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Mathematical Model of Surprise

A group of computer scientists have come up with a mathematical technique to detect surprising features in dense information streams. They tested their method by comparing it to what human's considered surprising, and the results were... surprisingly good! A mathematical model of surprise could be very useful in next-generation information systems, user-interfaces, situation rooms, and even fighter jet cockpits, for filtering signal from noise and helping to focus attention on what's most important at a given time.

SF Web Innovators Meetup This Thursday!

The next SF Web Innovators Network (SFWIN) meetup is happening this Thursday, Dec. 1, at Deep Sushi. Think "TechCrunch" for SF people. Please RSVP on the wiki if you plan to come. Space is limited for this event. Hope to see you there!

Boy in Nepal Said to go Without Food or Water for 6 Months

From the Fringe Department... This article is making the rounds today. It's about a 15 year old boy in Nepal (see the picture) who is said to have been meditating under a tree without food or water, or even moving or going the bathroom, for 6 months. Interesting. Although unfortunately, now that he has been "discovered" I wonder if he'll have any peace from the crowds of onlookers? Jeez, can't a guy just be left alone to meditate without food or water for 6 months in peace anymore??? What is this world coming to?

Colored Bubbles

After 11 years of painstaking research and inventor has finally achieved the "holy grail" -- colored soap bubbles that don't stain anything. But that's just the beginning -- his invention is based on a completely new kind of dye chemistry that could open the door to a wide range of new products. Read this excellent article, and also click here to view some pictures of these extraordinarily beautiful new bubbles.

New Bird-Flu Remedy... Sauerkraut?

Yuck. I hate sauerkraut. But even I will eat the stuff if it turns out to help fight bird-flu, as this article reports. Anyway, the good news is that kimchee may be equally effective; kimchi is delicious.

My Grandfather, Peter Drucker, Died Today

My grandfather, Peter F. Drucker, passed away this morning. The news has just started to get out, but already there have been many write-ups of his life and death; but the best ones so far are by Bloomberg (summarizes his life story) and Business Week.

For me it is a strange feeling to adjust to his passing, even though at age 95 it was not entirely unexpected. My grandfather was the central pillar of my family and was a huge personal and professional inspiration to me, and to countless others around the world who studied with him, read his books, and worked with him over the years. He lived a legendary life, founded the field of management science, helped define modern corporations, originated the concept of the "knowledge worker," and wrote more than 30 books. He was also a professor, historian, economist and social theorist. In his spare time (for fun), as well as reading encyclopedias, biographies, histories and the entire literary corpus of western civilization (several times over), he collected and studied classical Japanese and Chinese paintings, eventually becoming a professor of Japanese art. And in addition to this, he also devoted tremendous time and energy to working with nonprofits, governments, non-governmental organizations and religious organizations.

My memories of him are of long walks as a child in the mountains, discussing history, philosophy, business, and the future of civilization. He was the person who taught me how to divine the future from the past, and to analyze the nature of systems of all kinds. Although I was no match for his photographic memory and vast knowledge, I was able to learn patterns and approaches from him that have served me in everything I have done. I'll also remember the feeling of his home where, amongst the minimalist imagery of the Japanese and Chinese ink paintings he collected, and walls upon walls of books, there was always a tangible sense of being in the presence of a sage. As I grew up and he grew more famous, I remember that whenever I visited him there was a constant flow of leaders coming to meet with him, interview him, or simply to ask for his insight and advice. He truly was a guru.

He was a great man, a Renaissance Man -- the kind that comes along only once in a century. He will be missed.

New Low Power Broadband Wireless Networking Technology May Spark Revolutionary Advance

This article just came in (via Kurzweil)

A little-known start-up has demonstrated wireless broadband 1000 times more efficient than WiMax – and claims the technique could also make wireless LANs that will run for years on watch batteries.

xG Technology, based in Sarasota, Florida, used a transmitter not unlike a cordless phone base station, operating in the unlicensed - and crowded - 900MHz band, to send a 3.7Mbit/s data signal to a radius of 18 miles across the suburbs of Miami, using 50mW and an omnidirectional antenna.

The data rate and specifications don't exactly match xG's original plan, which we reported in July, as the demo uses a narrower band and a lower data rate. However, with an omnidirectional antenna, the demonstration appears to have transmitted a signal at a power density other schemes would find impossible. The company's xMax technology uses a novel modulation scheme, described at xG's own site.

New Study: Human Hands, Feet and Foreheads Emit Light

Now this is really interesting! New research has found that certain parts of the body emit measurable numbers of photons. This may open up new diagnostic techniques. But that's just the beginning. Spiritual healers from many different faiths have long said that they experience light coming from their hands, and can feel (and even see) energy from the hands, feet and heads of other people. And of course there's the classical image of halos around the heads of saints, which can be taken metaphorically, or perhaps literally, in light of this new research. I wonder if the levels of light coming from different people indicates not only health, but perhaps alertness, stress levels, or state of mind. There are many interesting possibilities for this research...

Sept. 6, 2005 — Human hands glow, but fingernails release the most light, according to a recent study that found all parts of the hand emit detectable levels of light.

