A ten year old grilled cheese sandwich has sold on eBay for $US28000. Apparently the sandwich bears the image of the Virgin Mary, and after ten years it still isn’t mouldy. Personally, I think the markings bear more of a resemblance to the Mona Lisa, though, having not met the Virgin Mary in person, I can’t be sure.
ABC News Online is carrying a story about the way a pod of dolphins shielded a group of lifeguards from a great white shark off the coast of New Zealand. The lifeguards were on a training swim when the pod of dolphins began circling around them tightly. It wasn’t until the divers saw the shark that they realised what the dolphins were doing.
It’s truly remarkable that wild dolphins should display such altruistic behaviour toward humans. There are many stories where dogs have protected their masters from danger. This is somewhat understandable, given that dogs and humans have had a close relationship for centuries. One study shows that dogs have evolved to understand human beings, and that this trait is genetic. Putting it differently, humans have selectively bred dogs so that, to some extent, they can understand the gestures we make, and I suppose, so that they protect us. In effect, we’ve bred them to be loyal. But why should a pod of dolphins want to protect a group of humans? If the story is correct, surely this must rank as one of the best examples of altruistic behaviour exhibited by animals ever recorded.
In a previous post, I documented my enquiry into Enetica‘s interpretation of auDA‘s Domain Name Eligibility and Allocation Policy rules. I replied to Enetica, pointing out that nicknames are not covered by any part of the document in question. Here is Enetica’s very interesting response to that e-mail:
The auDA policy document you quote does in fact say what you say it does, but for various reasons, it is not interpreted that way by registrars. auDA has issued a guideline to registrars which very clearly says domains can be based on ‘nicknames’. This guide has been in force for about a year, and has not resulted in any significant abuse of the domain space.
The document I refer to is at: http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2003-07/ and in particular Schedule C.
Check it out for yourselves. This document, which auDA has created to outline the way the domain name eligibility rules should be interpreted by accredited registrars, is far more lenient than the policy document itself. One day, somebody’s going to have a field day with this.
At a little after 10am on Wednesday morning, the entire Australian academic community launched what amounted to a distributed denial of service attack on the Federal Government’s ARC web site. The reason? The ARC had just announced the Discovery grants for 2005, and everybody was trying to download the document to see if they were among the lucky awardees. Jaga was. So congratulations to her. In the end, the UQ research office sent us an Excel file with the list of all the UQ projects which will receive funding. I only managed to download the entire document from the ARC today! Anyway, we just had some cake to celebrate.
The government needs to think seriously about a better way to distribute this information. By one o’clock on Wednesday, I was pulling my hair out in frustration when, for the umpteenth time, the ARC server decided to close my HTTP connection. The closest I got to downloading the whole PDF document on Wednesday was 58% at 3 o’clock. I gave up trying. Perhaps Bit Torrent should be considered as a viable alternative to HTTP for this kind of thing?
Via Karen: Google Scholar. A search engine for academics.
Ben strikes back in the UbiComp saga by asking
Do I want to live in the distopian future of, to take a bad example, Minority Report, where I am addressed by name by advertisements for bland Japanese luxury cars (Ok, that’s probably not the actual example from Minority Report)? Does my backpack need to acquire new functions automagically? Does every can of baked beans need to contain a record of it’s entire production process?
The answer is probably no to all of the above. But none of the above is a requirement for UbiComp. UbiComp might make these sorts of things possible, but they are certainly not a necessary indicator that UbiComp has arrived.
The example Ben uses from Adam Greenfield about self-moulding beds (my bed moulds to me just nicely already) simply shows that no matter how contrived a UbiComp scenario one can think up, it’s just as easy to develop a scenario equally or more contrived in which the technology fails.
The point of the self-moulding bed example, I suppose, is that things break. Of course they do. When there’s a blackout, my computer crashes. The blue screen of death is still a regular occurrance if you use a certain operating system. Things always break for one reason or another. Yet, I’m not about to argue that traditional computing technology has not arrived.
The story about Prada from Fred’s House, which Ben linked in his previous post, is another example of something not working as it should. However, there are many examples where this technology is working. Wal-Mart and many of its suppliers are about to start using RFID tags to monitor and track goods as they move from place to place. The FDA has, as recently as last Monday, released policy guidelines that encourage the use of RFID tags on prescription drugs. At least one pharmaceutical company, Purdu Pharma, has already begun tagging some of its drugs.
