Neutrinos were traveling faster than light!

Back in early OCtober, I blogged about the CERN experiment that found Neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. This result was met with plenty of skepticism, but now, literally posted today, the accuracy of the timing equipment used in the experiment was confirmed, ruing out a potential systematic error in the experiment.

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

I'm changing my capstone to devote all my energy to working on a flux capacitor to fully capitalize on the time travel implications of this neutrino experiment. And yes, I'm taking RoboPong with with me... to the future.

dropbox on every HTC phone?

Now you're talking, dropbox preloaded on ky HTC EVO? Awesome. Dropbox will be integrated into HTC phones, which means now you can start to easily access your files & back ups on any of your devices. Icloud on your iPad keeps you limited to the Apple ecosystem; drobox is platform neutral, making it easy to find your documents. Makes up for dropbox not selling to Apple a few years back.

This is is a sign of the mobiile and web comouting arena becoming less platform specific and more open. Another sign, flash foldingadobe caving and moving towards html 5.

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=38995&a=f

More on HTML 5:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203537304577030033160849296-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwMTExNDEyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email

Robotic fitness - fitness for the future

What's a better emerging technology than robots? This is the 21st century; robotics is a growing field and is having a dramatic impact on our society. Automated process are replacing humans and eliminating jobs, not to mention making us lazy... unless the robot is training you for an Olympic sport!

The Robo-Pong 2050 uses digital technology to deliver computerized ping pong training (table tennis), which as Robo_pong will tell you, is a great workout. The Newgy company produces robotics that actually enhance personal fitness... it's like a robotic personal trainer launching ping pong balls at you with "deadly accuracy." The 2050 also hooks up to a PC, so you can customize your own oscillation, sequence, and launch rate for a training session and then share your drills with other players. You can even select back or front spin on shots! Amazing, the convergence of modern emerging technology and ping pong. We truly do live in the space-age... THE FUTURE IS NOW!

http://www.newgy.com/default.aspx

Your smartphone owns you...

Check this out - your smartphone's accelerometer is sensitive enough to potentially detect your keystrokes on a nearby keyboard on the same surface. http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38913/?p1=MstRcnt  The researchers logged an 80% success rate in collecting keystrokes! 

I think everyone recognizes there are significant vulnerabilities in a smartphones, but this basically lets you know that little device can potentially collect EVERYTHING about what you are doing while it is nearby. It also highlights the security and privacy risk smartphones can pose to a business or organization. The Android app market has all kinds on unregulated apps out there, you have no idea exactly what you are loading on to your phone. This new keystroke logging technique is just another possible vulnerability on your smartphone; individuals must be aware of the data and information they are placing into that phone. 

Neutrinos and Information...

Last week I caught an NPR show ( 29 Sept - On Point with Tom Ashbrook) dedicated to the recent CERN measurement that clocked neutrinos traveling faser than the speed of light. The show featured physicists explaining some of the implications if it were found that neutrinos did in fact travel faster than light. Interesting? Sure... relevant to emerging technology, as it relates to the EMIS program? Maybe. After listening to the physicists describe some of the ramifications for relatively as we currently understand it, such as calibration for GPS, the measurements of the universe, and distance to stars, it became clear how intertwined our IT gadgets are intertwined with relativity. 

One discussion point point stood out - what else appears to travel faster than light and what happens if something actually does travel faster than light? Time travel - the faster you move, the slower time beats for you. If you were moving fast enough, you could travel back in time. Great - but time travel is a little too "emerging" for our class. What about the speed of information? It was discussed that experiments have shown that information can travel faster than light, but the information is not usable, it is essentially random... "Quantum entanglement."   Take that fact and now consider how general and special relativity, along with the study of physics and information intersect. Now start to consider the massive increase in the volume of data and information that is building across the globe. As we look for faster means of analysis, faster means of transmissions, can the fields of information and physics merge to yield a better understanding of our natural world and our ability share and interact with information? What about the connection between information and energy? As we collect and analyze and more and more information, including social information, what types of new technologies can be created to harness or better understand this information with physics rather sociology? What types of breakthroughs are in store? Imagine big data, and the trends the information revelas, are the laws of physics that merge with information? Are their universal laws governing information behavior that we simply haven;t proven yet?

Amazon Fire & The cloud...

WSJ has an article today explaining how Amazon is planning to use it's own cloud to help add behind-the-scenes power to the new Fire tablet. Amazon has essentially made a shift in the tablet market by creating a "thin-client" tablet which uses the cloud to do most of the processing and the device to simply render what's needed.  Seems efficient - and keeps the price of the Fire under $200. Sounds great right? The article goes on to raise privacy concerns, so as your Fire is rendering websites via Amazon's cloud - amazon is collecting all that data, gaining huge insights into  where people are going, buying, etc. Additionally, there may be costs to amazon to apply the cloud computing power on a large-scale to massive amounts of Fire users.

The real interesting development here is the obvious shift and reliance on cloud computing. Apple is introducing it's cloud services in a limited way, Amazon is linking it directly to devices - but it all goes back to benefit to consumers, but also how the cloud gives these companies access (via privacy policies that no one reads) to the user's data - music habits, purchasing habits, browsing, etc - all this is collected already via other mechanisms - but the web is tightening so that any action a users performs on any of their devices (phone, tablet, PC, TV, DVD player, Wii, etc.) is ultimately obtained by a handful of companies and used for future commercial gain.

Emerging Technology Starter

Read the WSJ Today? John Bussey wrote an article describing how SMBs are now looking to the cloud for data security (WSJ, 16 Sep, "Seeking Safety in the Clouds"). Concepts or themes that may have been "emerging" less than a year ago can shoot straight towards mainstream in no time. The article describes the benefits of outsourcing IT services toa cloud provider, primarily focused on security; that argument being that the cloud provide likely know more about security and is a better position to secure a SMBs data than the individuals running the SMB.

Makes sense, right? Except that the cloud still has plenty of potential concerns and potential security risks that need to be mitigated in order to properly secure the data. The cloud still sounds like an emerging technology to a SMBs and Security is the  PRIME reason many SMBs don't use the cloud (Bussey quotes a study by IDC, stating that 72% of small business with under 100 employees cite security as prime reason for not utilizing cloud services (63% for medium sized businesses)) -- this can be addressed and will be a major point to address for the TouchPoints capstone project. Developing a cloud security process and infrastructure will be key to selling cloud services to SMBs.