technology

“‘The Iraqi system is more decentralized and emergent than we realized,’ says Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. What if the U.S. had a very good Sims-like simulation of Iraqi society — one that started with the reactions of individuals and worked up? Not a sci-fi fantasy, the CIA has consulted with Sims creator Will Wright a number of times about Sims-style modeling of nations or governments. One existing advanced version of such a wargame is a sophisticated emergent model of a generic Middle Eastern country called MEPolity built by University of Pennsylvania professor Ian Lustick.” Sci-Fi Today.

BBC beats Google as Web-User website of the year. Web-User

Wired reports on a new device to allow the miltary to speak in tongues, ‘send three and fourpence we’re going to a dance’: “Interact lets someone talk into the device in one language — then it spits out an audio translation with just a two-second delay and no need for the speaker to pause.” Wired News: Device: Arabic In, English Out

Technorati just gets better and better. Relating news events to comments being written about them by Bloggers was one of the aims of Newsblogger the joint project between Moreover and Blogger. The interesting thing about this is that aggregated comments are useful to categorize news and add valuable metadata. The end goal is that comments about a story enrich that story and that the process is recursive i.e. comments can be about comments, eventually providing an ecology of news. Technorati: Current Events, with context

Linksys is the Cisco of wireless – and now quite literally. Cisco has acquired Linksys for $500M, a great move. Archives: Linksys the Cisco of wireless

As the war begins, Nick Denton points out that the Reuters online coverage is much better than the Soft-Warnography being pumped out by the cable channels. I am already bored with CNN’s war jargon, sweeping platitudes, vapid pundits and pictures of silhouetted minarettes, but the problem I have with all the online sites is that there is no real sense of breaking news, without constantly hitting refresh like a laboratory animal in a Skinner box. Here’s what I would like: the top 100 online newspapers with dynamic loading of new headlines in near realtime. Amazingly this simple thing does not seem to exist in any of the news aggregator client interfaces.

The Washington post looks to online newspapers from various UN members to gauge opinion: “As the United Kingdom seeks a second modified U.N. Security Council resolution to disarm Iraq, the online media in most of the member countries are strongly opposed to launching war any time soon.” In Security Council Countries, the Diplomatic Crunch Hits Home (washingtonpost.com)

We are seeing a rise of anti-Americanism, largely because America is so powerful and there is a tendency to resent power – but America is a better place to be than much of the rest of the globe. Resentment of dominance is not limited to global politics, but a natural phenomenon in any environment. Because of Google’s dominance, we are seeing the first signs of anti-Googleism, but Google is still a better search engine than most. If we look at the alternatives, well Altavista and Alltheweb are now owned by Overture, hardly a small startup – the time to champion them as little guys has passed, and very few bothered to then. Sterling Hughes: Golden Calf

Rip Buy, Mix, Burn Apple preparing digital music service | CNET News.com

Hungarian is the language of the future – and always will be. Top five technologies of the future – and they always will be: Speech recognition (weren’t we all supposed to have ditched our keyboards by now?) Virtual reality (whatever happened to VRML?) Smart cash (can you believe there are online services that write checks?) The Semantic Web (the pedantic web) Monorails (outside of Disneyworld, where are they?)

Until last week I used to wince when I used the word weblog to people I wanted to evangelize them to – particularly people like VCs. The problem was that a non-technical explanation lead down the path of trying to justify an online diary as something of earth shattering significance. Google’s purchase of Blogger changes everything. In this sense, it doesn’t matter why Google bought Pyra, but they did, and it helps justify the argument that weblogs are important. In fact not only does it help, but the Google acquisition helps weave together the perfect story. Google is about search on the web done right, weblogs are about publishing on the web done right. Together they create the web’s basic Input/Output. I can now say that with a straight face in a meeting. Much more than online diaries then, but they’re fun too.

“The long-term goal is to eventually create autonomous, programmable molecular computing devices that can operate in vivo, eventually inside the human body, and function as ‘doctors in a cell” United Press International: DNA computer sets Guinness record