Microcredit in the USA

Grameen Bank supports the microcredit scheme invented by Nobel prize winning Bangladeshi economist Professor Muhammad Yunus. Grameen bank began almost 34 years ago, when Professor Yunus started lending to enterprising women (initially only US $27), enabling them to develop their own businesses. Today, the model has been replicated in over 100 countries, with the simple (and very effective) principle that the "poor need credit, not aid". Staff at Grameen bank work closely with their clients, working alongside support groups to offer advice and money to such clients (many of whom often do not have any bank account at all). According to an article by Sigrid Rausing, "... the sums lent are carefully considered: the right amount is empowering; too little, or, interestingly, too much, is thought to be damaging". The bank uses four aspects as part of its client relationship strategy: (i) the loan; (ii) the savings account -- though banks such as Citibank; (iii) five days of financial literacy training; (iv) partnership with credit scoring organisations such as Experian.

Interestingly, Grameen Bank has now opened a branch in Queens, New York. Although initially intended for developing countries, it has now found that, "... 36.5 million Americans live below the poverty line, and 28 million have no bank accounts. Many of these are immigrants. They rely on payday loans or cheque cashiers, and short term loans (some legal, some not) -- with annual average interest rates of 300 to 400 percent", according to Sigrid Rausing's article. The New York office is led by Mr Chattree (formerly of Insead and JP Morgan), who sees Grameen opening six more branches in the US over the coming years -- reaching up to 20,000 people. Perhaps, this kind of community oriented banking is what is really needed in the Western world, with the current collapse of major banking institutions. Perhaps, the over US $700B that has been used to bail out major Wall Street concerns, should also be used to fund institutions such as Grameen bank, which provides a much more sustainable and democratic model of supporting people to help themselves, and communities to become more self reliant. Interestingly, such grass roots banking seems not only ethical but also safe -- as payback rate on loans for Grameen is almost 99 percent (now compare that with high street banks in the UK and equivalent US concerns).

image from http://37days.typepad.com

Google's Geo

Google Maps and Google Earth have now become almost as essential as the Google search engine itself. Whenever I am going to a conference -- Google Maps provide valuable information about the locality where the conference will be taking place, and where I will be staying. Now, Google has gone one stage further and sponsored a satellite -- through the company GeoEye. According to Dylan Tweney's blog, "the satellite will be able to take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters -- enough to get a pretty decent photo of your Mustang convertible, but not enough identify the redhead in the passenger's seat.
Because of a deal GeoEye has already signed with the U.S. government, Google will only get data with a resolution of 50 centimeters, News.com reports.
A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25cm, company representatives promised." The satellite also supports a colourful Google sticker -- although it is on the part of the satellite launcher that will return to Earth. This interesting development introduces an interesting new era for commercial mapping of the Globe -- where technology often reserved for national government agencies is now being used for the benefit of the masses.

Mobile Money Transfer

According to a recent report, over 200 million migrant workers transfer money to their home towns -- using the global Western Union (with over 170,000 agents worldwide) -- and a variety of informal networks (also known as Chinese fei ch'ien ("flying monkey"), phei kwan in Thailand, hundi (Pakistan/Bangladesh), hawalah (India/Middle East), padala (Philippines) and hui kuan (Hong Kong)). Such informal networks work in a number of interesting ways, essentially, an individual pays an agent in the UK who then informs an agent (a shop keeper in Kenya, for instance) to pay an equivalent amount to another individual. According to the report, "globally, the total amount sent home by migrant workers through remittance transfers is roughly $300bn (£170bn); money sent via informal networks and money laundering is believed to add a further $150bn. Remittances far outstrip foreign aid to the developing world and can contribute up to a third of a country's GDP." With the significant recent take up of mobile phone technology in many developing countries (for instance, according to Cellular Networks, mobile subscription growth stood at 39% annually in Africa between 2005-2007, and 28% in Asia over the same period. India and China added 154 million and 143 million new subscribers respectively), G-Cash and M-Pesa are now becoming alternatives to the traditional systems facilitated through mobile telephone networks. Essentially, "Users pay cash into an `mWallet'; and whenever they want to transfer money using their phone, the recipient gets a text message, which provides them with a code to show to a local agent." With the government control that is now being exerted over informal networks (often tied to money laundering and other crimes), G-Cash and M-Pesa are more regulated, and offer an excellent alternative to traditional banking transfers (often with a 1% commission, compared to the 10%-23% or so requested by banks -- depending on the transfer time involved). Additionally, "the mobile transfer networks could also change the way humanitarian agencies administer aid, as a pilot scheme launched during the Kenyan post-election violence this year demonstrated. With the country in chaos, cattle rustlers took advantage of the security vacuum in the remote Kerio Valley to attack communities and livestock, making the transportation of food, money and materials to affected communities unfeasible. The aid agency Concern Worldwide entered into an agreement with M-Pesa, sending money to over 560 households within a month." Perhaps, mobile phone technology, used in this way, could provide an important application for sustaining communities and families relying on overseas remittances, and avoid the need for the involvement of major banking institutions (many of which seem to be collapsing right now!).

image from: http://www.textually.org/

Periodic Videos

The periodic table always provided a reference point when I was doing my Chemistry practicals at A'levels. I was fascinated by how a list of key constituents of my environment could be catalogued in this way. Now a collection of videos from the University of Notthingham provides information about each element in the table. With over 2 million views, this site provides an excellent site for teaching.

