences aspects of different places they may never get the chance to see in the non-virtual world. The Internet can bring people together who otherwise would never know each other and create a virtual universe that is totally cohesive, with every kind of information imaginable literally available at your fingertips. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, the Internet has a dark side. It is full of material that is inappropriate for children and all kinds of predators. Leaving your kids alone to fend for themselves on the Web is exactly as dangerous at leaving them in a crowed airport or shopping mall. You don’t know where they’re going or who with. The news is filled with horror stories about kids who have been taken advantage of on the Internet, but you don’t want yours to miss out on all the positive aspects of the technology. The first line of defense in keeping your kids save on the Web is to teach them how to use it safely.
A lot of online dangers can be dodged simply by reminding kids of one of their earliest learned lessons: don’t talk to strangers. The kinds of people who want to harm kids have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. They may try to lull your child into a false sense of security by pretending to be someone she knows. Make sure your child understands that it isn’t a good idea to give out personal information such as their address, phone number or the name of their school. The less information a potential predator has, the harder it will be for him to actually locate a victim. It might be a good idea to establish a secret password and share it only with friends and family so your kid has a way to identify people who are safe to chat with.
Chat interfaces and instant messaging are great tools for keeping in touch with friends and conduct business, but they are also direct connections between your child and possible pedophiles and other predators. Most instant messengers have settings that will only allow people on a pre-approved list to approach your child. That way you can let the kids chat with family and friends while keeping the bad guys out. You can visit http://www.internet-parental-control.org to find more information on online child safety measures.
You can’t watch your kids every minute they are online, and you can’t always count on them to do what you have taught them to do. Parental control software is a great back up. Most browsers will allow you to customize age-appropriate settings for each child in your house. You can choose what kinds of Web sites you want your kids to access and block them out of the ones you don’t. It’s a great way to provide a virtual safety net for your family. If the parental controls supplied by your Internet Service Provider, check into installing additional software that will evaluate each site your child attempts to access. You set criteria by which the software judges each Web page and assigns a rating, much like a movie rating. Your kids will only be able to look at sites with ratings you have deemed appropriate.
Web Accessibility a Universal Goal!
Over the last decay, an increase number of research were conducted to determine ways Information Technology can assist in meeting special needs to ensure universal accessibility. Findings to date suggest that by being more knowledgeable about accessibility issues, Web designers and developers are able to accommodate end users with special needs.
As we enter the knowledge age, it is no longer acceptable that people with limited or no vision are on their own when it comes to accessing the web, nor those with mobility problems are on their own when it comes to use a hardware. To ignore
website accessibility raises moral, business, and legal issues. It is morally wrong to discriminate
against disabled people on the web simply through lack of thought, consideration, or awareness. Many business web sites designed without considering accessibility issues result in loss of revenue. Some countries, such as the US, UK, and Australia has introduced legislation that requires organizations to adhere to accessibility issues.
In June 1999, the Disability Discrimination Act (1999) has been used to fight for access rights in
Australia. The 2000 Olympic Site Games, jointly developed by Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (SOCOG) and IBM was found inaccessible to the blind users, and SOCOG was fined A$ 20,000 [1].
The purpose of this paper is raising awareness among web designers and developers, to achieve universal web accessibility goal. The paper looks at the disability issues and the existing assistive technologies or methods used by disabled users to assist them in accessing the web.
Afterwards, the paper reviews guidelines for good web site design, and provides analysis for designing an accessible website. Furthermore, the paper highlights on the challenges and gaps in the web accessibility area.
Literature Review:
Two years ago, a Conference was held in ‘London’ and attended by representatives of commerce, industry, government, and the IT Sector aiming to raise awareness of the potential benefits of assistive technology to disabled users. The outstanding number of speakers highlighted through number of cases how technology can transfer lives. ‘Sue Bassoon’ a Business Development Manager at IBM said: “IBM’s goal is to have a speech recognition system as good as the human ear by 2010” [2].
The objectives of this literature is two folds: (1) explain how a particular disability (e.g.
visual impairment, mobility restriction, hearing impairment) can impede the use of the web, and what can be done to accommodate special needs; and (2) show how web designers and developers can construct accessible web sites to end users with disabilities, such as visual or hearing impairment.
(1) Disability Issues
The section begins with a descriptive part concerning disabled user functional limitation
and dependence on assistive technologies.
A- Vision Issues:
A web user who has no sight (totally blind) is likely to use the screen reader technology to reads a load the content of the web page. Other web users, with partial or poor sight need to be able to enlarge the text on web page using a screen magnifier.
B- Mobility Issues:
A web user may have mobility problems as a result of an accident or disease such as:(loss of limb, Injury, or aging process). The technologies used by users with mobility problems are:
- Sticky Keys: For users with one finger typing.
- Filter Keys: Ignores repeated strokes for people with hand tremors.
- Mouse Keys: Permits moving pointer with numeric keypad.
- Serial Key: Permits access to alternatives for mouse and keyboard functions such as Foot Mouse.
- Eye gaze: A video camera that racks eye movement as the user look at an on screen keyboard. It is customizable as how long a key must be looked at to be recorded. When system has identified the key looked at the symbol appears and the user look at next key.
C- Hearing Issues:
A web user may be deaf or experiencing problems with hearing due to the natural aging process. To assist those users the audio or video need to be translated to the ASL (American Sign Language) language of the deaf, in which certain signs represent words.
(2) Design for Accessibility
In the above section, the paper provided readers with a general knowledge about disability issues, disabled users, and the existing assistive technologies. This section is intended for web designers and developers, because it provides them with tips and guidelines on ways to design a good and accessible website. There are two main aspects
to take into account:
I- Look and Feel
Web designers need to present a user friendly interface that addresses specific ability needs. The designer should be able to describe ways disabled users interact with a website, and how they move through the pages and how they achieve their goals. Below, are helpful tips that designers need to consider when designing an accessible website.
- Web Designers & Developers; should follow the four principles of visual organization in the process of designing a website which are: Proximity, Alignment, Consistency, and Contrast.
- Web Designers & Developers; must avoid using HTML tables to control the layout, instead use style sheets.
- Web Designers & Developers; should use legible fonts, and font size to allow disabled users to easily change them from the browser interface.
- Avoid poor color contrast in your design, and do not use color for meaningful description.
- Avoid the use of animation, and flash which may affect users with photosensitive epilepsy.
- Avoid using Frames because it can pose problems for technology used by some disabled users.
- Try not to use graphics for menu and button forms.
- Avoid hiding menu items (using DHTML or applets)
II- Content
Web designers should organize content in a way that can provide ease of use and simplicity. Below, are helpful tips that designers need to consider when designing an accessible website:
- Use a clear language, and write short sentences.
For example, a web page should provide blind users with a short summary of what they can find. A Search Functionality is important because a blind person can’t scan the page, and will generally trust first result he/she receives.
- Add Accessible tags and attributes by using rich set of tags to enhance accessibility. For instance, an ALT tag is used to provide a text equivalent for images within a website. The
ALT text description is what the screen reader or talking browser will read to the blind users .
- Use clear link descriptions, and include links that a user can click to skip repetitive regions of the page.
- Ensure the pages are usable when scripts, applets, or style sheets are turned off or not
supported.
- All audio and video content should contain captions, transcription, and descriptive information.
Analysis:
It is estimated that 20% of the population has some kind of disability. The internet opens
a new window of opportunity and independence to disabled users from reading news to banking to conducting business. For example, by using the screen reader technology a blind user can listen to the latest newspaper published electronically. Similarly, a user with mobility problem who can not go out shopping to buy a newspaper, nor use a
keyboard or mouse independently, can rather use the eye tracking software that allow people to use a computer with nothing more than eye movement.
Nowadays, organizations are asking designers to make their web sites accessible and for
good reasons. First of all, the more people who can use a site, the more potential it can
generate. Online stores, in particular have a great deal to gain, since many people with
functional limitation problems, find it much easier to shop online. Most Web designers
are not personally opposed to the concept of making web sites accessible to people with
disabilities. In fact most accessibility errors on web sites are the result of ignorance. A large proportion of web designers and developers have simply never thought about accessibility issues. A small proportion of web designers (4%) do not understand the needs of users with disabilities; another (46%) understand some of the needs of users with disabilities. While only (26%) of designers understand most of the needs of users
with disabilities and can accommodate them [3].
