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.