SLAs and Complexity

In the Grid and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) community, there seems to be significant discussion about developing charging models for the provisioning of electronic resources (compute and data servers) and services -- examples include European projects such as SORMA and GridEcon -- and various Cloud computing vendors, for instance. Many of these projects utilize the concept of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as a means to specify electronic contract between single/multiple providers and users. A question that continues to arise at workshops and conferences in this area appears to be identifying the types of SLAs that are really necessary, as many users currently are just happy to accept `Best Effort' services. For instance, although significant research exists about SLAs, those being used by commercial providers, such as Amazon.com for their Simple Storage Service (S3) seem to be very simple (in the case of Amazon.com, the SLA primarily uses Monthly Uptime Percentage based on an Error Rate, as the SLA metric). Similarly, in the SLA research community, there is significant discussion about aspects of negotiation (some of which are quite complex) -- however, when SLAs are being used by data center providers and compute centers (traditional Supercomputing centers), these appear to be mainly paper-based documents that only take account of "customer classes" (in the case of data center providers). One question one needs to ask is the level of complexity that could be (usefully) tolerated by an end user/provider in an SLA. Perhaps, the formula that seems to be recurring in other Internet-based systems also needs to be applied here -- i.e. to keep the technology simple (so that many people can use it), but keep the complexity under the hood (so that there are a suitably rich set of features, and a diverse range of applications can benefit from it). Perhaps, too much complexity is being exposed to the end user -- when, in fact, simple SLAs are what people really want (and need)?

image from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

The Tech Pill

The Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (St. Ingbert, Germany) has developed a control system for a camera pill. About the size of a vitamin pill, the "Camera Pill" is a non-invasive diagnostic alternative to traditional endoscopy, the most common procedure used to examine the esophagus -- first produced by Given Imaging Limited -- called "PillCam", and approved by the US Federal Drug Administration in 2001. The pill can be taken with water, and in about 3 minutes reaches the esophagus, where it can take digital images (approx: 14 per second -- in total about 2,600 images), transmitted to a device around the patient's waist worn in a belt. The image count is however restricted due to the size of the device -- causing it to move through the stomach (for instance) at a fast speed (due to it's weight). The control system from Fraunhofer and partners allows a doctor to steer the disposable camera inside the body using a magnet. An interesting new approach to utilize sensors inside a human body for diagnostic purposes. Reminds me of the 1960s movie Fantastic Voyage, where a submarine is reduced to microscopic size, injected into the bloodstream and able to travel through the body to provide medical treatment. Although the PillCam is not small enough to travel through a blood vessel, it seems that emerging interest in nanobots could eventually lead to the creation of such machines -- and according to the Jersulaem Post, they are already here.

image from http://www.biotech-weblog.com/

Distributed Programming Abstractions @ e-Science 2008

The 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science takes place in December 2008 at University Place Conference Center (University of Indiana) in the US. The conference has a special theme on "Cloud Computing" this year, and is a unique event that brings together computational scientists with computational infrastructure developers. The conference features an excellent list of workshops and tutorials -- covering areas such as workflow, Problem Solving Environments and a focus on "community engagement" to get better uptake of computational infrastructure within the day to day practices of researchers. Along with colleagues, I am also involved in organizing a workshop at this event on Abstractions for Distributed Applications and Systems. The overarching aim of this workshop is to highlight and understand the gap between: (i) the increasing complexity and availability of distributed computational infrastructure; (ii) the lack of takeup and effective use of such infrastructure within computational science applications. It may be argued that applications have not been able to make effective use of distributed infrastructure and tools because of the gap of suitable abstractions/patterns to utilize infrastructure efficiently -- the effort required has been too high for many scientists. Interestingly, the design and implementation of the most ambitious distributed infrastructure are not consistent with a clear theoretical understanding of distributed applications -- the different classes of application, specific application level requirements and common usage modes. Additionally, this workshop aims to determine where programming abstractions are important and where non-programmatic abstractions are likely to make greater impact in enabling applications to effectively utilize distributed infrastructure. In addition to covering traditional applications and systems, this workshop will also address emerging infrastructure and application areas, such as programming and system abstractions for Clouds and data-intensive applications. Paper submission deadline is September 1, 2008.