The Challenges and Gaps of Web Accessibility:
In this section, we highlight the challenges and the requirements posed by user needs, to
access the web. We argue the need for a new approach to address accessibility issues, and
include it in each and every web project life cycle.We recognize that the vast majority of disabled users face challenges when accessing the web. Why is this? Is it the lack of technical solutions to meet their needs – absolutely not! You will hear today that there are new technological solutions to address even most extreme form of disability. Is it cost?
Again it is not! Some technical solutions, cost nothing at all, and already exist in software. So, What then? Is it that web applications are being developed that present challenges to accessible design? Is it lack of knowledge and skills to meet their needs?
There does seem a general lack of awareness of web accessibility issues. Web Designers and Developers, need to have a better approach to tackle the problem in each phase of the web development process. For example, during the requirement analysis phase a web developer must define the target audience of the site, and should take into account people with a combination of disabilities. In addition to this, during prototyping phase a web designer must have the knowledge to accommodate end users with special needs, and also the skills to meet their expectations.
Moreover, testing the web site using different
technologies is critical for a successful web site, to ensure it meets the accessibility
standards and user requirements [4].
Therefore, in each phase of the web development process, accessibility plays an important role. Accessibility and Usability should be completely embedded in web design and development cycles from beginning to end.
The future looks bright for web accessibility. It promises to educate web designers and developers about accessibility issues, through training courses offered at universities.
Conclusion:
The Internet offers independence and freedom. But, this independence and freedom is limited to certain users. Many websites are not created with accessibility issues in mind.
Whether it is the Web Designer lack of knowledge or ignorance, they exclude a segment of users that in many ways benefit from the internet [5].
In short, designing accessible websites does not require an enormous effort or time. It simply, requires commitment, and accountability, to achieve a universal goal.
The Benefits Of CRM Software
CRM software, often called customer relationship management software, is becoming much more popular today than it was in years past. One reason for this is that more people understand what the software is and are deciding to use it. Another reason is that the software is getting better and easier to use. It has more features and benefits than it did in the past, and it is also becoming more user-friendly, which is very important. More people today are using the Internet for their businesses. As this trend continues to grow, there will be a larger need for CRM software, but only if it is found to be useful and compatible with the needs that a business owner or manager has.
There are a lot of benefits to CRM software, as well. Managers can use this software to keep track of their customers and vendors and organize them in many different ways. It is unfortunate that so many people only think of CRM software as being a datebook or contact-recording type of software. It does handle these functions, but it does a great deal more than that, which is something that many business people fail to realize today when they are presented with CRM software. This CRM software can be used to record names and dates. However, it also keeps track of sales, returns, important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. In addition, it can help to remind salespeople of their prior commitments. This keeps them from missing deadlines, meetings, the returning of phone calls, or anything else that will affect the perception of them that their clients have.
Naturally, not missing deadlines is vital to a good business relationship. In addition, the CRM software can help a client feel as though he or she matters to a business. When a client feels important and valued, repeat business is much more likely than it would otherwise be. This is great for the business, but it is also good for the clients, because everyone in the relationship benefits from the efficiency that CRM software helps to create. Without CRM software, there is a good chance that there will be more problems in the interactions that are needed between clients and businesspeople. This is not to say that CRM software eliminates all chance of problems, but it does reduce them.
Those who use CRM software can also be more organized, because it is easier for them to find what they need when it comes to their customers, their vendors, and anything else that they need to keep close track of. It allows them to return calls more promptly, send out birthday cards, and keep customer information stored in a database where it can easily be retrieved by anyone who has authorized access to it. The main benefit to customers is that almost anyone in the company can help them, at least to some degree, because they can get to their information. This benefit of CRM software is the most important one because of the ability to let customers know that they are important to the company.
The Benefits Of CRM Software
CRM software, often called customer relationship management software, is becoming much more popular today than it was in years past. One reason for this is that more people understand what the software is and are deciding to use it. Another reason is that the software is getting better and easier to use. It has more features and benefits than it did in the past, and it is also becoming more user-friendly, which is very important. More people today are using the Internet for their businesses. As this trend continues to grow, there will be a larger need for CRM software, but only if it is found to be useful and compatible with the needs that a business owner or manager has.
There are a lot of benefits to CRM software, as well. Managers can use this software to keep track of their customers and vendors and organize them in many different ways. It is unfortunate that so many people only think of CRM software as being a datebook or contact-recording type of software. It does handle these functions, but it does a great deal more than that, which is something that many business people fail to realize today when they are presented with CRM software. This CRM software can be used to record names and dates. However, it also keeps track of sales, returns, important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. In addition, it can help to remind salespeople of their prior commitments. This keeps them from missing deadlines, meetings, the returning of phone calls, or anything else that will affect the perception of them that their clients have.
Naturally, not missing deadlines is vital to a good business relationship. In addition, the CRM software can help a client feel as though he or she matters to a business. When a client feels important and valued, repeat business is much more likely than it would otherwise be. This is great for the business, but it is also good for the clients, because everyone in the relationship benefits from the efficiency that CRM software helps to create. Without CRM software, there is a good chance that there will be more problems in the interactions that are needed between clients and businesspeople. This is not to say that CRM software eliminates all chance of problems, but it does reduce them.
Those who use CRM software can also be more organized, because it is easier for them to find what they need when it comes to their customers, their vendors, and anything else that they need to keep close track of. It allows them to return calls more promptly, send out birthday cards, and keep customer information stored in a database where it can easily be retrieved by anyone who has authorized access to it. The main benefit to customers is that almost anyone in the company can help them, at least to some degree, because they can get to their information. This benefit of CRM software is the most important one because of the ability to let customers know that they are important to the company.
Kamis, 13 Maret 2008
The great Internet search engine
Few Web sites generated as much media buzz in 2005 as Wikipedia, the collectively authored online encyclopedia. The attention is well deserved because there is no more compelling example of the Web's collaborative potential. What makes Wikipedia interesting is how it gets made: Ordinary people submit entries for different topics and then revise them over time. That is a truly radical break from the traditional closed-door, credentialed method of producing Encyclopædia Britannica and its ilk. While there have been substantive critiques of Wikipedia's accuracy and comprehensiveness, the idea that a free encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers could give the venerable Britannica a run for its money would have sounded preposterous even 10 years ago. Now it is a fact.
But the Wikipedia miracle is a story of means, not ends. And I worry that we've lost sight of the ends by focusing so much on the idea of collective authorship. The end products created by all those swarming amateurs are encyclopedia entries, supplemented by hyperlinks—no different from what you would find on any of the traditional online encyclopedias, including Britannica. The information presented by Wikipedia can be more timely—hurricane Katrina had an entry before the storm swept through New Orleans—but the form that information takes is a throwback to dead-tree media.
Luckily, there are innovative alternatives to the encyclopedia model out there. They are not the highest profile sites online. But as vehicles for conveying complex information, they may well make up one of the most successful species in the entire Web ecosystem.
A few years ago, I began researching a project about cholera in the 19th century, and I stumbled across a Web site (www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html) devoted to the legendary doctor and epidemiologist John Snow. When cholera spread through London's Soho district in 1854, Snow plotted a map of the deadly outbreak and found that everyone who fell ill had used water from a centrally placed public well that was contaminated by nearby sewers and cesspools. The discovery not only helped prevent the further spread of the disease but also constituted a major medical breakthrough—until then the scientific establishment had wrongly assumed that cholera was transmitted by air, not water. Snow's cartographic detective work made him a founding figure in several fields of research: epidemiology, public health, even information design.
