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Sunday, June 18, 2006 |
The future will be streamed to the personal device of your choice.
Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? – posted at Yahoo! questions, and answered at length by Leonard Lin. First he considers what's changed since 2001:
- No iPod/ITMS
- No Cameraphone
- No Satellite Radio
- Blogging not mainstream
- Very little social media (Flickr, YouTube)
- No social networking sites
- No Wikipedia
- MMORPGs just taking off
He notes that most of these were happening five years ago, but among early adopters. (Today's fringe is tomorrow's future.)
So what's hot in five years? Leonard has a good list (here with my own comments):
- Software as a service becomes more standard. This has actually been a long time coming – consider the experimentation with the ASP (application service provider model) in the 90s. One question: to what extent will we trust the SAAS operators to hold critical data. I already find myself depending on Google and 37 Signals quite a bit, and I know other early adopters who are beginning to build their information environment with external services rather than local software and databases.
- Global identity framework, referred to by some as "Identity 2.0." This is a standard way to manage your identity and personal data online, precursors of which were W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences and Microsoft's Passport. There's a bunch of people working on this.
- Digital Media – more and more of it, some cheap and some free, carried on many gadgets of many sizes, with wireless access to sync and stream effortlessly.
- Smart phones. Leonard says that phones will be the primary convergence devices in five years, though you might say that the primary convergence devices will includes voice communication of some kind, and increasingly advance positioning systems.
- RFID and spimes or network objects. These should take off once people get over the privacy paranoia... like it's threatening for the FBI to know where you've put your socks.
- Self monitoring or self instrumentation. Nike Plus is a good example: "tune your run." This is very cyborg, and we saw it coming in the early 90s (e.g. Menstat).
- Personal aggregators, or what Marc Canter calls Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. Marc notes that Apple and Microsoft are already moving on the concept.
- Shared everything... or online environments that promote sharing. I would add that the "consumer" is dead, replaced by the more active customer-as-collaborator.
Another piece that's not explicit in Lin's list: the rise of game culture and the communities that form in game-driven environments (and avatar-based communities like Second Life). I already know people whose social life is built around systems like Second Life, World of Warcraft, Runescape et al. And these games are more than places to hang out; they actually teach new ways of thinking. Example: at a recent conference, David Pearce Snyder noted that gamers are more tolerant of failure, because they have to fail so many times to move to higher levels of a game.
[Weblogsky]
8:46:20 PM 
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Science advocate destroys global warming/AIDS dismisser. Cory Doctorow:
Last week, Ira Flatow of NPR's Science Friday program did a segment on politics and science, bringing on Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, and Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. The former is a book that accuses the left of distorting science to fabricate the AIDS crisis, global climate change, the prohibition against stem cell research, and other well-known politically charged scientific crises. Mooney, the Washington correspondent for the excellent SEED magazine, which is the best science and policy magazine on the stands, is especially masterful in the debate.
Bethell has nothing going for him -- he's regurgitating throughly debunked pseudo-science ("the Earth actually cooled at the start of the 20th Century") and rather than let this turn into a "I'm right-No, I'm right" talk-show, Mooney just quietly, thoroughly and masterfully destroys Bethell. He is firm, concise and sharp, while Bethell is meandering, incoherent, and fuzzy. The MP3 is up as part of the Science Friday podcast -- great both for the content and for Mooney's excellent radio-show ninjitsu. Show notes link, MP3 link
[Boing Boing]
8:44:15 PM
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Confucius [Kong fuzi] say.....
This hilarious article about "confirming" your descent from Confucius is making the rounds.
Now, my understanding is that the patrilineage of Confucius remains to this day. So the people who would seek confirmation would often have a tradition of descent from the great sage himself. But, I note tradition. We all know that "ancestors" can be concocted, and, we also know that sometimes patrilineages can be "interrupted." When English geneticist Bryan Sykes tested individuals with his surname across the British Isles he found that ~50% of individuals were of the same Y chromosomal lineage. That means that half of these "Sykes" were actually descended from the same man in the recent past (~1000 years ago, or less). But, what of the other 50%? Turns out that they were descended from a host of various different men. In other words, the pie chart of "Sykes" lineages would have shown a modal haplotype, and a diverse array of non-modal haplotypes. A plausible explanation for this pattern is that the other 50% are due to lineage introgression, a polite way of suggesting cuckoldry on the order of 1-2% per generation.
Unlike the Sykes lineage that of Confucius is of high prestige, and it seems plausible that in addition to misattributed paternity, there would be many individuals who would claim Confucian antecedants. On the other hand, one might contend that misattributed paternity would be somewhat lower in the Confucian lineage than the Sykes' lineage because of the higher status, and concomitant elevated vigilance of Confucian males. Additionally, Chinese traditions of filial piety an the important of blood descendents (sons) maintaining ancestral graves and performing rites might also mitigate against lineage introgression. Of course, the Confucian lineage at least 2,500 years ago. Assuming 99.5% fidelity and 100 generations (2,500 years divided by 25 years per generation) about 60% of the individuals claiming to be descendents of Confucius should carry the same Y haplotype. Drop it to 99% and it would be 36%. 95% and you drop to 0.6% carrying the Y lineage of Confucius! Of course, some researchers claim that the Kohanim priestly lineage, passed from father to son among Jews, seems to exhibit a modal haplotype on the order of 50% worldwide. But the difference between the Kohanim and the Confucian lineage is that the latter garners esteem from a nation-empire, and it seems conscious defection would be low and introgression rather high because of the status of Confucius. In any case, my overall point is that you believe in inference, you don't need to assay Confucius' remains, if a modal haplotype that coalesces to around 2,500 years into the past is found, than I think one can say that the most parsimonious conclusion is that that is the genuine Confucian lineage.
Addendum: What we're talking about here are uniparental genealogies. The non-recombinant Y is passed from father to son intact, indefinitely (though with mutations). While it seems plausible that all Chinese, and possibly all Eurasians, can trace a line of descent back to the great sage, genomes are discrete, so most of these individuals may not carry DNA identical by descent from the great sage. On the other hand, since the Y is not diminished and is passed wholly from father to son, this signal can be discerned out of the noise of generations that have passed. Though most of the genomic material that is derived from Confucius is not found in the patrilineage, that is, it is scattered across humanity (though concentrated among Han Chinese), the Y chromosomal lineaeg is diagnostically tractable. [Gene Expression]
8:43:53 PM
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Here's a short video of kids throwing a large salad bowl of liquid nitrogen into a small hotel swimming pool -- it's a gorgeous fog effect, and all the cooler for happening in a totally normal hotel. 