Sunday, November 24, 2013

Rethinking Major Web Properties in Glassware

Google Glass is starting to become even more exiting as a platform as more developers are investigating the functionality and building new apps.

A few key elements are that first it is important to recognize that Glass is a completely new and different technology platform. Glass is not just a cell phone for your face or another smartwatch, but a true cognitive augmentation platform and a critical moment in the continuous always-on information climate. A higher-resolution experience of life could be available in an information-rich environment. The eyes and ears senses are always on and augmented. Passive information can be ambiently contributed to any situation in real-time.

The current applications for Glass include picture-taking, video, maps, directions, search, and hangouts, but as usual with a new platform, the future apps that will harness the functionality in new ways are yet to be imagined. For example, what are some of the new ways of being social in the moment? 
All major web properties will need to rethink themselves in Glass – what is Glass-Instagram, Glass-Facebook, Glass-CRM, Glass-Tivo? 
App creation could ramp up quickly as development can be either native Android (Glass runs on the Android O/S), or standard web (e.g.; html5, css), particularly with this weekend's release of the Mirror API.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

What are Cognitive Nanorobots?

Cognitive nanorobots are an extension of the more familiar idea of medical nanorobots.

Medical nanorobots are a range of medical solutions using nanoscale electronics. Medical nanorobots span the continuum from nanoparticles in current pharmaceutical use that disgorge cargo in cellular destinations per simple onboard logic instructions to optically-stimulated channelrhodopsin proteins for real-time live biological intervention to the more elaborate conceptualization of many species of future medical nanorobots such as respirocytes, clottocytes, vasculoids, and microbivores that could perform a variety of biophysical clean-up, maintenance, and augmentation functions in the body.

In the most basic sense, cognitive nanorobots are the analog to medical nanorobots, nanorobots deployed in the specific context of facilitating, aiding, and improving the processes of cognition like perception and memory, a sort of NanoNeuroProsthetics.

Cognition is just another biological function, a process that can possibly be identified, managed, and ameliorated. Robert Freitas in the Nanomedicine text books has already begun to explore the issue of nanorobot biocompatibility with neural cells, and outlined the different levels of concern and response for them: mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical.

In summary, one initial way to consider and classify cognitive nanorobots is as a special case of medical nanorobots.

More: YouTube Video, Presentation

Sunday, November 10, 2013

State of Tech: Image Corpus Corralling and API Integration

Two of the biggest current tech trends are image corpus ‘corralling’ and API integration. 1 billion images are taken per day and 6 billion photos are shared monthly.
Uploaded photo databases are the new 'data' corpora.
The first moment this shift became clear in Google’s announcement in June 2012 of the ability to recognize images of cats (the most frequently appearing entity in YouTube videos), and in the big data industry’s continual innovation to manage unstructured data like photos. Now, the sheer volume of image-related activity and opportunity for different consumer and commercial applications is making image classification a focal area for the tech industry.

Functionality is being developed for classifying and accessing content – both images and all web content - with tools such as Imagga as a cloud-based image classification program, and OpenCalais, a standard for text-based semantic content analysis and organization. What we might now start to call the corpus characterization ecosystem is expanding into related tools like DocumentCloud that runs uploaded documents through OpenCalais as a service to extract information about the nouns (e.g.; people, places, and organizations) mentioned.

API integration remains an ongoing trend of the year, with integrated API and developer management platforms like Mashery continuing to grow. API integration platforms give companies a means of facilitating and encouraging external developers to access their content to make apps, and give developers a standardized means of accessing large varieties of data content from different sources to integrate in creating a new generation of sophisticated apps and web services. 

Sunday, November 03, 2013

Mindfulness and Friendship

Friendship is a topic with significant contemporary relevance both popularly and in academic areas such as philosophy and psychology. This could be due to the huge contemporary trend of focusing on well-being, of which social connectivity is a key component.

Simultaneously, there are many ways that mindfulness is being applied for a heightened experience and understanding of social and interactive phenomena in both physical and virtual reality in areas such as communication, collaboration, friendship, and love.

The central idea in mindfulness and friendship is to be volitional and active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing action-taking rather than a passive stance of acceptance. In fact, self-awareness of your own parameters, mindset, rules, and ethics of friendship is a good starting point, especially as your attitudes may be unconscious, and are likely to differ from those of others.

In the friendship context, there may be a greater tendency for conflict avoidance, e.g.; less awareness and interest in acknowledging and discussing issues, in a way that would be unavoidable in other interaction contexts like work or romantic relationships.