The easiest way to describe the John Snow site is by starting with what it is not. It is not an encyclopedia entry; it is not a biography or a biographical article; it is not a collection of links. The traditional scholarly word that might be used to describe it is archive. The site is a potpourri of useful material: audio files telling the story of Snow's investigations; an exhaustive collection of Snow's original writing; a vast library of articles written about Snow's legacy; annotated maps of London, including Snow's famous map of the Soho outbreak; short biographies of the major figures in Snow's life; excerpts from books that mention him; dozens of photographs, including images of Snow and landmarks in London related to his life; modern-day scientific explanations of the cholera bacteria; and much more.
The Snow site is hosted by the department of epidemiology at UCLA's School of Public Health. It was the brainchild of a professor there named Ralph Frerichs, who began putting the site together in the late 1990s, mostly as a hobby. "When we talk about notable figures in any field, you have to bring in a little more information about who they are, their character," he says. "In public health, we didn't have that many notable individuals who had been brought out to the general public. I figured I could write an article about Snow, but it's hard to get wide circulation for an article that appears in a newspaper or magazine that comes and goes. The Web opened up the opportunity for having something out there for much longer."
Frerichs could have summarized some of the information on the site had he chosen to showcase the life and work of John Snow through an encyclopedia entry. Or he could have captured Snow's life in more of a narrative form had he chosen to write a traditional biography. But neither of those forms would have produced the same open-ended, exploratory wonder that the Web site conjures. "It's a little like a library," Frerichs says. "Someone can come there and they can just wander through it, in whatever direction they want to take."
Unlike a traditional library, the site is open for anyone to explore at any hour of the day or night. A typical visitor might find her way there via a Google search on "epidemiology" or "cholera" and then sample various versions of the outbreak map that Snow tinkered with over the years, or download a handful of PDF files that offer a comprehensive account of his public-health legacy. Someone interested in urban history might spend more time on the larger annotated map of 1859 London that Frerichs digitized. Or a browser interested in Snow the person could spend an entire afternoon sifting through the biographical materials.
There's nothing technically innovative about Frerichs's archival tribute to Snow—no state-of-the-art user forums, no recommendation algorithms, no blogging whatsoever, as shocking as that might sound. Indeed, the site reminds me most of a great, unfinished study of 19th-century urbanism called Passagenwerk, an elaborate collection of photos, quotes, advertisements, clippings, and short aphorisms compiled by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin during the 1930s. Benjamin's premise was that an archive of connected documents could convey the riches of a subject more powerfully than a traditional linear book; it was an idea about 50 years ahead of its time.
In some ways, the Snow site is also a throwback to the early days of multimedia when CD-ROMs—and not Web pages—were the primary vehicles of interactivity. Its structure brings to mind a number of early influential projects from the early 1990s: the multimedia CDs published by the Voyager Company, an annotated archive of the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced by the University of Virginia, and an early Web portrait of 19th-century British culture called the Victorian Web, created at Brown University.
What I find most surprising is that the Snow site is something of a rarity these days. Pretty much every university department on the planet has its own page on the Web, with course listings, faculty bios, and recent publications listed in endless detail.
But few academics go to the trouble of creating public archives. It's true that most people who use the Internet for research end up bouncing from site to site with Google as their guide, collecting quotes and images and documents as they explore the wider Web. What's lost in the process is the individual, expert wisdom of intelligent curators, assembling the crucial materials that Google might overlook.
Frerichs designed the Snow site as a way of sharing the character and wisdom of a great man, but what I sense more than anything as I move through the space is the animating presence of Frerichs himself. I trust him as a guide, and even more so after listening to him talk about the site with the sort of fondness someone might use to describe a garden he's been cultivating for years. "Oh, I've been ignoring the site a little recently because I'm working on a book," he says. "But when any new Snow item comes out—a new article, say—I'm usually pretty fast about getting it up. It's kind of therapeutic, actually. When I get tired of other things, it's always fun to go back to."
Quantum Leap
In February, D-Wave Systems of Vancouver, British Columbia, launched the Orion, what they call “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” Whereas digital computers confine bits of information to either 1 or 0, quantum computers harness the strange laws of quantum physics to achieve “qubits” of information. Unlike bits, qubits can represent more than one number at a time. Computer scientists realized decades ago that representing multiple values simultaneously could cut certain number-crunching problems from years to minutes. But no one had ever managed to assemble more than a handful of qubits at a time.
D-Wave claims to have solved that problem. It cools circuits made of the rare metal niobium to five-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Each of these 16 superconducting circuits serves as a qubit, and the company has plans for expansion. By the end of next year, it hopes to unveil a vastly more powerful 1,000-qubit machine. D-Wave hasn’t yet released data on Orion’s early test runs, but some experts are expressing guarded optimism about the machine that could herald the end of the beginning of quantum computing. “I think that this current piece of work is potentially solid,” says Seth Lloyd, a mechanical engineer at MIT.
Others are more dubious. Qubits must function in a single collective quantum state, so that any action performed on one simultaneously affects all the others. Achieving that kind of coherence isn’t easy. “Understanding their basic fabrication process and talking with D-Wave people, I know that any quantum coherence in their system is very minimal,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. But Geordie Rose, D-Wave’s founder, seems unconcerned. “What we’re going to do is build them and see whether they’re behaving as quantum computers should.”
IBM Debuts Web 2.0, Collaborative Technologies
IBM has unveiled several new collaboration tools and Web 2.0 technologies, including IBM Lotus Mashups, a forthcoming commercial mashup maker designed to allow "non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups." At the Lotusphere conference in Florida last Wednesday, the company also introduced new versions of Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, a rich collaboration tool.
IBM Lotus Mashups, which is expected to be released later this year (although no firm date has been set), provides a browser-based tool for assembling mashups blending enterprise and Web-based data. It includes a set of pre-defined widgets, a "catalog" for locating usable widgets and mashups, and a tool that allows users to build widgets that access enterprise data.
IBM also said it plans to release Lotus Connections 2.0 in the first half of this year. Lotus Connections 2.0 is the next version of IBM's social networking tool that includes several new features, including a new homepage that filters Lotus Connections services, aggregates content, and provides support for drag and drop widgets. The software's community component is also expected to receive an overhaul in the areas of discussion forums, unified communications via integration with Lotus Sametime, and linking to wiki services through Lotus Quickr, SocialText, and Atlassian.
Finally, IBM also announced a planned update to Lotus Quickr, a Web- and desktop-based collaboration environment. The next release, version 8.1, will include "content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and other connectors that make sharing information easier," according to IBM. The company said it also plans to add features to Quickr that will allow it to integrate with IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager. It will also launch a companion application, Lotus Quickr Entry, that will include personal file sharing capabilities.
Lotus Quickr 8.1 is expected to be released in March.
New Technique Nails Down the Amp
If there’s one thing physicists can’t abide, it’s ambiguity. Precision is everything. But the definition of one fundamental physical quantity—the ampere, the unit of electric current—falls somewhat short of that ideal. One ampere is “that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10-7 newton per meter of length,” according to the International System of Units.
The days of ambiguous amperes, however, may be numbered, according to a paper published last April in Nature Physics by Mark Blumenthal, a physicist at the University of Cambridge. Blumenthal’s team etched germanium-gallium-arsenic nanowires a hundred times thinner than a human hair in a semiconductor. Across those wires, at regular intervals, Blumenthal and his colleagues laid three even thinner gold strips. The gold strips act as gates: A voltage applied to them stops or starts the flow of electrons through the main nanowire with an unprecedented combination of speed and precision.
The new technique still isn’t quite accurate enough to form the basis of a new definition of the ampere, says Blumenthal, who now loses or gains about one electron in 10,000. “For a new standard, you need current to be accurate to 1 part in a million, so that for every million electrons you move through in a second, you’ve got a million, not 1,000,001 or 999,999.”
Nanoparticles Pop Up Everywhere
The idea of manipulating molecules to create microscopic machines or materials with unusual new properties has been around for years, but 2003 saw a flurry of breakthroughs. IBM developed a technique for making carbon nanotubes emit light, paving the way for new fiber optics; Harvard scientists figured out how to deposit tiny wires on glass or plastic, opening the door for the development of supercheap computers; and at the University of Central Florida, neuroscientist Beverly Rzigalinski discovered a nanomolecular fountain of youth effect: When Rzigalinski applied cerium oxide nanoparticles to rat neurons in a petri dish, the particles seemed to strip out the free radicals that make tissues age and kept the neurons alive and functioning up to six times their normal life span.
