Okay, for years now we've had local and national government arguing over the future of Auckland's transportation infrastructure (similar arguments are taking place in many other cities as well). Is it more roads and cars, or lots more buses, or light rail and trams, or a rail loop, or a combination of all of the above? Then how is it all going to be paid for? Time and time again everyone in the debate makes apocalyptic predictions about the total grid lock that will happen in 20 years time if we do nothing.
It's essential to prepare for the future, but to do so you must have an accurate idea of what the future will look like. Current planners seem to be completely ignoring the profound impact that self-driving cars will have on the need for transport infrastructure. Now you may be thinking that I'm just another geek predicting robotic vehicles and personal jet-packs. But you'd be wrong. I'm not going to quote articles from scientists or show video of Google's driverless car. I'm going to quote from a recent report by KPMG, called "Self-driving cars: The next revolution."
"An essential implication for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure is that, because efficiency will improve so dramatically, traffic capacity will increase exponentially without building additional lanes or roadways. Research indicates that platooning of vehicles could increase highway lane capacity by up to 500 percent. It may even be possible to convert existing vehicle infrastructure to bicycle or pedestrian uses. Autonomous transportation infrastructure could bring an end to the congested streets and extra-wide highways of large urban areas. It could also bring the end to battles over the need for (and cost of) high-speed trains. Self-driving vehicles with the ability to “platoon”—perhaps in special express lanes—might provide a more flexible and less
costly alternative."
Yes, KPMG are predicting up to a 500% increase in road capacity and less need for expensive trains. Basically it seems as if our politicians and planners are like people in 1905 planning how many horse stables will be required in the city in 30 years time and are worried who will collect all the horse pooh! I highly recommend the KPMG report - it's not science-fiction we are on the cusp of a revolution. The car dramatically changed the nature of our society in the 20th Century and will do so again in the 21st. Please wake up politicians and start planning for a future that will actually happen.
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| Sir Tim Berners-Lee |
As part of a project to help future generations understand how the world wide web came about, and the way we originally used it. CERN has put the world's first webpage back online at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html Cern want to hear your experiences of visiting the first webpage. So if you can remember the first time you surfed the web visit the project's website and leave your memories.
I wrote about the creation of the first website by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in chapter 8 of The Universal Machine. I quote:
In the summer of 1993 I was working with a small team developing expert systems (artificial intelligence software) for the construction industry when Mark came into my office. He was waving a floppy disk and enthusiastically said “Ian, you’ve got to see this! It’s a web browser!” “What’s the Web and why do I want to browse it?” I replied. “It’s really cool, you can see information from all over the world and navigate around it like a web,” he said, so I took his disk and installed a browser called Cello, and then had to install some other network drivers, and after about half a day of lost work I was ready to browse the Web.
I launched Cello and I was taken to http://info.cern.ch, which seemed to be the heart of the Web. I then browsed around CERN getting lots of arcane documents about particle physics experiments and committee meetings, and ended up in a Computer Science department at MIT. I browsed around other websites for an hour or so and then put Cello down. Frankly, the Web seemed rather boring.
The web got better, much, much better.
In 2011 when I was writing The Universal Machine I searched for a topical example of demonstrators using social media to publicise their protests. I chose the Syrian uprising as the latest example of the Arab Spring uprisings, little thinking that two years later this tragic conflict would still be raging. I also wrote about the rise of state-sponsored hacking, using China and North Korea as examples. Now the Guardian reports that Syrian pro-Assad hackers are attacking western targets. The Syrian Electronic Army has hacked the twitter accounts of the BBBC, France 24 TV, National Public Radio and Associated Press in the United States, al-Jazeera, the government of Qatar, and Sepp Blatter, the president of football's governing body Fifa. In one hack they claimed via twitter that a bomb had exploded in the White House and that President Obama had been injured. It really does seem as the next war will be fought in cyberspace.
Incidentally Twitter recently announced that it was going to start using two-factor authentication. It seems like they should hurry this up.
My colleague, Brian Carpenter, has just published a book called "Network Geeks" - "Part history, part memoir and part cultural study, Network Geeks charts the creation of the Internet and the establishment of the Internet Engineering Task Force, from the viewpoint of a self-proclaimed geek who witnessed these developments first-hand." The Internet pioneer Vint Cerf says the book "is a geek page-turner! I learned much about the European side of the Internet's history that I did not know in detail and a lot about Brian himself, too. I don't know how he remembered so much in detail!"
Network Geeks is available from all your usual book sellers - highly recommended.
The lead lecturer for our Department’s Gibbons Lectures this year is Professor Geoff Wyvill from the University of Otago, who will speak on “A Better Paintbrush.” Geoff is one of the founders of Computer Graphics animation in New Zealand and is always an entertaining speaker. Way back in the 1980s before computer animation was used in movies Geoff gave our department a showing of short video “The Great Train Rubbery” that explored creating images from intersecting spheres that moved on trajectories – unfortunately, all we have to show now is a still from the movie. Back in Dunedin Geoff was one of the founders of Animation Research Ltd., that has made many memorable videos, including the famous (in New Zealand) “Bluebird Penguins.” [Click here for a video]
The date for your diary is Thursday 2nd May 6:30pm. If you're not in Auckland the lecture will be streamed online. Full details of the talk, date, time and venue are available here.
Quora recently posed the question "What are some of the most ridiculous startup ideas that eventually became successful?" There list of crazy startup ideas that have actually become huge successes amused me; for example here are their first two:
- Facebook - the world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We'll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.
- Dropbox - we are going to build a file sharing and syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, and you'll have to move all of your content to use it.
Read the full list on Quora and if you can think of any others add them to the comments below.
I'd obviously like this story wouldn't I. But, IBM's Watson system certainly isn't named after me or even after Sherlock Holme's sidekick, it's named after a former CEO of IBM. A couple of years ago Watson famously beat the two best Jeopardy! competitors to win $1,000,000 by answering (in real time) Jeopardy! questions. IBM then announced that Watson would be turned to work in healthcare. Archiving and searching the vast, and growing, corpus of medical literature. Clinical Ontology News reports that: "The Watson product in oncology, called Interactive Care Insights for Oncology, provides a Watson-based advisor, accessible through the cloud, that is intended to help identify individualized treatment options for patients with cancer, starting with lung cancer, ... In principle, oncologists anywhere will be able to access detailed treatment options to help them decide how best to care for a patient. To prepare for its work in oncology, Watson has taken in more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, and 2 million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials, ... Watson is able to search through 1.5 million patient records and provide physicians with evidence-based treatment options in seconds."