Creative China

As China prepares for the next olympics -- it is remarkable to see how this country has changed over the last few years. BBC's Culture Show had a special report on China, and the growth of creative industries in this country. The design industry seems to be booming in China -- with a range of emerging design houses -- such as Grifted, Design Republic, and Shirtflag -- all representatives of contemporary China reinterpreting identity and individuality. According to the FooZoo Design Blog, "...
now more than ever, China is redefining its place in the world. Vast, technologically-advanced cities are popping up next to some of the most rural places in the world; design, art, music, and culture are evolving quicker than ever before. For the first time in centuries, China is on center stage with a new image, a new feel, and a wealth of innovation." Some of these musicians -- such as "B6" -- represent the emergence of the new electronic music scene in China. According to a report on US National Public Radio, "...B6 is that rare creature in China, an independent musician who is making a living from his work. Until recently, the Chinese government limited the number of CDs that could be sold — and music piracy is rampant. But the Internet and the burgeoning capitalist economy have opened up other options for independent musicians like B6." For me, London in the UK represents one of the most culturally (and design) rich cities in the world. A recent talk at the Department of Trade and Industry's Technology Strategy Board by Sir Terrence Conran highlighted the importance of design in facilitaing innovation, and sustaining a creative environment (leading to new ideas and technology innovation). Subsequently, the UK TSB launched a special programme in Creative Industries -- recognizing the importance of this area within UK economy. Similarly, in China perhaps this growth in creative industries, which in the past were suppressed by Chinese government, spells a new era for Chinese innovation and creativity? Perhaps, the recent emphasis on the negative sides of China (human rights etc etc.) need to be balanced with the rapid growth of this nation, not just as a country with 1.3B people and vast swathes of concrete, but also as a nation that is emerging as the culture capital of the future. Where artists combine thousands of years of Chinese culture with a range of different Western and Asian influences.

image from http://www.daylife.com/ -- originally from Getty Images

Music for nothing and your kicks for fee

In the UK, listening to the radio (the "wireless") will always have a special place in people's heart. The Internet is bringing it's own radio revolution. With the thousands of streamed audio stations that one can find through Shoutcast Radio and Live365, it is often difficult not to find something of interest. However, one on-line radio site seems to stand out amongst these offerings -- this is LastFM -- a streamed radio that combines listening to music with social networking. It boasts 20 million users globally with over 1 million tracks to chose from. It allows users to custom-build their own radio station based on common tracks being listened to by other users. So, if you like song X and I like song X, then LastFM will recommend other music that you have in your playlist to me. This enables sharing of common music recommedations between individuals, thereby allowing one to extend their playlist. A concept that was started by Martin Stiksel in London (in 2002). LastFM was bought by CBS radio last year for US $280 million, "... the largest ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition", according to a BBC report. It is also possible to listen to LastFM through a Facebook application. An interesting issue that LastFM also raises is one of streaming audio vs. providing the ability for individuals to download music files. According to Becky Hodge, the music industry "... says that online piracy costs it profits ... Where other sectors that have been challenged by the internet - the news media, for example - have adapted their business models to suit the digital age, the record industry has, instead, gone cap in hand to the government, asking for the clock to be turned back, and for the nasty digital world to somehow be magicked away." According to her, ISP's in the UK have been asked by the government to send "nasty letters" to the alleged six million illicit file-sharers this summer. Becky Hodge points out the need for new business models that take into account the existence of illicit downloads. Interestingly, a topic extensively addressed in Professor Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks -- "... as computers became more music-capable and digital networks became a ubiquitously available distribution medium, we saw the emergence of the present conflict over the regulation of cultural production--the law of copyright--between the twentieth-century, industrial model recording industry and the emerging amateur distribution systems coupled, at least according to its supporters, to a reemergence of decentralized, relation-based markets for professional performance artists." Benkler discusses the different business models that would enable sharing of digitally accessible content using "Creative Commons" licensing models. For instance, a music artist could give their music away for free, but make money through concerts. A wonderful discussion about new business models that could be propagated through a Web 2.0, social network oriented radio stations like LastFM.

image from http://www.tv13.net/

Hyperpolitics and Memetics

Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum (June 2008), emphasises how "hyperconnectivity" through the Internet and other digital communication mechanisms today enables the distribution of ideas across a large group of individuals in a short span of time. He emphasises how the use of digital media (Facebook, Flickr, etc) allows the spread of ideas; according to him, "... whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces ... unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously" -- thereby leading to Hypermemisis. A very interesting article that discusses how children of Generation Next are becoming experts in mimesis -- the learning by immitation. He suggests that, "we are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers. Our peers now number three and a half billion." An interesting and related idea has been propagating across the Internet for a while -- that of Memetics. According to the Wikipedia entry, "Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics." Memetics therefore represents those ideas that have managed to survive and be passed on through the "minds" of individuals. A meme being either a unit of cultural information that can be copied, or an observable cultural artifact and behaviour -- describes those theories that dominate our thinking today. Perhaps, a more controversial question one can ask today is whether the Climate of Fear imposed through rising oil prices, climate change etc, is essentially a meme propagated by news media. A "cultural artifact" that has been picked up and replicated upteen times until it has become acceptable "reality". Surely, the Internet provides the best medium for propagating memes to the masses -- like dominant genes that exist within our population.

