I read a nifty piece by Wikinomics authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, this morning on the Guardian's website about some of the future uses of the internet. The article focuses on how business can use the power of the internet to dramatically improve their bottom line. Most of the examples given strive to harness a large user base to solve complicated problems. The computer industry calls this kind of stuff, 'Web 2.0'.

Some highlights.

• The 'self-organizers'

China's burgeoning motorbike industry isn't dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths employing thousands of employees, or outsourcing tasks to smaller subcontractors. Instead, a self-organized system has emerged in which many smaller companies collaborate to share the risks and the profits - often, admittedly, by copying Japanese designs.

A computer simulation showed that dust in an environment of plasma and zero gravity will begin to form DNA like structures. Further more these DNA structures will incorporate less stable DNA structures from the surrounding environment. The results are in the Aug 14th issue of the New Journal of Physics. The simulation was done by a team of scientists including V.N. Tsytovich from the Russian academy of science and Gregor Morfill from the Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. Some people are excited about these results, claiming that this shows the possible origins of life or possible that these structures are possibly the a more common form of life in the universe.

In a project reminiscent of the Chinese microchip controlled pigeon, DARPA has a program called Hybrid Insect Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS). The HI-MEMS project is designed to implant a MEMS device inside a moth pupae. The MEMS device would be used to control the locomotion of the insect once it reaches adulthood. This information comes to us from the UK's Register. BoingBoing also posted a similar article.

The technology will probably not be long in coming. According to the University of Washington website, they have already implanted MEMS in moths. They used a species of moth called Tritonia diomedea, that grows up to 20cm in length. The experiments listed on the website were undertaken prior to 2004. The purpose of the project was to:

Michael Enzi, of Wyoming, is one of America's esteemed Senator's pushing to tax the internet. Sales Taxes, Access Taxes, and email tax? Evidently the US Senate is tired of the Internet stealing revenue from local governments. You terrible internet users!

The CNet article explains that this isn't the first time such legislation has been proposed, however this is the first time that a Democratic Majority has been seated in congress to view the proposal. From the article, "the political dynamic appears to have shifted in favor of the pro-tax advocates and their allies on Capitol Hill."

The Java Robotics User Group. Sorry, this is more of a personal bookmark than anything else. The group appears to be defunct (at least they haven't updated their website in a few years). During their operation they were working on developing software packages that would make it easier to program robots in java.

On second look, it appears as though the project moved to here.

The guy who runs infosthetics recently went to a conference on pervasive computing (those crazy people with budgets, huh). He sat in on a talk by Adam Greenfield about the ethics of ubiquitous computing. The talk was about the ethics of ubiquitous computing, aka 'everyware' (software that is ubiquitous). The 5 points Adam lays out are:

(1) all ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness.
(2) ubiquitous systems should be self-disclosing (e.g. be clearly perceptible, "seamlessness" must be an optional mode of operation). proposal of 5 different graphical icons to disclose capabilities of an object (see first image above the post).

In a DIY project similar to the Fab@Home people, the Maker Faire will feature this 3D fabrication device. The device works similar to other 3D printing & prototype machines in that a solid object is built from a computer model by creating the model layer by layer out of a cheap substrate. The difference between this machine and others is that this machine uses what the makers call SHASAM, or selective hot air sintering and melting, to melt layers of sugar into an object. A hot air jet melts sections of a bed of sugar to form the various layers of a 3D object.

Google is having a Sketch Up contest to see who can create the best model of their college campus. The winner gets a free trip to Mountain View, CA to participate in 3D modeling workshop with some of the experts at Google. The judging panel is a very distinguished group of professionals from the gaming, graphics, and architectural communities. Entries are due June 1, 2007.

Yesterday I looked through a few of the entries for the contest, as well as some of the other figures uploaded to the '3D warehouse'. I was inspired by the amount of quality work and interesting junk already uploaded. It also struck me that Google appears to be the largest contributor of images to their online catalog. I suppose Sketch Up isn't the most popular feature of Google.

I was reading about a new semantic search engine called Hakia. Titus Hoskins wrote an article on Site Pro News about how semantic search could be the death of Google. I'm not trying to preach about how google is the enduring world champion of the internet. Eventually Google will slide into the background of the popular imagination, eventually. However, Hakia is not going to precipitate that slide. Why do I think so?

On the topic of semantic search, Titus overlooks Google's own efforts in this arena. The admitted Google efforts to develop AI are likely based upon semantic recognition. Google is not being blindsided by the efforts of startup's like Hakia or similar semantic search companies.

International automakers are looking to develop computer models of humans for improving the design of their cars. The Global Human Body Models Consortium LLC was quoted in the article as saying that the models provide better data. It is also likely that a computer model will save automakers a lot of money becuase they will not need to actually build a car before they crash test it. The automakers consortium contacted 40 research and universities world wide to help with the creation of full body models and specific body part models.

Boing Boing posting this slashdot piece about internet routing in space (IRIS). The Defense Department launched their first 'IP-aware' satelitte this month. The satellite is able to send and receive IP packets without sending information to earth. This will enable satellites to communicate with each other, and effectively make them another network resource.

NASA is engaging the Second Life crowd through an online emissary of sorts. Thus far they have created a replica of the Space Shuttle in the online world. They call their emissary the 'CoLab' complex, which exists on it's own island within the game. Some of the in-game personalities are working on lava tube habitats, others on Martian habitat's and terraforming. There is talk of creating worlds that look and feel like the moon or other heavenly bodies.

Kyrre Glette and Jim Tørresen from the University of Oslo are working to create 'evolving hardware'. The concept is that the hardware pairs up 'genes' at runtime to find the optimal hardware design for it's given task. The hardware will iterate through 20-30 thousand 'generations' in making these evolutionary choices. In the real world this is expected to take seconds for the hardware to accomplish. The two researchers have previously created a robotic chicken that works on this 'evolving hardware' principle. The chicken was called 'Henriette' and it was able to learn to walk on it's own.

Color OLED computer peripherals are on the market. This website has a few items for sale including the Optimus keyboard with OLEDs built into each key. This allows for the keys to be changed to any format you wish; enable your keyboard with buttons for Quake, Russian, or surfing the web.

OLED is short for organic light emitting diode. By embedding certain organic compounds into a plastic substrate and exciting the compound with electricity it is possible to reproduce images, in other words create a screen. One major advantage of OLED is that they do not require a backlight as LED screens do because the backlight is built into the pixel.