I don’t think anyone has ever stated that UbiComp would be perfect and flawless and that nothing would go wrong. UbiComp is not Utopia. It’s just another computing paradigm.
There are certain enabling technologies that will allow the goals of UbiComp to be fulfilled. Ben mentions a couple of them: speech recognition and agents. Ben says that these are a Long Way Off
. The kind of speech recognition engine that doesn’t need to be trained on a particular voice, that has an unlimited vocabulary, and can infer intended meaning from context might be a long way off, but this kind of speech recognition is not required to bring about UbiComp. For example, I can already ask my little mobile phone to call home by talking to it. I regularly use this feature, because it’s by far the quickest way to dial. It’s nothing fancy; my mobile phone lacks the processing power to do anything like proper speech recognition, but it’s an example of something simple enabling technology that works. As for the agents. Well, A.I. might be a very long way off; but again, A.I. is not a necessity to bring about useful agent technology. The cool thing is that lots of neat things can be accomplished without true A.I. Check out this project, for example. Sure it’s an honours project, but it works on real phones. It does call redirection based on where you are, what devices you currently have access to and what you’re doing. It automatically switches profile depending on context. It does adaptive ringing, which means that if somebody really, really needs to talk to you because they’re calling every 30 seconds the ring tone will get louder each time the person calls.
Lots of interesting things can already be done. If they haven’t been deployed in the real world yet, they certainly will be within the next 10 years (although I’m betting the stuff I’ve just talked about or some variant of it will be deployed by some telco or another well before 2015).
So no, not even 90 years, Ben. Think about where computers were 90 years ago and where they are today. 90 years ago we had nothing more than Babbage’s "sketch" of the Analytical Engine. Now I can send e-mail over the Internet using my mobile phone.
I don’t think so. New Now Know How points me to an article in Fred’s House, which claims that UbiComp could well be a 100 year problem. I’m of the opinion that UbiComp will progress leaps and bounds in the next 10 years. It won’t be perfect, but then, nothing ever is. Sure it’s much harder to deploy technology to the real world compared to the lab, but slowly it’s already happening. Perhaps Japan is the leader in real world deployments of this technology. They are showing that the stuff can work. The gripes raised by Gene Becker (the proprietor of Fred’s House), largely revolve around fiddly handheld computers. In ten years’ time, handhelds may be a thing of the past. UbiComp is not about handheld computers anyway; it’s about hiding computers from sight altogether. I accept that this grand goal may not be achieved within 10 years, but it’ll happen within 100. There are many, many problems to overcome before the true dream of ubiquitous computing arrives. But in a limited sense, it’s already here.
Living in a developed nation, it’s easy to take things for granted sometimes. When one turns the tap on, clean water flows out of it. Hot? Plug your fan or airconditioner into the wall and switch it on. If you’re stuck without a ride, dial somebody (your mum, perhaps ;-) ) on your mobile phone and if you ask really nicely, they might come and get you.
While we enjoy these modern conveniences and basic amenities, 2 billion people around the world still don’t have access to a toilet! To address this problem, hygiene experts, town planners and environment specialists are currently attending the fourth World Toilet Summit in Beijing. They are formulating a plan to deploy loos to every corner of the earth, and to improve the hygiene standards of existing toilets. An admirable cause if ever there was one!
Tomorrow (Friday) is World Toilet Day.
(Via ABC News Online.)
Anyone who cites IETF RFCs in their work on a regular basis should find this BibTeX database very useful. It contains the details of just about every RFC ever written in BibTeX format. Looking through my own BibTeX database, I note that there is absolutely no consistency in the way I’ve been entering information about RFCs. That shouldn’t be a problem any more!
The Australian is running an interesting story about infiltrating groups of cockroaches with robot cockroaches in order to influence the group’s behaviour – presumeably making it easier for them to be cornered and disposed of. Eventually they expect to be able to prevent sheep from jumping off cliffs by using a robot sheep to influence the flock. Sort of anti-lemminglike, really.
Jean-Louis Deneubourg, the leader of the project in the news story, has long been at the forefront of studying the group behaviour of animals (especially insects). Coincidentally, my thesis references one of his papers on ant behaviour.