Meanwhile, nanomaterials are rapidly infiltrating everyday life. Wilson, the sporting goods manufacturer, has nanoengineered layers of clay to double the playing life of its Double Core tennis balls; L’Oréal uses nanoscale particles and capsules in their cosmetic creams that allow replenishing ingredients to penetrate deep into the skin; and the Australian company Advanced Powder Technology has created Zinclear, a translucent zinc oxide sunblock composed of nanoparticles as small as the tiniest known viruses. “You’ve got all the protection but with no white lines on your nose and face,” says Hugh Dawkins, head of product development for the firm.
But are nanoparticles safe? This year scientists began to question openly whether nanotech firms are careering toward an asbestoslike fiasco. Nanoparticles are known to behave in strange and unpredictable ways partly because at the nanoscale, quantum physics can take over, and the Newtonian physics of everyday life becomes less dominant. “Particles of that size can go anywhere they please,” says Pat Mooney, executive director of the technology policy group ETC, which released a report warning about nanotoxins this spring. “They pass the entire immune system. They can pass the blood-brain barrier; they can go into the spinal cord.”
Recently, NASA scientist Chiu-Wing Lam spritzed carbon nanotubes into the lungs of mice and found that they caused granulomas, nodules that are symptoms of toxicity. At Rice University in Houston, researchers found that nanosize buckyballs—60 carbon atoms bound together in the shape of a soccer ball—can bond to pollutants such as naphthalene, slowing the pace at which the pollutants are naturally neutralized and greatly expanding the distance over which environmental toxins can spread.
Although more than $1 billion was spent on nanotechnology research this year, less than 1 percent went to investigating potential toxic effects. “We need to get out ahead of it all, so it’s not like Freon or dry-cleaning chemicals,” says Rice environmental engineer Mason Tomson.
—Clive Thompson
Cell Phones Rival Alcohol as Driving Hazard
You may be coordinated and have a hands-free phone in your car, but recent studies at the University of Utah suggest that it isn’t the dialing or the arm waving that makes driving while talking on a cell phone dangerous. It’s the yakking itself—or more precisely, the yakking to someone who isn’t present. David Strayer, a Utah psychologist, says, “Your driving performance while talking on a cell phone is impaired at levels comparable to, or worse than, driving with a blood alcohol level of .08,” which is the legal limit in most states.
Using a driver-training simulator, Strayer and a team of Utah researchers compared the attention levels and response times of 110 motorists in various situations. In dense traffic, cell phone users were about 20 percent slower to respond to sudden hazards than other drivers, and they were about twice as likely to rear-end a braking car in front of them. “Cell phone drivers are extracting less than 50 percent of the visual information that non-cell drivers are getting,” says Strayer. “Looking and seeing are not one and the same.” By contrast, the researchers found that listening to the radio or conversing with passengers is not as hazardous. “When a dangerous situation arises, the driver and passenger put their conversation on pause,” Strayer says.
Whether talking with a passenger or someone on a cell phone, however, people are less able to recall the details of a conversation carried on while driving, adds psychologist Frank Drews, a coauthor of the study. “So it might not be good for your economic health to discuss investment strategies with your broker while either of you is driving.”
—Michael W. Robbins
Battery made of Paper
Imagine a battery as flexible as paper—because it is made of paper. In August, a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York unveiled a small sheet of black paper that can store and discharge electricity. In addition to being light and flexible, it can extract electrical energy from human blood and sweat, making the device potentially usable as a power source for tiny medical devices inside the human body.
The RPI team made the paper battery by first growing an array of carbon nanotubes on a silicon surface and then covering the array in dissolved cellulose (the main constituent of paper). The cellulose forms a flexible sheet studded with embedded nanotubes that can be peeled away from the substrate. The nanotubes make the sheet as black as coal, but only a small quantity is needed. “Ninety percent of the device is still normal paper you buy at the store,” says Pulickel Ajayan, one of the lead researchers and a materials scientist. “The best part about this is its versatility,” he continues. “It’s paper. We can wrap a device in paper that also works as the device’s power source. Or we can slide it into a tiny crevice—anywhere, really. It is vastly superior to a conventional battery. If you cut a normal battery in half, you break it; it’s useless. If you cut a paper battery in half, you just make two batteries that have half the power of the original.” Want more power? Stack sheets of the paper together. “It’s not just a paper battery; it’s the ultimate battery,” Ajayan says.
The Year in Science: Technology
Carbon Nanotubes Burst Out of the Lab
Fourteen years after the discovery of the pencil-shaped molecules called carbon nanotubes, scientists are finally learning to exploit their remarkable properties. Nanotubes are nine times as strong as steel and can transmit 1,000 times as much electrical current as copper, but they are difficult to manipulate because each tube is just 1/350,000 as wide as the period at the end of this sentence.
Carbon nanotubes seeded this clump of bone-forming mineral, a technique that could help heal broken bones.
In August Ray Baughman at the University of Texas in Dallas and his colleagues reported a way to weave nanotubes into usefully large material. With the help of Australian wool spinners, researchers had already developed a method to twist the tubes into long fibers. Expanding on that work, the Texas group created sheets of nanotubes so thin that an acre of the material weighs just a quarter of a pound. The sheets are good electrical conductors; they can also withstand more than 34,000 pounds per square inch of force without tearing and can endure temperatures as high as 840 degrees Fahrenheit without losing strength or conductivity. The Department of Defense, along with manufacturers of helicopter blades, solar electric cells, and robotics, has expressed interest. Baughman has made a sheet 33 feet long, and he is hard at work expanding his process.
Meanwhile, two teams are developing medical applications of nanotubes, taking advantage of the human body's ability to absorb carbon. Stanford University chemists have fabricated cancer-killing nanotubes that sneak inside tumor cells, and researchers at the University of California at Riverside are using nanotubes to speed the healing of broken bones. Materials scientist Robert Haddon has demonstrated that the bone-forming mineral hydroxyapatite will grow around a nanotube scaffold, replacing the collagen fibrils that grow naturally. "Bone needs to be strong but a little bit flexible," he says. "It's hard to imagine a better material than a carbon nanotube." —Zach Zorich
Tissue Engineers Cook Up Plan for Lab-Grown Meat
Most of us avoid thinking too hard about the origins of our dinners. We happily eat chicken nuggets, willfully forgetting that they are a meat product derived from formerly living birds. Now science is prepared to make our cognitive dissonance complete. Last June, in a paper published in the journal Tissue Engineering, an international team of researchers proposed a new kind of food handmade for sensitive carnivores (and maybe even vegetarians): meat that comes from a laboratory instead of a farm.
Clinical research scientists routinely grow muscle cells in the lab. And NASA-funded experiments have succeeded in culturing turkey muscle cells and goldfish cells as a potential way to feed astronauts on long space missions. Jason Matheny, a graduate student in agricultural economics and public health at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues turned this scheme earthward, proposing two methods for growing meat in bulk. One would culture thin sheets of meat, seeded by cells from a living animal, on a reusable polymer scaffold; the other would grow meat on small edible beads that stretch with changes in temperature.
Currently the process is far too expensive to bring lab-grown meat to the supermarket. A tasty fake steak is an even more distant dream: To have the structure of filet mignon, muscle tissue needs blood vessels, a major challenge to tissue engineers. Still, Matheny says that within several years, lab meat could be used in Spam, sausage, and even chicken nuggets. Europe has taken an interest. The Dutch government has invested $2.4 million in a project that would cultivate pork from stem cells.
But will people eat it? Matheny thinks so. "There's nothing natural about a chicken that's given growth promoters and raised in a shed with 10,000 others," he says. "As consumers become educated, a product like this would gain appeal." —Sarah Webb
Humanoid Robots Walk Tall
Most of the joints belonging to a three-foot-tall Cornell University humanoid are not powered like those in traditional robots. Instead, they swing freely in a surprisingly human-like manner.
