World wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was “devastated” by recent abuses of the web, in an interview with Vanity Fair.
He is working on a new platform, named Solid, to re-decentralise the internet and take power away from monopolies like Google and Facebook.
He still has hope that the internet can become a something that serves humanity well.
Our transport modes and infrastructure will transform the way we work and do business in the next 20 to 30 years. From the office to the movement of goods, retail and advertising, we will see fundamental and fascinating changes.
Thomas Frey, senior futurist at the Da Vinci Institute in Colorado, says the haulage and shipping industry will see the biggest change. “Because we will consume more things we will need to move more freight, need more trucks and have to build extra lanes on our highways,” he says. “The trucks will be driverless or driven remotely from the office. They will be electrically powered and without those noisy diesel engines will radically change the sounds of our towns and cities. Rolls-Royce is currently working on a crewless ship, so we will see more of those. They will also be electrically powered. Because we will be using 3D printing manufacturing on location, we will be moving not finished goods across the globe but raw materials.”
Continue reading… “How will I do business in the new world of transportation?”
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Unlike HAL, it won’t be able to open the pod bay doors.
Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles.
CIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work — namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Whether it is facial recognition tech that is (allegedly) able to pick a wanted criminal out of a crowd of thousands or aerial drones which use image recognition smarts to predict fights before they take place, there is no doubt that we are living through a major paradigm shift for automated surveillance technology. But this kind of tech can have more grounded, everyday applications, too — like helping prevent shoplifters stealing goods from their local mom-and-pop corner store.
That is something seemingly demonstrated by a new artificial intelligence security camera called the “A.I. Guardman,” built by Japanese telecommunication company NTT East and startup Earth Eyes Corp. The camera uses a special pose detection system to identify behavior it deems to be suspicious. In the event that this kind of behavior is spotted, it sends an alert to the store owner’s smartphone, allowing them to take action.
Continue reading… “The future of surveillance: Watch this A.I. security camera spot a shoplifter”
Researchers are developing a real-time drone survelliance system to identify violence in crowds before it occurs.
Imagine your every move being watched and analysed by drones designed to predict – and stop – violent behaviour.
It sounds like a scene from Black Mirror, but researchers are trialling a drone surveillance system that does just that – and it could come to a festival near you.
Continue reading… “Eye in the sky: Drones are being taught to spot violence in crowds”
Bribes and shakedowns. Days in hideaways without food. For many fleeing violence in Central America, this is what thousands of dollars gets them on the journey to the United States.
MATAMOROS, Mexico — Shortly before dawn one Sunday last August, a driver in an S.U.V. picked up Christopher Cruz at a stash house in this border city near the Gulf of Mexico. The 22-year-old from El Salvador was glad to leave the one-story building, where smugglers kept bundles of cocaine and marijuana alongside their human cargo, but he was anxious about what lay ahead.
The driver deposited Mr. Cruz at an illegal crossing point on the edge of the Rio Grande. A smuggler took a smartphone photograph to confirm his identity and sent it using WhatsApp to a driver waiting to pick him up on the other side of the frontier when — if — he made it across.
Continue reading… “What it costs to be smuggled across the U. S. border”
Building houses is massively wasteful. During the construction process, building projects accumulate giant piles of garbage from off-cuts of lumber and drywall to pallets that carry materials and the packaging they come in. And once operating, homes consume huge amounts of energy.
“It turns out if you triage the world and you ask where are all these ecological health issues coming from, you get a surprising answer,” Jason Ballard, co-founder and president of ICON, says. “It’s not the gas guzzling SUVs and private jets; it’s buildings, especially homes. They are the number one consumer of energy by sector and the number two user of water.”
Continue reading… “Can 3D printed homes solve the urban housing crisis?”
GM, Toyota and BYD are part of a potential $550 billion industry.
The first batches of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles are hitting retirement age, yet they aren’t bound for landfills. Instead, they’ll spend their golden years chilling beer at 7-Elevens in Japan, powering car-charging stations in California and storing energy for homes and grids in Europe.
Lithium-ion car and bus batteries can collect and discharge electricity for another seven to 10 years after being taken off the roads and stripped from chassis—a shelf life with significant ramifications for global carmakers, electricity providers and raw-materials suppliers.
Continue reading… “Where 3 million electric batteries will go when they retire”
The active dampening (AD) phone case, patented by German student Philip Frenzel, is a slim alternative to bulky phone cases, but comes with a nifty trick.
So far it’s only a prototype — but the AD case can detect when the phone is falling and protract springs to make the phone bounce when it hits the ground, which should prevent any scratches or cracks on flat surfaces.
Once you pick the phone back up, you just fold the springs back in.
Less than a quarter of Americans are meeting all national physical activity guidelines, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
Federal physical activity guidelines recommend that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise each week, in addition to muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week. But according to the new NCHS report, which drew on five years of data from the National Health Interview Survey, only about 23% of adults ages 18 to 64 are hitting both of those marks. Another 32% met one but not both, and almost 45% did not hit either benchmark.
Continue reading… “Only 23% of Americans get enough exercise, a new report says”
The SD Association has announced a new card specification that should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes and provide much faster data transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second.
Continue reading… “SD cards could soon hold 128TB of storage”
The mortality rate flattens among the oldest of the old, a study of elderly Italians concludes, suggesting that the oldest humans have not yet reached the limits of life span.
In Acciaroli, a hamlet in southern Italy, about one-in-60 residents are over the age of 90. A survey of about 4,000 Italians found that mortality rates in old age plateau around 105, suggesting that the ceiling for human lifespan has not yet been reached.CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Since 1900, average life expectancy around the globe has more than doubled, thanks to better public health, sanitation and food supplies. But a new study of long-lived Italians indicates that we have yet to reach the upper bound of human longevity.
“If there’s a fixed biological limit, we are not close to it,” said Elisabetta Barbi, a demographer at the University of Rome. Dr. Barbi and her colleagues published their research Thursday in the journal Science.
Continue reading… “How long can we live? The limit hasn’t been reached, study finds”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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