Liquid Publications

Elaine Morgan, in the New Statesman magazine demonstrates, using a very interesting example, how the Internet is changing scientific debate. According to her article Here Comes Everybody, "in the 1960s, Sir Alister Hardy (an Oxford Professor) suggested that several features distinguishing human beings from apes could be most readily explained if our earliest ancestors had inhabited a semi-aquatic environment, rather than having lived on the open plains, as was generally believed. At the time, Hardy's peers wrote him off as a crackpot. Now, 48 years later, there is strong support for the aquatic idea on the internet. Yet, on most university campuses, the Aquatic Ape hypothesis is still treated as belonging to the lunatic fringe and unworthy of debate. It is on the web that the debate - both for and against - rages, at sites such as Riverapes and Primitivism. The internet as a source of information is messy, chaotic and often misleading. But it is a godsend when academic practices have stiffened into inflexibility and university luminaries are regarded, in all intellectual disputes, as the final court of appeal." Interestingly, a similar idea is being propagated in a wonderful project called Liquid Publications -- where the authors (Fabio Casati, Fausto Giunchiglia and Maurizio Marchese from the University of Trento), indicate the need for "evolutionary, collaborative, and composable scientific" contributions. The authors stress the need for involving the wider community in judging the merit of research findings, through a "social network", rather than a small set of members from the academic community (often a limited programme committee), who may have pre-set views on what contributions they wish to accept. The authors of the Liquid Publication document indicate that there is a need for "... a radically different evaluation method for publications and for authors, based on the interest they generate in the community and on their innovative contributions ... (peer reviews can be used as a complement). The method also encourages early dissemination of innovative results." An interesting view is provided about the need to balance quality of a contribution vs. quick dissemination of new ideas. An accompanying article -- Publish and Perish -- explains some of the background to this thinking. There is certainly a need to make better use of Web technologies in disseminating ideas, and avoid the necessity to use standard academic peer-review as a basis for selection of ideas. However, more needs to be thought about how content on the Web can be scruitized for quality (whatever that may mean). Perhaps, publishers of journals and text books, and those who compile "impact factors" of research publications, also need to think more about how such "Liquid Publications" can be made more acceptable as channels of dissemination and are considered as "reputable" as other (more traditional) sources.

Super 30

In one of the world's most populated country, where education of children is given more emphasis than any other endeavour by parents, entering a prestigious University is the dream of many youngsters. The Indian Institute of Technology happens to be one such institution -- with over 300,000 students from across India competing for around 5,500 places each year (across all campuses). Selection is based on the highly competitive, science based, entrance exam. Super 30 is a specialist program led, rather interestingly, by a mathematics teacher (Anand Kumar) and a police inspector (Abhayanand) in the city of Patna, aiming to "... hunt for 30 meritorious talents from among the economically backward sections of the society and shape them for India's most prestigious institution -- IIT". Super30 searches for talent amongst the "brick kiln worker, rickshaw puller, landless farmer, roadside vendor and the likes", to bring opportunity to kids from these communities. Since its inception in 2003, Super30 has seen 94 successes out of 120 students who have come through its doors (a remarkable success by any standard). See the video by Tania Rodriguez on Super30, and a special two part programme (part of the "WITNESS" series) from Al-Jazeera TV. Chris Mitchell who produced the film for Al-Jazeera writes, "It really is a story of how people from the lowest caste in India can actually become millionaires and work in the global economy. I hope that people will see how a real effort, commitment, and hard work in extremely difficult circumstances, brings out amazing results." According to Dipak Mishra from the Time of India, "... The 'Super 30' heroes this year include Pranav Prince whose mother works as a tailor to support the family. There are also a nurse's son and an FCI godown watchman's son. Hard work + 'josh' = success, formulated Abhishek Kumar, another Super 30 star who is ranked 327th in the IIT-JEE this year." A remarkable tale of determination, ambition, and helping people help themselves.