In 2005 a new generation of robots revolutionized the way humanoids walk, one of the greatest challenges in engineering. They followed Honda's ASIMO, which wowed a cheering audience last winter by breaking into a two-mile-per-hour trot. ASIMO is based on technology that is much like that of a shuffling windup toy. Every maneuver is part of a programmed pattern, each posture a frozen moment in time, and an enormous amount of energy is needed to keep the body plugging along in a stiff-looking gait. By contrast, a nameless robot unveiled by engineers at Cornell University in February is modeled after antique toy figurines that make their way down a slope, depending only on gravity. The Cornell robot is the first to use principles of passive-dynamic walking to stroll on level ground, employing electrical energy equivalent to the metabolic energy a human would use. Most of the joints swing freely, naturally shifting mass like a pendulum. Another robot, named Rabbit, designed at the University of Michigan and the University of Nantes in France, may be the first to run in strides that look human. Its creators have made it dynamic, balancing on two points—it has no feet—and with the ability to adjust to obstacles and changes in terrain. Unlike ASIMO, which cannot balance in a fluid way, Rabbit can be shoved violently and regain its stability. —Susan Kruglinski
Laser Transistor Makes Its Debut
Just when experts were beginning to fear that the conventional transistor would become as outmoded as the eight-track tape, legendary semiconductor guru Nick Holonyak and his colleagues have recast it—literally—in a whole new light.
Holonyak's team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign devised a transistor that is also an ultratiny laser, producing a narrow beam of light simultaneously with electrical current. "An ordinary transistor has only two signals: an electrical input and an electrical output," says coinventor Milton Feng. "The transistor laser has those plus a third output—a coherent photon beam," which can be transmitted by fiber-optic line for speed-of-light processing. "It is conceivable that connections on a circuit board can be made exponentially faster than is possible with conventional electronics alone."
Transistors typically consist of a sandwich of specially "doped" semiconductor materials: two chemically similar pieces called the emitter and the collector, separated by a thin layer of a different sort of substance called the base. Applying a voltage to the base permits the flow of current from emitter to collector. Some of that current is lost, however, as moving electrons from the emitter drop into "holes"—places in the base where electrons are missing—releasing energy in the process. "For years, people were just throwing away that base current, and it was dissipated as heat," says Holonyak, who invented the first practical light-emitting diode 44 years ago. "Milton kept saying that there was a lot of current density [in the base] to use" to power a laser. "I thought he was nuts. But it turns out he's right."
The researchers engineered their transistor's base with microscopic pockets called quantum wells, which trap the electrons and release them as laser light. In September they reported that the prototype could run at room temperature with a clock speed of three gigahertz—the same as a top-of-the-line PC chip. But they're confident that it will easily operate 10 or perhaps even 100 times faster. —Curt Suplee
High-tech gadgets make it possible for people to travel through time . . . well, sort of. To leap forward 40 to 50 years in physical abilities, merely talk on a cell phone while cruising down the road. Research at the University of Utah shows that when drivers between 18 and 25 chat on a cell phone, they cannot react to a braking situation any better than a 65- to 74-year-old. Employing a driving simulator to measure reaction times, psychologist David Strayer found teenagers have the greatest trouble combining driving and talking, but the problem affects all generations. "We see that accident rates, if you're using a cell phone, are about four times greater than if you're not using a cell phone," he says. "Cell phones seem to be a distraction across the age range." —Kurt Repanshek
Science Technology Fiction- 20 things you don't know
1 Arguably the inspiration for much science fiction traces back to classical mythology. Think of it—Earthlings abducted by beings from the sky, humans morphing into strange creatures, and events that defy the laws of nature.
2 Birth of the (un)cool: In 1926 writer Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first true science-fiction magazine.
advertisement article continues below
3 Gernsback loved greenbacks. He tried to trademark the term science fiction, and he paid writers so little that H. P. Lovecraft later nicknamed him “Hugo the Rat.”
4 Rat’s revenge: The most famous sci-fi writing award is called the Hugo.
5 Writers for the early pulp magazines would often write under multiple pseudonyms so they could have more than one article per issue. Ray Bradbury—taking this practice to another level—used six different pen names.
6 Serious science-fiction heads say sci-fi carries schlocky, B-movie connotations. Many prefer the abbreviation SF.
7 Prominent physicists and space travel pioneers have (often secretly) contributed to SF lit. German rocket genius Wernher Von Braun wrote space fiction and was an adviser to sci-fi movies such as Conquest of Space.
8 During the 1960s, James Tiptree Jr. penned sci-fi classics like Houston, Houston, Do You Read? but was so secretive that people suspected he was a covert government operative.
9 At age 61, Tiptree was outed—not as a spy but as outspoken feminist Alice B. Sheldon.
10 One of the more famous works in the growing field of gay sci-fi is Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, about a woman who bolts from her overbearing Jewish family to the mystical all-lesbian city of New Chelm.
11 Irony alert: Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s most influential SF writers, studiously avoids computers and ATMs and claims he has never driven a car.
12 Not to be outdone, sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov wrote about interstellar spaceflight but refused to board an airplane.
13 Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed 1992 novel Snow Crash has inspired two major online creations: Second Life (derived from Stephenson’s virtual Metaverse) and Google Earth (from the panoptic Earth application).
14 Meanwhile, in the humble brick-and-mortar world: Sci-fi author Gene Wolfe helped develop the machine that cooks Pringles, while Robert Heinlein conceived the first modern water bed.
15 Sexual liberation plays a big role in Heinlein’s books, which really puts the water-bed thing into perspective.
16 In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, the HAL 9000 computer discusses its feelings and Pan Am flies passenger shuttles to the moon. After the book’s release, Pan Am announced a real-life list of passengers waiting to go to the moon; Walter Cronkite, Ronald Reagan, and 80,000 others signed up.
17 Forty years later, computers can’t discuss printer drivers, let alone emotions, and Pan Am has been dead for 17 years.
18 When sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick inadvertently re-created a Bible scene in his book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, he became convinced that the spirit of the prophet Elijah had overcome him, kicking off a long bout of schizophrenia.
19 After Dick’s death, fans built an android likeness of him that mimicked his mannerisms and quoted his writings.
20 In 2005, the Dickbot was misplaced by a baggage handler. It remains at large.
The Latest Weapon Against Global Warming: Your Fridge
Is your refrigerator the solution for greener energy? Not entirely, but giving your fridge the ability to think for itself is an excellent first step when it comes to preventing future power blackouts, according to results from a pilot project led by the Department of Energy and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
In the project, called GridWise, everyday appliances like washers and dryers were equipped with small electronic circuit boards and installed in more than 200 homes in Washington and Oregon. These circuit boards are programmed to detect changes in the alternating-current frequency coming into the appliance. When the device senses a lower frequency, signaling less available electricity on the grid, it reacts by turning off certain functions of the appliance: a dryer might keep tumbling clothes but switch the heating coil off; a fridge light could stay on while the cooling motor took a break. These responses happen in less than half a second, last for only around 10 seconds, and are nearly undetectable by homeowners.
The autonomous appliance reaction lowers the demand on the grid system for about 5 minutes, allowing secondary response systems to kick in. “Think of your fridge or stove as an initial shock absorber,” says Rob Pratt program manager for the GridWise program.
advertisement article continues below
While powering down the appliances in one home would not do much, if every home in New York or Los Angeles were equipped with the GridWise system, it could be enough prevent serious blackouts like the one in 2003 that paralyzed the Northeast, says Pratt. The key is that the circuit board can react to conditions on the grid instantaneously—something humans cannot do.
Along with clever appliances, some homes in the GridWise project received computer systems to monitor the real-time price of power and limit consumption when the price spiked. Pratt describes the system as a mini energy marketplace in the home that works as a second buffer when the grid is overloaded. When demand for energy is high, he notes, so is the price. Homeowners can program their thermostats, for instance, to automatically take a break if the price of energy skyrockets. The real-time price of electricity is updated and processed in homes every five minutes.