The findings support prior research that suggested most living things, including plants, release light. Since disease and illness appear to affect the strength and pattern of the glow, the discovery might lead to less-invasive ways of diagnosing patients.

Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics in Japan, who led the research, told Discovery News that the hands are not the only parts of the body that shine light by releasing photons, or tiny, energized increments of light.

"Not only the hands, but also the forehead and bottoms of our feet emit photons," Hiramatsu said, and added that in terms of hands "the presence of photons means that our hands are producing light all of the time."

The light is invisible to the naked eye, so Hiramatsu and his team used a powerful photon counter to "see"it. 

The detector found that fingernails release 60 photons, fingers release 40 and the palms are the dimmest of all, with 20 photons measured.

  The findings are published in the current Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology. 

The Semantic Web on Your Desktop -- Open IRIS Announced

Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart's pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS -- an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my own startup, Radar Networks, as well as other participating research organizations.

IRIS is designed to help users make better sense of their information. It can run on it's own, or can be connected to the CALO system which provides advanced machine learning capabilities to it. I am very proud to see IRIS go open source -- I think it has potential to become a major platform for learning applications on the desktop.

IRIS is still in its early stages of evolution, and much work will be done this year to add further functionality, improve the GUI and make IRIS even more user-friendly. But already it is perhaps the most sophisticated and comprehensive semantic desktop PIM ever created. If you would like to read more about IRIS, this paper provides a good overview.

Congratulations to the team at SRI for reaching this important milestone!

(Note: IRIS is a product of SRI. Radar Networks helps to develop IRIS, under subcontract to SRI, but our primary work is on our own commercial products, which have not yet been released, and which are not related to IRIS. Stay tuned.)

Hydrino Power -- A New Source of Energy?

A new source of inexpensive, renewable energy that depends on a modified form of hydrogen has quantum theorists up in arms: they say it violates the laws of quantum mechanics. The inventors, on the other hand, claim they have extensive proof that it works.

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

Now They are Patenting Storylines

A truly horrible innovation. Someone has figured out how to patent storylines, for example unique plots and they have a published (but not issued) patent. Hopefully writers everywhere will blow this out of the water.

Amazon Launches new Service that Harnesses Networks of Human Minds to Do Tasks

Amazon has launched a new service that seeks to create a marketplace for human intelligence on the Net. The idea is to utilize humans like one might utilize intelligent agents, to help complete tasks that humans do better than computers -- for example like image adjustments, formatting, tagging and marking up content, adding metatdata to documents, filing and filtering, etc. The idea is that people can sign up to do these tasks and make money. People who need tasks can farm them out to the marketplace. It's like a big army of "human agents" who can use "human intelligence" to do stuff for you.

The name of the service is "Amazon Mechanical Turk" -- quite bizarre. But OK. It's a cool idea. I think the combination of human and machine intelligence is ultimately going to be smarter than either form of intelligence on its own. This system is at least a start -- it harnesses groups of human intelligence to help do things.

But think about where this could go: For example, the system could actually be built right into applications --  for example, imagine if in Photoshop there was a new menu command for "fix this image" that charged you a dollar and farmed the image out to 2 or 3 humans who each attempted to improve the image. It would function just like a filter, but instead of software doing the work it would be humans. For you, the end-user, it would be functionally equivalent. You would get 3 versions of your adjusted image back in a few minutes and could choose the best one or use them all.

The idea of building in menu options into software and services that actually trigger behaviors among networks of humans is very interesting.

But to do this well you really need and API that all applications can use to harness "human intelligence" and "human functions" in their apps. One the best proposals for how to do this more  is here.  And an update about that is here.

Defining the Web 2.0 Customer

Nivi has a good post on defining the different types of Web 2.0 customers. He says:

You can break down Web 2.0 customers into a fuzzy hierarchy:

1. Creators who create an “original” work. Examples include a reporter at the New York Times, a podcaster, a blogger who is writing original content, or the author of Harry Potter.

2. Linkers who annotate the work of Creators. Examples include a blogger who mostly links to other content or a del.icio.us user who publishes the RSS feed of his bookmarks.

3. Commenters who comment on the Creator’s and Linker’s work. Examples include anyone who writes a comment on a blog.

4. Surfers who consume the output of Creators, Linkers, and Commenters. Anytime you read someone’s blog, you are a Surfer.

Reminder: Web 2.0 Gathering in SF tonight!

Hey if you are in SF and developing a Web 2.0 business or product, come hang out at the first monthly Web 2.0 entrepreneurs gathering tonight! Read more here.

Images of UFO's in Ancient Paintings

This is an interesting series of images of ancient paintings that seem to contain depictions of UFO's.

Turing's Cathedral

George Dyson wrote a nice piece on his impressions from a visit to Google, and some speculations about the future of AI on the Net.

Congratulations to Paul Ford!

My congratulations to Paul Ford, who was just profiled in a New York Times article. Paul is a friend and one-time advisor to Radar Networks, and is fast becoming a Big Writer. Paul wrote a widely-read article on the Semantic Web once.