Gartner's Emerging Trends Symposium

Gartner's Emerging Trends Symposium/ITxpo took place in April 2008, where, according the Communications of the ACM magazine, seven IT Grand Challenges were identified:

• Eliminate need to manually re-charge wireless devices
  
• Parallel programming applications that fully exploit multicore processors
  
• Non-tactile, natural computing interfaces
  
• Automated computer-to-human speech translation
  
• Reliable, long term digital storage
  
• Increase in programmer productivity (by 100%)
  
• Identify financial consequences of IT investments
  

It is really interesting to see this list, consisting of a collection of technology and business related outcomes. From the various Trip Reports from the expo, the one on Business Intelligence particularly caught my attention. According to the people surveyed in this area, 46% are now starting to make use of Google infrastructure or applications (such as Google Docs and Google Application Server). Also, "... major vendors are exploring the use of Cloud computing." Another interesting debate on "GreenIT" was led by Gartner analysts French Caldwell and Charles Smulders, who mentioned that " ... Green IT is a myth, and any efforts the IT industry takes to address climate change will have little impact." Hmmm ...

Making Trade Fair

I remember a few years ago when the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign took hold of the UK. My work colleagues and friends were wearing wrist bands branded with the MPH logo, aiming to show their solidarity with this movement. However, I disagreed (and still do) with the general idea of MPH. With a growing world population, and limited resources, it is very unlikely that we can ever make poverty ``history". An alternative campaign that I would support would be to Make Trade Fair (MTF) -- rather than Make Poverty History. The MTF campaign has much more interesting and sustainable ideas -- which encourages people in developing countries to undertake trade with the developed work on more equitable basis. A case in point is the PhytoTrade Africa -- an organization promoting fair and environmentally sustainable trade. Recently, PhytoTrade has been promoting the import of fruit of the baobab tree from Africa into Europe. According to a recent BBC Report, "...the fruit, contained in a hard nut, has six times more vitamin C than oranges and twice as much calcium as milk. African people have eaten the fruit for thousands of years, but Europeans will consume its pulp as an ingredient in smoothies and cereal bars." PhytoTrade had been fighting an EU legislation to bring this fruit into Europe -- with an estimated market worth of over £500 million per year. An excellent example of how fair trade and a gap in the market can be used to support developing nations, and eventually help them eradicate poverty.

"Machinimation"

As computer games become more complex, developers of many of these games, such as Halo, Half-Life, Doom, Quake, The Sims, and Second Life, are providing tools to enable users to record the game they are playing. This has subsequently led to the new development of Machinima -- machine + animation -- which involves the recording and subsequent editing of game playing to make movies. The emergence of Machinima (which now has it's own Blog) is attributed to the fact that many gaming engines provide quite complex environments for movie making, reducing the need for specialist graphics software to generate movie sequences. Enthusiasts are now able to create short movies simply by recording and editing the games that they play on their video consoles -- using either tools directly built into the game (that enable a user to view their recorded game from multiple camera angles -- after the recording process), or third party tools that can work alongside specialist game engines. Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue provides one of the first series built on such animated productions. There is even now an Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences -- which now brings together enthusiasts in this genre in an annual festival. As an example, check out the 100 minute long War of the Servers (or the shorter 3 minute trailer) from Lit Fuse Films. Impressive stuff.

Skin-based Communication

According to Ident Technology -- "the skin is the largest organ of the human body. It is the physiological border between our body and the environment. Thereby it protects us from harmful influences from the outside. At the same time we receive feelings of heat and cold, but also tenderness or pain. So our skin has to fulfil a great variety of tasks." Ident Technology's Skinplex enables the human skin to be used as a mechanism for communication. Skinplex enables both the active transmission of information through (alongside) the skin and the passive identification of any changes in the electrical field produced by a human being. Essentially, a detector worn close to the skin can measure changes in an electric field, the field being induced via an oscillator worn along another part of the body -- and used as a transmission device. Japan's Red Tacton has been attempting to do the same. RedTacton have products that can transmit 10Mbps across the human skin! RedTacton has a brief explanation about how their product works. Fascinating!

Categorizing Clouds

Peter Laird from Oracle has written a wonderful blog to help navigate through the various concepts in cloud computing. Based on the current market offerings, he defines cloud computing as the "... virtualization of the data center, such that server machines are not thought of individually but as just a commodity in a greater collection of server machines." A visual representation of the different categories is also provided in his blog. Another really interesting talk in this space is from Alexis Richardson of CohesiveFT -- given at the Open Grid Forum in Barcelona (June 2008). Alexis talks about the Elastic Server from CohesiveFT, and provides a reference to John Will's Blog on "IT Management and Cloud" -- where a list of Cloud vendors currently providing commercial offerings can be found. Interesting to see that commercial vendors are starting to become more "Cloud active".

Cool Hunting

A fantastic Web site -- CoolHunting brings together news about art, design and creative technologies. The site features short stories about art installation and design houses across the world -- such as Plus Minus Zero -- the Japanese company co-founded by the master of minimal design Naoto Fukasawa. Wonderful archives and coverage.