In the case of an impending blackout, a dryer and refrigerator respond first, quickly shutting off and temporarily decreasing power consumption. Then the second-tier price-driven system kicks in. That allows time for power suppliers to react to the overload by turning on backup generators or redistributing power throughout the grid—the final step in the process.
Fewer blackouts and money savings aside, equipping homes with smart energy systems could allow electric companies to switch to using more energy from renewable sources like wind and solar. Today, wind and solar power are considered too unreliable to be used on a mass scale, unable to supply energy when the sun sets or the wind stops. In a price-responsive system, however, rainy days could mean slightly higher energy prices, which could cause homeowners to scale back on energy consumption, says Ron Ambrosio of IBM *Research, a branch of the company researching new energy strategies
There are no technical hurdles; Ambrosio says policy and market acceptance are the biggest roadblocks to adoption of smart appliances. His estimation for widespread use of this type of energy system: 10 to 15 years, if manufacturers, consumers, and governments get behind the idea.
*Correction February 20, 2008: this originally stated IBM Energy.
Using X-Rays To Do Cruelty-Free Dissection
For such a small, dainty fish, a sea horse eats like a high-powered Hoover, sucking up water through its snout, its head expanding in less than one-hundredth of a second to accommodate the influx. To probe this specialized feeding system, Dominique Adriaens, director of the Evolutionary Morphology of Vertebrates group at Ghent University in Belgium, turned to a technology that a growing number of researchers are taking advantage of—high-resolution X-ray computed tomography. This “virtual dissection” machine works like a hospital CAT scan, but instead of the equipment’s taking tens to thousands of X-rays from different vantage points as it rotates around a still patient, the X-ray beam is still and the specimen is rotated in front of it. Just like many CAT scans, the multiple two-dimensional images are assembled to create a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, sliced, and put back together—with up to 1,000 times the detail of a typical hospital CAT scan.
Virtual dissection has been used to find air bubbles trapped in concrete, to spot grains of gold locked in rock, to identify writing on crusty rolls of papyrus, and to dissect the Kennewick man. And the demand for this technology is on the rise. Scientists with objects too precious or difficult to cut apart are waiting weeks for time with the scanners at the handful of universities that have the million-dollar machines.
Emerging Technology
Some technological revolutions arrive as revelation. You hear a human voice wafting out from a rotating plastic disk or see a moving train projected onto a screen, and you sense instantly that the world has changed. For many of us, our first encounter with the World Wide Web a decade ago was one of those transformative experiences: You clicked on a word on the screen, and instantly you were transported to some other page that was served up from a computer located somewhere else, across the planet perhaps. After you followed that first hyperlink, you knew the universe of information would never be the same.
Other revolutions creep up with more subtlety, built of tweaks and minor advances, not radical breakthroughs. E-mail took decades to gestate, but now many of us can’t imagine life without it. There’s a comparable quiet revolution under way right now, one that is likely to fundamentally transform the way we use the Web in the coming years. The changes are technical and involve thousands of individual programmers, dozens of start-ups, and a few of the largest software companies in the world. The result is the equivalent of a massive software upgrade for the entire Web, what some commentators have taken to calling Web 2.0. Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.
Part of the beauty and power of the original Web lay in its simplicity: Web sites were made up of pages, each of which could contain text and images. Those pages were able to connect to other information on the Web through links. If you were maintaining a Web site about poodles and stumbled across a promising breeder’s home page, you could link to the information on that page by inserting a few simple lines of code. From that point on, your site was connected to that other page, and subsequent visitors to your site could follow that connection with a single mouse click. In some basic sense, those two pages of data were interacting with each other, but the exchange between them was rudimentary.
advertisement article continues below
Now consider how a group of poodle experts might use the Web 2.0. One of them subscribes to a virtual clipping service offered by Google News; she instructs the service to scan thousands of news outlets for any articles that mention the word poodle and to send her an e-mail alert when one of them comes down the wire. One morning, she finds a link to a review of a new book about miniature poodles in her in-box. She follows the link to the original article, and using a standard blogging tool like TypePad or Blogger, she posts a quick summary of the review and links to the Amazon page for the book from her blog.
Within a few hours of her publishing the note about the new book, a service called Technorati scans her Web site and notices that she has added a link to a book listed on Amazon. You can think of Technorati as the Google of the blog world, constantly analyzing the latest blog posts for interesting new developments. One of the features it offers is a frequently updated list of the most talked-about books in the blog world. If Technorati stumbles across another handful of links to that same poodle book within a few hours, the poodle book itself might show up on the hot books list.
After our poodle expert posts her blog entry, she takes another few seconds to categorize it, using an ingenious service called del.icio.us, which tags it with her content-specific title, like “miniature poodles,” or “dog breeding.” She does this for her own personal use—del.icio.us lets her see in a glance all the pages she has classified with a specific tag—but the service also has a broader social function; tags are visible to other users as well. Our poodle expert can also see all the pages that other users have associated with dog breeding. It’s a little like creating a manila folder for a particular topic, and every time you pick it up, you find new articles supplied by strangers all across the Web.
Del.icio.us’s creators call the program a social bookmarking service, and one of its key functions is to connect people as readily as it connects data. When our poodle lover checks in on the dog-breeding tag, she notices that another del.icio.us user has been adding interesting links to the category over the past few months. She drops him an e-mail and invites him to join a small community of poodle lovers using Yahoo’s My Web service. From that point on, anytime she discovers a new poodle-related page, he’ll immediately receive a notification about it, along with the rest of her poodle community, either via e-mail or instant message.
Now stop and think about how different this chain of events is from the traditional Web mode of following simple links between static pages. One small piece of new information—a review of a book about poodles—flows through an entire system of reuse and appropriation within hours. The initial information value of the review remains: It’s an assessment of a new book, no different from the reviews that appear in traditional publications. But as it ventures through the food chain of the new Web, it takes on new forms of value: One service uses it to help evaluate the books with the most buzz; another uses it to build a classification schema for the entire Web; another uses it as a way of forming new communities of like-minded people. Some of this information exchange happens on traditional Web pages, but it also leaks out into other applications: e-mail clients, instant-messenger programs.
The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.
A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.
Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.
This is good news whether we love poodles or not, but it’s also good news economically because the diversity of the ecosystem makes it a fertile environment for small players. You don’t have to dominate the food chain to get by in the Web world; you can find a productive niche and thrive, partially because you’re building on the information value created by the rest of the Web. Technorati and del.icio.us both began as small projects created by single programmers. They don’t need huge staffs because they’re capturing the information supplied by the countless number of surfers who use their services, and they’re building on other tools created by other people, whether they work in a home office or in a vast international corporation like Google. All of which makes this the most exciting time to be on the Web since the glory days in the mid-1990s. And the revelations aren’t about to stop. As we figure out new ways to expand the complex information food chains of Web 2.0, we will see even more innovation in the coming years. Welcome to the jungle.
BT calls for action on net speeds
The UK's largest broadband supplier has called for the industry to be clearer about how it advertises net speeds.
BT Wholesale, which supplies eight million people, said many customers were disappointed by the mismatch between advertised and actual speeds.
An independent survey found that 15% of people who bought eight megabit per second packages actually got the speed.
The firm said regulators needed to agree rules about how broadband speeds could be sold to the public.
"The reality is we are all trying to push the technology," Guy Bradshaw of BT Wholesale told BBC News.
"The industry needs to join together with Ofcom to agree a set of principles as to how these messages should be communicated and advertised so that the understanding with the consumer is as accurate as it can be."
Traffic problems
BT said that, while its DSL Max product offers a range of speeds up to eight megabits per second (mbps), it tells its customers - the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - that actual speeds will vary from user to user.
Cameron Rejali, Managing Director of Products at BT Wholesale, said it is up to the ISPs how they market broadband, "but if they are marketing it badly, the market will punish them."
BT said users need to know that there is a difference between the line speed - what the line between their home and the exchange can support - and what it describes as "throughput", a measure of the data coming down the line during an activity such as the downloading of a video.
Only 35% of BT's DSL Max customers are achieving an eight mbps line speed - the rest will see their speed cut by factors such as distance from the exchange, poor equipment, and interference from electrical appliances.
