CRAZYY!!! CERN - Hadron Collider

The technology developed will cascade to the general public in 20 yrs...

- GBs a second are sent out around the world
- 100,000 PCs are needed to analyze the data
- Same detecting technology in a particle collider will benefit the medical industry...by detecting cancer = particle physics
- 100 mts under Geneva..
- 455 F... is the temperature that keeps everything under control..
- 18 million degrees F when the protons collide..
- 12,000 tons is what the detector weighs....
- Protons go around 10,000 times a second * 27 km diameter of the collider = 270,000 km a second = 167,770 miles a second.
- Two proton beams circulating at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.


Absolutely mind boggling numbers!!! esto esta INCREIBLE!!

http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

URLs will be an Anachronism

Very interesting topic for conversation on Jeremiah Owyang's blog
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September 04th, 2008 | Category: Web Theory, Social Media

The search box circumvents the address bar
After playing with Google's Chrome browser for the last few days, I noticed the "Address" bar, which is just called a "Box" is really a search field. Anything entered into it will deliver a webpage (it first looks at your historical activities) or renders Google search results (or search of your preference, including twitter search). As a result, it's become apparently that I no longer need to enter in URLs to my browser for 99% of all tasks.

[Chrome is a nod to the future, the address bar is really a search bar. URLs will be an anachronism]

…is what I mentioned in Twitter with a flurry of agreements back from the community. Lori MacVittie expands further on the idea and agrees that like engine parts in our car, or IP addresses, they mainly go invisible as we drive to our real world or online destinations.

What's next: content to be found and served through context
I have an odd habit of counting how many TV advertisements don't have a URL somewhere in it, on average, I only count 1-2 per hour, nearly all are signaling to viewers to learn more on the web. If I'm curious about a product, I can manually enter in the URL, or do a search to find the site. Given that Google has experimented with active listening to TV programs through the mic on your computer, there's ways to serve up contextual information at any point of your TV watching experience, thinking further, when TV and the web truly marry, entering in URLs will truly be an extinct activity.

Of course, URLs will always be there, but like signs on the road, they move into the background and let you focus on what's really important –your destination.

For me, I'm happy to say good bye to URLs and move on to more contextual ways of finding, or serving information through digital spaces, the next phase of information navigation is starting.

Love to hear your thoughts:

1) Will URLs go away?

2) At what point will URLs be an Anachronism?

3) What is needed to make this happen?

4) How will be find (or be served) information in the future?

Can you answer the above 3 questions without saying the "S" word? (semantic), try to, it's good for ya.

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/04/urls-to-be-an-anachronism/#comment-641785

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Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content

Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content

by Marshall Kirkpatrick on June 8, 2006

A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computer's internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched. It's strange, but it sounds like it works and people might really like it. There's no indication yet whether or when this could be available as a service.

Google Research team members Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja along with Michael Fink of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Center for Neural Computation were given the best paper award for their report on the system at the the Euro ITV (interactive television) conference last week. ("Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification" 10 pg PDF, see also the Google Research blog post on the paper.)

The system compresses the captured audio into irreversible (emphasis theirs) summary statistics which are then compared to a database of mass media statistics and used to determine what the browser should display. Possible service offerings discussed in the paper fall into four categories:

• Personalized information layers Here's what Tom Cruise is wearing in the show you are watching and here's where you can buy the same clothes in your zip code.
• Ad hoc social peer communities If you would like to chat about this show, ten of your college friends are watching it right now as well.
• Real-time popularity ratings Nielsen requires hardware and the results aren't available in real-time. You might want to know if there is a spike in viewers watching the show on channel 9 right now. Advertisers might want to know that too.
• TV- based bookmarks Click to save a show or clip into your video library and there will be more than just a few shows available for watching later.

The system requires no dedicated television-connected hardware, protects users' privacy and is technically feasible, the researchers report. Experiments with a laptop placed in the lap of a person ten feet from a television and engaged in loud conversation with some one next to them were successful in providing matching online content - when channel surfing was taken into account.

Lest you fear that all broadcast TV is a huge data-set, the report says that ff the database of summaries holds only 32-bit descriptors of 5 second clips, then up to one year of broadcast information could be held in less than 1 GB. The researchers report that this is made much more feasible by re-runs.

Privacy concerns were addressed in the prototype by compressing captured audio on the user's computer before transmitting summary data to the database for comparison and by offering a mute button in the program. Given Google's recent ethical issues, these privacy measures may not be enough to assuage some people.

--
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
- Stephen Hawking