"Tools for Armchair Activists"

London-based Troika combine art and design with new technologies to support mechanisms for communication. Check out their Guerilla Projection -- aimed at supporting message projections on street signs and other objects. Troika also recently participated at the inter_multi_trans_actions event held at Napier University in Edinburgh (June 2008), which brought together " ... a number of leading practitioners from the fields of art, architecture and design who each share a common desire to exploit the latest computing technologies in their creative practice".

Green Investments

In the 1990s there was a focus on Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) -- where fund managers actively pursued "virtuous" companies to offer their clients (rather than merely avoiding gambling, weaponry and pornography stocks). According to CNBC European Business magazine's article "Greed is Good" (by Richard Lofthouse and Ticia Holly Davis), 2008 has seen the launch of "green funds" -- an area set of explode over the next decade. The article uses data from the Climate Change Investment Guide by Holden and Partners, to identify a number of SRI funds with Environmental Holdings. One of the outcomes of this emphasis has been the Carbon Disclosure Project -- a global movement that uses shareholder pressure to solicit carbon footprint reporting from large companies. It is useful to see that reducing the carbon footprint may no longer be undertaken merely through an ethical concern or the need to mitigate climate change -- but by the increasing goverment support and consumer demand for lower-carbon emissions -- with companies that are changing their business models to achieve this getting a greater number of investors. Interesting how markets can influence the improvement of the planet!

Technological "Singularity"

The IEEE Spectrum magazine has a special report this month on "The Singularity" -- a phenomenon that would begin when engineers are able to build the first computer with more intelligence than a human. According to some, this will trigger a series of cycles in which "superintelligent machines" lead to even smarter machine progeny, accelerating the process of going from generation to generation in days/weeks rather than decades/years. The report contains short articles from MIT's Rodney Brookes, economist Robin Hanson, along with an article by Vernor Vinge -- whose 1993 essay The Coming Technology Singularity launched the modern singularity movement. Closely associated with the singularity movement is the notion of a "conscious machine" -- ideas propagated by MIT's Marvin Minsky and Igor Aleksander of Imperial College. Consciousness researchers are interested in the phenomenon that happens in our cerebral cortex that turns objective information into a subjective experience -- chemical and neuronal activity (in the mouth and nose) into the taste of watermelon, for instance. The special report consists of a variety of views about whether such "conscious machines" are actually possible and could ever be built.

Cooling Teraflop Chips

Intel announced last year the first tera-flop chip containing 80 cores on a single die. This chip has equivalent performance to a 10,000 processor (single core) machine about 12 years ago. How does one cool such chips -- which are likely to generate large amounts of heat. IBM has a water-based cooling system around "3D" chips, with thousands of hair-width cooling arteries. The Stanford University spin-off company Cooligy has been developing "micro-structure cooling loops" using fluids to remove heat and noise. As there is a greater commercial push to create low heat emission data centres, support for such cooling technologies will become even more important.

Orkut vs. Facebook

An excellent article in the IEEE Internet Computing magazine entitled "Will the Overseas Expansion of Facebook Succeed?" by Yun Wan, Vaishali Kumar, and Amina Bukhari (University of Houston, Victoria) compares the take up of Facebook and Orkut -- two social networking sites -- within Pakistan and India. Wonderful coverage of how localisation and social culture impacts the choice of Internet social networking sites. The authors indicate, for instance, that "... one explanation for Orkut’s popularity in India is that it’s easy to pronounce and rhymes with the word `chirkut', which means `stupid' in the Indian dialect Gujarati." The authors emphasise the importance of the use of Facebook's Open Platform and Orkut's OpenSocial, enabling third party applications to be integrated into these systems.

Current TV

Bring together YouTube and main stream television, and you get Current TV. A television channel broadcasting in the UK that allows viewers to create their own content (generally as short -- 10 minutes or so -- videos), publish it on the Current TV Web site, and get other viewers to vote on these videos. The best videos get an airing on the Current TV channel. Available on channel 193 if you subscribe to SKY and channel 155 if you are on Virgin Media in the UK. The channel was jointly formed by U.S. Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt, and features branded segments by Google. There is a strong emphasis on topics related to the environment (it is, after all, Al Gore's) -- but overall coverage is quite broad. This is a really wonderful way for individuals to highlight projects and activities taking place in their local communities, and also provide a personal perspective and viewpoint onto global issues. I have found the content to be entertaining and informative (and know that it will be over in 10 minutes even if it's not!). Could this be the future of television?

Flying Jelly Fish

The German automation company Festo produces industrial robots that can swim through the air -- such as a flying Jelly Fish. Their robots also try to mimic motions of living creatures -- such as fish and snakes, when placed in water. Many of these robots can work in a group -- interacting with each other using short distance radio communication. See also the wonderful robot fish created at Essex University in the UK. Wonderful stuff!