But none of these five million users will achieve eight mbps "throughput" because of internet congestion and other network issues.
"The reality is if you are very far from an exchange or there are environmental factors then your speed will come down and there is not much we can do in the short-term to address that problem," said Mr Bradshaw.
Ofcom is currently reviewing the way broadband is marketed to consumers.
A spokeswoman said: "Whilst there are technical reasons why a consumer may not get the full speed of the package to which they have signed up the key point is that consumers should be able to make an informed decision about what broadband package is best for them at the point of purchase.
iPhones For Freshmen At ACU
iPhones or iPod Touches will be issued to incoming freshmen at Abilene Christian University (ACU) this fall. The intent is to provide what amounts to a "campus lifeline" that lets students check on every aspect of their campus life with a single, pocket-sized device.
According to ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts, more than 15 web applications have already been developed. See this ACU iPhone application video for more details.
(iPhones at ACU video)
The video is really an interesting piece of near-future science fiction itsef; it shows how a fully deployed mobile learning environment might look like. However, everything in the video is easily doable with an iPhone or iPod Touch:
Receive podcasts with class lectures
Find classes on map application
Visual walk-through of campus
Change class section or drop classes
Text messages from profs re classes
More pilot projects like this are being done with Apple's participation; more projects like this one are expected at universities like Harvard, MIT and Stanford.
Frankly, they'd better hurry up. The enormous number of unlocked iPhones has created a robust application development group; they are going to have all the necessary apps written by fall, at the rate they're going.
The iPhone used in this way reminds me very strongly of multi-function pocket-sized devices like the pocket computer from Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye or the joymaker from Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot.
See part two of the ACU iPhones on campus video. Via MacRumors. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
Mars Phoenix Lander On Wide World Of Mars
When I was a kid growing up in the 1960's, one of the most amazing things to me was the live coverage from multiple cameras of world events, like the Winter Olympics. When they talked about "spanning the globe" to bring you a "Wide World of Sports," they weren't kidding around.
NASA's Phoenix Lander is going to get a similar treatment from the many correspondents on Mars. Correspondents on Mars? That's right - the three orbiters, NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Europe's Mars Express are all getting themselves into position.
Even better, NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been helping out by simulating transmissions from Phoenix to rehearse the orbiters' operations.
Phoenix will enter the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 20,519 kph.
On that day, Odyssey will turn its robotic eyes from the heavens to point an ultrahigh- frequency antenna towards the descending Phoenix. A high-gain antenna will stream information back to Earth as Odyssey watches Phoenix slow itself through heat-shield friction, a parachute, and then firing descent rockets. That allows the lander to hit the Martian surface on three legs at just 5.4 miles per hour (2.4 m/s).
MRO and Mars Express will start recording Phoenix transmissions as backup data "about 10 minutes before landing," according to Ben Jai, mission manager at JPL for MRO.
Sooner or later, the world's planetary explorers will realize that we need a rock-solid, high-capacity data network for the solar system. George O. Smith, an engineer by trade and sf writer by avocation, wrote about this idea in an excellent set of stories in the early 1940's.
The Venus Equilateral Relay Station was a modern miracle of engineering if you liked to believe the books. Actually, Venus Equilateral was an asteroid that had been shoved into its orbit about the Sun, forming a practical demonstration of he equilateral triangle solution of the Three Moving Bodies. It was a long cylinder, about three miles in length by about a mile in diameter...
This was the center of Interplanetary Communications. This was the main office. It was the heart of the Solar System's communication line, and as such, it was well manned. Orders for everything emanated from Venus Equilateral.
(Read more about the Venus Equilateral Relay Station)
Via Mars Orbiters Prepare to Watch Phoenix Landing. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
Nokia Morph Cell Phone Concept
The Nokia Morph cell phone concept is currently featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition.
(Nokia Morph cell phone concept)
Nokia is thinking at least a decade ahead, as far as consumer offerings are concerned - according to Nokia. According to the marketplace, that might be too long, because some of these features are already available.
For example, in terms of "morphing," Nokia engineers imagine that the cell phone could start out with a normal phone factor, but then unfold into a larger screen.
Check out these pictures of the Readius cell phone with a five-inch foldable display. They don't call it "morphing," but it's pretty cool.
Any way, as far as cell phone "concepts" are concerned, I've always liked some of the early sf descriptions, like the pocket phone from Heinlein's 1953 novella Assignment in Eternity, and the polycarbon phone screen from Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.
Via Nokia Morph concept - this futuristic gadget is all you’ll need; thanks to Moira for the tip. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
ReadyBot Robot Ready To Clean Your Kitchen
Trik untuk meningkatkan kecepatan internet
March 17th, 2007
Secara default Windows (Win XP Pro dan 2000) sebenarnya juga mengurangi bandtwith kita sebesar 20%, 20% ini digunakan window untuk mendownload update untuk window. Berikut langkah untuk menghilangkan pengurangan bandwidth tersebut :
Klik Start->Run->ketik"gpedit.msc" (tanpa tanda ") Ini akan memunculkan tampilan "Windows Policy". Kemudian masuk ke : Local Computer Policy–>Computer Configuration–>Administrative Templates–>Network–>QOS Packet Scheduler kemudian di tampilan kanan pilih "Limit Reservable Bandwidth", disitu tertulis "Not Configured" -> doubel klik (ada tampilan baru, "Limit reservable bandwidth Properties").
Jika ingin tahu keterangannya buka di bagian "Explain". Di situ tertulis keterangan windows secara default menggunakan 20% bandwidth kita. Kembali ke "Setting" dan pilih "Enabled" lalu ganti 20 % menjadi 0%.
Matsushita Mechanorg-New Porter Robot
Matsushita is demonstrating it's porter robot; at 130 cm in height and 60 cm wide, it is able to carry about 20 kilograms of cargo.
The cool thing about this robot is that the user carries a small transponder that tells the porter robot where its user is at all times. The porter robot lets you place your baggage on its shelf, and then will follow you where ever you go.
Here's the research abstract:
;We are considering safe and reliable life-assist robots to coexist with human. First of all, we decided to develop a tool type robot that carry out a single task, and call it "Mechanorg" that is a coined word of "Mechanical" and "Organism". And we developed "Porter Robot" as one of the Mechanorg concept robots. It can carry baggage with following its user and avoiding obstacles safely at the airports...
The robot detects user's position by the supersonic wave, and knows the shape and distance of obstacle by infrared ray sensor and supersonic wave sensor. The robot calculates the best motion in environment, so the robot can follow safely without losing sight of user.
The porter robot has an omnidirectional camera and other sensors for measuring range, determining the best way around obstacles, and collision avoidance. The nickel hydride batter provides about an hour of use.
Regular technovelgy readers know of my fascination with the autoporter robot from John Brunner's wonderful 1975 novel Shockwave Rider. It won't be long before you'll be able to rent something like this at any airport.
Matsushita has some competition; check these bots out:
- TMSUK Robot Carries Your Bags
- Porter 'Robots' For Baggage, If Not People
- Russian Robot Suitcase
- RoboPorter Carries Your Baggage, Guides You
Via RobotWatch; the site also has some videos you can download showing the porter robot in action. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
China May Issue A Billion RFID-Based ID Cards
At RFID World last month, a speaker representing China's radio frequency identification (RFID) initiative said he expected China to issue over a billion identification cards - one to every citizen. An example ID badge from Intermec Technologies, currently used for expedited border crossings between the U.S. and Candada, is shown below.
Rocky Shih, representing the government of China, also stated that three million handheld RFID scanners would be issued, one for every police officer in China. When Mr. Shih was asked if perhaps this might bring up concerns about RFID and privacy, he said that the government does not need to respond to such concerns.
An example of a concern that might be raised about such devices: suppose all citizens were required to produce an identification card on demand (as is the case when you are driving a car, for instance, in the U.S.). If you carried an active RFID tag with you at all times, you could be monitored by any organization or business with an appropriate detector. Every time you entered a mall, or passed through a turnstile, or drove past a toll booth your presence could be monitored and recorded.