People Mashup

A wonderful video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University talks about the impact of Web 2.0 on connecting people. Michael's video relates the development of the Web to the general growth of Hypertext and the Web. A wonderful, artistic statement about how the Web started out as linking text to now linking people.Also check out the Social Networking and Web 2.0 blog called Mashable -- a wonderful collection of sites making use of Web 2.0 technologies and themes.

In and out of the Clouds

Cloud computing is certainly emerging as a new paradigm for supporting aggregation of data and computational resources. With the emergence of data centres, it is very likely that such capability will be the basis for future resource provisioning in distributed systems -- especially with the capability to undertake service aggregation (mashups) across multiple providers. A key concept in Cloud computing seems to be the idea of virtualization. Two contrasting stories indicate how Cloud computing is being viewed today -- whereas the New York Times thinks this is an important emerging trend (mentioning a few companies already utilizing this technology), the BBC thinks that fault tolerance, reliability and privacy are likely to be limitations for actual take up of Cloud computing ideas. The Economist has also published recently about Cloud Computing -- primarily treating this as a means to support services on large scale data centres. Will be interesting to see how this field matures.

Self Parking Car

Check out the Volkswagen Tiguan -- a self parking car. The car first measures the size of the parking space, and then controls the steering wheel. Nice!

Machine Mashing

Being able to integrate content from devices across the network is one of the aims of Microsoft's Live Mesh -- which enables sharing of folders between PCs and mobile devices. This is a really useful technology for many people today who have a number of machines distributed across their home and work environments. Another approach similar in scope is the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), which enables centralization of user profiles in one place, so that multiple Yahoo applications can make use of these. Y!OS also enables Yahoo apps to be integrated using mashup technologies, and makes use of the centralized profiles to enable users to more seamlessly access additional apps.

Standardising Social Networks

Google has invested a great deal into Open Social -- a common API for developing "social applications" -- enabling groups of people to interact with multiple Web sites, and exchange data with people. A number of applications are now making use of the Open Social API. Many appear to be applications that one can use alongside FaceBook, and one in particular, developed by NewsGator talks of "Social Sites 2.0"! Many of these rely on the use of RSS feeds (with RSS readers and writers) as a means to exchange/share data between sites. A concept also popular with Yahoo Pipes. Interesting to see how Open Social is taking off, and providing the basis for a new type of distributed application.

Financial Markets Data

Financial markets react in different ways to every day events. Relating how this happens, i.e. how market trends are influenced through news, has been the domain of traders in a number of financial institutions. Australian-based SIRCA is now taking data from Reuters and making this available to academic institutions and other financial companies. They provide the TAQTIC engine to aggregate, summarize and publish financial data -- often leading to very high data volumes. A very interesting use of large scale data Grids.

Europe's top 100 from Red Herring Magazine

There are two tech./business trends magazines whose opinions I truly respect -- Wired and Red Herring. Recently, Red Herring revealed it's Top 100 European tech entrepreneurs. A very interesting collection of companies -- ranging from news categorization company Newstin to Rummable -- a location based "social discovery" tool.

How does Google make money?

According to a report released on April 21, 2008 from Millword Brown Optimor the total worth of the worlds top 100 brands is 1.94 trillion US dollars in 2008. Most interesting of all, the world's top brand today, worth over 86,000 million US dollars is Google! A brand that has now surpassed world leaders such as Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nokia, Marlboro, McDonalds and GE. What does this mean? Well, today, Google makes more advertising revenue than mainstream UK television channels such as ITV. According to a report from the UK Times Newspaper, Google generated over £325 million of advertising revenue between July and September 2007 -- surpassing that of ITV (even when taking into account advertising revenue from sporting events such as Rugby). Do these statistics indicate a potential future change in the way individuals interact with media? Is on-line the future of information dissemination and mass marketing?

Life in 2000 frames per second

Ever realized what a single second would seem like if we were to capture it in 2000 of its constituent parts. That's what high speed cameras are capable of doing today -- capturing 2000 frames in one second. Watch the yellow balloon exploding video below. Watch how the water holds its shape when the balloon is burst -- before gravity pulls it apart.

"They Work for You" -- analysing voting record of MPs

Members of Parliament often vote on new bills in the House of Parliament in the UK. Ever wonderered how your MP has been voting? Has he/she been a "rebel" or voted with their own party? Now you can find out. The Web site They Work For You allows an individual to find out who their MP is, details about how to contact their MP, and also analyse how their MP has been voting. See also the related site Public Whip -- both use the Hansard database. A true example of democracy -- whereby the public (you and me) can find out about our MPs!

Afro-Cuban and Latin Jazz

A beautiful recording from Omar Sosa with over 21 musicians bringing together a combination of African, Latin/Cuban and Jazz sounds on one recording called Afreecanos. Omar Sosa's sound is very much influenced by the electronic Jazz guru Steve Arguelles. This has to be world jazz at it's absolute best! -- note the music textures introduced through background electronic instruments on "Why Anga?" -- a tribute to Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz.