Apparently, Walmart's plan to have an RFID device in most consumer items within the next year or two was of less concern to the Chinese government, despite the fact that many of the goods sold by Walmart are produced there.
SF writer John Brunner explored the issues surrounding the privacy of the individual in an age of universal computer access and cradle-to-grave monitoring in his classic 1975 novel Shockwave Rider. Brunner coined the term computer tapeworm in this novel.
See RFID in Colorado and China; thanks to Future Now for the story. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
VeriChip RFID Tag Patient Implant Badges Now FDA Approved
The Food and Drug Administration has given final approval to Applied Digital Solutions to sell their VeriChip RFID tags for implantation into patients in hospitals. The intent is to provide immediate positive identification of patients both in hospitals and in emergencies. Doctors, emergency-room personnel and ambulance crews could get immediate identification without resorting to looking for wallets and purses for ID. If, for example, you had a pre-existing medical condition or allergy, this could be taken into account immediately.
The Federal Drug Administration has approved a final review process to determine whether hospitals can use VeriChip RFID tags to identify patients. The 11-millimeter RFID tags will be implanted in the fatty tissue of the upper arm. The estimated life of the tags is twenty years.
(From VeriChip)
The VeriChip is a radio frequency identification (RFID) device that is injected just below the skin; the subdermal RFID tag location is invisible to the naked eye. A unique verification number is transmitted to a suitable reader when the person is within range.
The FDA ruling is not to allow implantation in humans; this has already been established. The purpose of the review is to examine privacy issues.
Kevin Wiley, CEO of VeriChip Corporation, stated:
"We continue to market and sell VeriChip internationally primarily for the security application. As evidenced by the recent chipping of Mexico's Attorney General and his staff, the VeriChip technology provides first-of-a-kind tamper-proof and secure applications. These applications can also occur with medical records and medical device information. We look forward to the de novo process and the ultimate conclusion of the regulatory process."
(Medical Use of VeriChip)
SF fans may recall that in the world of The Computer Connection, written by Alfred Bester in 1974, most people have chips called skull bugs for identification and monitoring implanted at birth.
About one thousand of VeriChip RFID tags have been inserted into humans so far; most of the sales have been outside the U.S. See Baja Beach Club Implants VeriChip In Customers for more about implantation in humans; read more about this story at RFID tags may be implanted in patient's arms. (This story was originally posted on Aug-15-2004). Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
Veripay Credit-Card Implant
Advanced Digital Solutions intends to use its implanted RFID (radio frequency identification) VeriChips as a method of payment at the upcoming ID World 2003 in Paris, France. ADS claims that Veripay could end problems of identity theft and make it impossible to lose your credit card.
The technology has two parts; a small chip the size of a rice grain that is surgically implanted in the user, and a radio frequency reader device that activates and provides power to the implanted device. These devices have been in use for almost a decade in a variety of devices; ADS is the first to announce the use of implanted chips to make financial payments.
Of course, science fiction readers are aware that the use of these chips as credit card devices was proposed by Neal Stephenson in his 1995 novel The Diamond Age; see implanted credit card.
Privacy advocates are skeptical (at best) of the proposed use of this technology in human beings. Beth Given, of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (San Diego, CA) stated
"If we establish a robust credit card network based on RFID chips implanted under the skin, we are also creating the infra-structure for potential government surveillance."
Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
Electronic Number Plate RFID Keeps Tabs On Vehicles
A South African RFID design firm now offers Electronic Number Plate RFID technology. iPico Holdings says this technology is now being used in a pilot project in South America. (See What is RFID? to find out more about radio-frequency identification.)
(From RFID Journal)
The technology is being considered for electronic vehicle licensing, traffic and speed control, cross-border traffic control and other applications. The tags can be read at ordinary vehicle speeds.
This is a passive RFID tag, meaning that it does not need to carry batteries (and therefore will likely last for the life of the vehicle). The tag is attached to the windshield during the manufacturing process; any attempt to alter or remove the tag will damage it.
Science fiction fans may recall the Camden speedster, a car that not only went underwater, but would also alter it's license tag while in motion, in order to fool traffic control devices. Not a bad prediction for 1958, when Methuselah's Children was published (read the quote for traffic control camera). See the original story at Passive Tags Track Cars.
For another look at how people and objects can be tracked with RFID, see China May Issue A Billion RFID-Based ID Cards. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.
Chumby and the Ambient Web
Feeling overwhelmed by information overload? Wait, there's more coming. A lot more.
Chumby is a pretty goofy device with a silly name and a weird shape. And nobody needs one. But it's worth checking out because we're going to be seeing a lot more devices like this, smart little machines constantly fetching information from the Internet, spreading the Web beyond the realm of PCs.
"We're already living in a Blade Runner world, where we're surrounded by connected information screens," says Stephen L. Tomlin, chief executive and cofounder of Chumby Industries in San Diego, Calif.
Sci-fi movies never anticipated that the future would be so, well, cute. Chumby weighs 13 ounces and looks like a little leather beanbag with a screen. Plug it in, let it find your Wi-Fi network and, boom, you're on the Chumby Network, pulling weather, music, news, photos and trivia from the Web.
You can choose from more than 400 streaming widgets on the Chumby Web site. Keep track of your friends on MySpace and Facebook, see photos from Flickr, check in on your Ebay bids, read right-wing blogs or left-wing newspapers, watch sports videos or a videoclip of David Letterman's Top Ten List, listen to podcasts or check out your daily horoscope. If your friend has a Chumby you can become online "chums" and send widgets to each other over the Chumby Network.
Chumby has a virtual keyboard that pops up in some applications--for example, when you search for music on Shoutcast--but this isn't a device for typing and sending messages. It's for reading and viewing. The touch screen handles mostly simple commands like "play" and "stop" for music streams. You might think of Chumby as a souped-up clock radio and digital photo screen with a toylike exterior hiding a full-blown (albeit tiny) computer running the Linux operating system on a chip typically used in portable devices.
You pay $180 for the device, and there's no subscription fee for the data streams. Chumby hopes to make money from ads injected into the stream. Tomlin describes his target customers as "people with rich Internet lives," meaning people who can't bear to be untethered. I have to admit I'm one of these people. The idea of having a Chumby sitting on my desk sending me news feeds and Chuck Norris jokes while I'm working makes perfect sense to me.
Apparently I'm not alone, because these so-called ambient Internet devices are springing up everywhere. A firm with that very name, Ambient (otcbb: ABTG.OB - news - people ) Devices, sells wireless desktop baseball and football tickers ($125 each), a seven-day weather forecaster ($200), a stock market ticker ($125) and an umbrella with a handle that pulses with blue light if rain or snow is in the forecast ($125). Another company sells a cute plastic bunny called Nabaztag ($165), which, like Chumby, picks up the Internet from your Wi-Fi router and feeds you a wealth of information, with the added (and superannoying) feature of being able to speak.
My Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) N800 tablet computer mostly serves as a fancy touch-screen remote control for a music server but also feeds me news headlines, runs photo slide shows and plays Internet radio. (I also use it to Web-browse, e-mail and make phone calls via Skype. That's a lot of gadget goodness for under $300.) In my living room another ambient device, Logitech's Squeezebox music player, pulls music from the Internet and scrolls news feeds.
The biggest ambient device may end up being the digital picture frame. These things were a hit over the holidays with sales up fivefold from the year before, according to NPD Group. While most frames just display pictures stored on memory cards, some high-end models now can connect to the Internet. Currently all most of them do is zip photos back and forth, but once this thing can attach to the Net why not add all the fun stuff that you can get on a Chumby?
In fact, that's Phase 2 of Tomlin's master plan. He aims to let people attach non-Chumby devices like picture frames and Net-connected LCD TVs to the Chumby Network. He's trying to persuade hardware makers to use the Chumby Network rather than build their own online services.
One way or another, Chumby-like streams will soon be coursing through things all around us: our TVs, photo frames, clock radios, portable music players, GPS navigation screens in the car. One of China's hottest advertising plays is Focus Media (nasdaq: FMCN - news - people ), which has 140,000 networked LCD billboards and TV screens throughout the teeming country. Information overload is about to go into overdrive.