Clothes that Change: Sensor networks and art

A highly creative London-based company called "Cute Circuit" brings together expertise in sensor networks (both sensing and actuation), art/design and textiles, to weave together a range of clothes that enable people to hug each other via Bluetooth (Hug Shirt), a dress to change patterns based on the mood of the person wearing it (KineticDress), and clothes that change shape and colour depending on the time of day (Mystique). A really good demonstration of art and technology.

Geekologie

Not sure about you -- I spent many a long hours trying to solve Rubik's Cube (shows my age!). Here's a rather interesting robot created with Lego Mindstorms for solving Rubik's Cube. Check out more such interesting but useless stuff at Geekologie.

Interactivity from LM3Labs

Interacting with large scale displays, and making interaction and user interfaces more intuitive is the wonderful work being undertaken at LM3 Labs. Their aim is to bring user interfaces to surfaces we deal with everyday, such as tables, floors, walls, etc. Some wonderful work -- reminds me of Minority Report.

"Fairy Tale: A Horror Story to Prepare Children for Newspapers"

In "The Curtain", Milan Kundera writes: "Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable ..., stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal." Can we really distinguish today between truth and non?

Major news networks today have a particular bias when reporting the news. Even major networks such as BBC and CNN have a particular viewpoint. Do institutions like these define the "reality" that we see around us? Whether it is the reasoning behind the need for taxation or the reason for a war? A number of independent news media have come to fill the gap -- most accessible via the Web -- examples are Media Lens, Spiked On-line, Open Democracy and The Real News. Not that these are totally free of bias either. But somewhere between the "institutional" view of events and news from such Web sites lies reality! Judge for yourself.

Social networks on Wireless Devices

The SOCIALNETS project is investigating how wireless-enabled devices can directly share data with each other when they come into range, and then pass it on to another device. This approach takes into account how humans physically interact and mix with each other. As often human interaction is the basis for bringing portable devices into range of each other. Social networks with friends, colleagues and contacts can be used to transfer and acquire electronic data, information and knowledge -- such as photos, music files, etc. This project provides a radical new way to form social networks based on geographical proximity. My colleagues Roger Whitaker and Stuart Allen from Cardiff lead the project.

Geo-referencing photos

Ever wanted to reference the photo you took to a map. Panoramio enables one to do just this. It is a mashup of Google Maps and user supplied photo content. There is also an API that one can use. Here are some photos of Cardiff.

The World -- Synchronized

Since 2005 Japanese art director Jun Tsuzuki has been running a project he calls Synchronicity. Jun asks people all over the world to take a picture of what they are doing at a pre-determined moment in time. These pictures, along with a brief explanation of the time and place they are taken, are then displayed on the Synchronicity website as a portrait of the world at that exact moment. See what the world was doing at a particular point in time.

Jonathan Harris tells Stories on the Web

What happens when you combine a story teller, an artist and a Web developer into one person -- you end up with Jonathan Harris. Here is someone who uses social network analysis to tell the stories using data from the Web. Watch his fantastic video on TED from July 2007. Check out the Web sites that he talks about in the video -- We Feel Fine and Universe. His social network analysis can be used to tell many stories about todays heros and heroins, and the social buzz of those who contribute content (text and photos) to the Web.

Service Level Agreements

With the emergence of infrastructure such as "Cloud Computing" (Google's DFS, Amazon EC2 and S3, IBM's "Blue Cloud", etc), it is now becoming clear that Service Level Agreements will play an important role in the future of such infrastructure. SLAs enable a client to establish a relationship with a provider in the context of a particular service provision. This is especially useful when services need to be integrated from a variety of different sources -- an example being the photo sharing site SmugMug.com utilizing Amazon's S3 service for storage (more on programmableweb.com). Wolfgang Ziegler, Philipp Wieder, Ramin Yahyapour and I are organizing a workshop alongside the IEEE/ACM Grid 2008 conference focusing on the use of SLAs in Grids. Deadline for submission is end of May 2008. Workshop takes place towards the end of September 2008 in Tsukuba, Japan.

European Grid Showcase

Various projects are currently active in Europe in Grid computing. The European Grid Showcase event alongside the IEEE CCGrid 2008 conference will bring together a collection of presentations highlighting work taking place in Europe. There is still time to submit! -- details on the CoreGrid site.

Open Source and Social Networks

How can one improve the trust in artefacts that are developed by the open source community? Surely, lack of trust remains one of the key barriers to the take up of some of the wonderful projects that are currently being undertaken by Open Source enthusiasts -- within the commercial context. We address this in a new paper that will appear at the "International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking" (http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/infosci/Conferences/Isn2008/) -- taking place in Otago (New Zealand) -- June 2008. Anas Tawileh has played an important role in shaping some of the ideas in this paper.