Alexa.com allows users to compare traffic to different websites through time according to reach, rank, and page views and using various levels of magnification. It’s fascinating to compare not only the quantity of traffic, but the shape of growth curves. For example, although Facebook is still slightly behind MySpace in terms reach (though it appears to have pulled ahead in rank and page views on November 11th of this year), Facebook exhibits more of an exponential curve whereas MySpace exhibits more of a linear one, enabling predictions about when the former was destined to surpass the latter.

And although the data only goes back to slightly before 02000, this small virtual here is growing…

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Good Magazine ran an interview recently with a man they call The New Nostradamus. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses a mathematical model that is based entirely on game theory to predict the outcomes of political conflicts. He takes a very literal interpretation of the phrase “political science” and focuses his analysis strictly on issues of strategic interest, ignoring any cultural or historical aspects of the parties involved. He believes that the theory of rational choice can accurately predict the actions of any political actors as long as the data underpinning the determination of interests are correct. An analysis of his model’s predictive abilities done by the CIA found it to be accurate 90 percent of the time.

In the article a few of his predictions are discussed, but what is interesting is that he also makes a number of prescriptions. In fact, while there is a list at the end of the interview describing some of his accurate predictions, the discussion with him fails to clearly separate predictions from prescriptions. In the interview, he proposes a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and criticizes the outcome of negotiations with Kim Jong-Il of North Korea for not conforming to his model.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita’s model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. “He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,’ of course.” The “foreign-aid” figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. “I read that and I said, I hope that’s not the deal because it’s not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It’s unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we’re stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it’s self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal.”

It would appear that what he has actually developed is a highly sophisticated system of conflict mediation. His model assumes that people are selfishly rational and always gravitate toward very predictable terms in an agreement. It would be very interesting to show these predicted outcomes to two negotiating parties at the outset of their talks. Would they get to the same results faster?

Bueno de Mesquita acknowledges the power of what he is able to do with his work, which seems to play a big role in his approach. He will not call elections that he claims to know the outcome for because he does not want to influence them and he will not help organizations affect or manipulate government policy. Clearly, predicting the future is a complicated and controversial venture. It toys with our sense of continuity and our theories of causality, let alone the concept of free-will. It also seems that as people get better at it, we may be raising questions faster than we can answer them.

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Author Margaret Atwood, perhaps best known for the near-future fable The Handmaid’s Tale, has invented a device called LongPen which allows writers to sign their works at a distance, replicating their hand movements.

Says Atwood:

It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device.
…
In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one - which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)
…
The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means - I’m told - that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!

The product’s website keeps a running tally of the carbon saved by authors foregoing air travel to attend book signings (implying that they would otherwise have attended in person, which may or may not be the case). Still, the green credentials of the LongPen seem clear, and some of the possibilities it opens up are kind of intriguing: signing international contracts without flying anywhere; collaboration on tangible artwork; remote tattooing…

It compares interestingly to robotlab’s project The Bible Scribe, blogged here just last week. Put them together and you can shortly look forward to being the proud owner of an autograph signed remotely by your favourite robot author.

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  The German art group Robotlab has re-purposed an industrial robot to “hand” write a Martin Luther bible.  While in this instance there is not much feeling in the characters, one could easily imagine an algorithm that randomly introduces small errors to make it feel more hand made.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to order “manuscripts” of your favorite books on demand?

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Genes of micro-organisms are being modified to create something new

The BBC reports on our upcoming seminar speaker Craig Venter’s recent advances in creating life. Attendees of Juan Enriquez’ illuminating talk “Mapping Life” also heard about this research and Venter’s success in “jump starting” life by injecting DNA from one cell to another.

The plan is to re-synthesise these DNA sequences from simple chemicals, stitch them together and create an artificial organism. Some believe the team may be on the cusp of doing just that. Dr Venter’s work on synthetic life is described by some as “top-down”, meaning that he is taking an existing organism and changing it to create something new.

“We have abandoned so much of what traditional biology is doing, many biologists view us as heretics” -Steen Rasmussen

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“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez began, “and it
is promiscuous.” Thus discoveries like the one last month of an
entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the
old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene
lineages with gene webs.

“There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we’ve just
mapped part of the coastline so far.” Noting that his friend Craig
Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a
different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are
going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life.
“We’ll do with bacteria what we do with our pets.”

Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as,
“Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it,
can we reboot it?” Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven
by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from
the brain.

Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such
technology and the education that drives it while others cripple
themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the
world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help
educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at
home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants,
but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard
that read: “Portugal— We were a world power for about 15 minutes.”

The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries,
business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific
renaissance like this is Christmas every day.

During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has
retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven
been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the
“Precautionary Principle” that all new technologies are guilty until
proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the
potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could
save tens of thousands. I asked him, “What would you call the
opposite of the Precautionary Principle?” Kevin Kelly offered from
the audience, “How about the Pro-actionary Principle?”

–Stewart Brand

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Cool Tools Reader Michael Hohl figured out this wonderful way to make your computer Y10K compliant. That is, how to set your computer so that it displays the 5-digit date it will need when we reach the years after 9999: that is 10000 and beyond. In anticipation of that time, you can set this year’s date to 02007 if you have Mac OSX Tiger. Here are step-by-step directions on his site (or click the “read the rest of this entry” link below). Be first in your neighborhood to have all your documents and files future-proofed.

Now if we could only get our WordPress blog engine to the same thing…

(more…)

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(This post was submitted by Roderick Jones, photo from Flickr user Dukal)

One of the stranger aspects of the explosion in the use of virtual worlds is when the avatar outlives the physical life of the gamer controlling it. People inhabiting virtual communities die in real life leaving their avatar and its property behind. A trend that is likely to increase given the predicted increase in use of virtual worlds. Players could leave their avatar passwords to their children or friends to carry on their virtual lives and distribute their property, but it is possible to conceptualize a scenario whereby the avatar continues to exist by replicating the digital profile of its real-life creator.

Both Myspace and Facebook are on the verge of introducing systems to monitor their users online activity in order to better direct advertising toward them. It doesn’t seem long before this kind of marketing system will also be applied to virtual worlds. The process of distilling an individual’s online behavior into a digital profile is currently driven by the commercial needs of advertising but it is possible to imagine it being used in more creative ways. The software used to track the online behavior of users, within in particular system (virtual worlds or social networks) could be modified to track the entirety of their online behavior, over a longer space of time – say thirty years. At the end of this period the data could be used to program an avatar. This avatar would inhabit a virtual world or worlds and be programmed with all the users personal data, preferences and potential responses– would this lead to an avatar afterlife?

With the increase in data storage capacity, computational power and future arrival of mainstream interconnected virtual worlds, this scenario does not seem so improbable. The idea of uploading minds into computers and robots certainly isn’t new (Moravec, Kurzweil) but is generally tripped up by ideas of consciousness and attempts to replicate the mechanics of the human brain. Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life is not suggesting consciousness, merely sophisticated replication. This scenario has some intriguing consequences. Amongst them are the possibilities an individual could leave money to their avatar rather than their children in order to support their avatar afterlife, or that future generations would have access to a representation of their ancestors – but would having access to the temporal wisdom of our forebears be of any use? A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended.

Tech companies could offer this service; certainly there has never been a lack of human interest in life after death. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife.

Roderick Jones

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(Frozen bacteria found by Richard Hoover in the ice of the Fox permafrost tunnel)

From New Scientist:

Microbes can survive trapped inside ice crystals, under 3 kilometres of snow, for more than 100,000 years, a new study suggests. The study bolsters the case that life may exist on distant, icy worlds in our own solar system. Living bacteria have been found in ice cores sampled at depths of 4 kilometres in Antarctica, though some scientists have argued that those microbes were contaminants from the drilling and testing of the samples in labs. And in 2005, researchers revived a bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years (see Ice age bacteria brought back to life). Now, physicist Buford Price and graduate student Robert Rohde, both at University of California in Berkeley, US, have found a mechanism to explain how microbes could survive such extreme conditions. They say a tiny film of liquid water forms spontaneously around the microbe. Oxygen, hydrogen, methane and many other gases will then diffuse to this film from air bubbles nearby, providing the microbe with sufficient food to survive. Thus, virtually any microbe can remain alive in solid ice, resisting temperatures down to -55° Celsius and pressures of 300 atmospheres. Under such harsh conditions, the microbes would not be able to grow and reproduce, but they would still be able to repair any molecular damage, keeping themselves viable for more than a thousand centuries, the team says. “It is not life as we generally think about it,” says Rohde. “[They] are just sitting there surviving, hoping that the ice will melt.”

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 At the Singularity Summit earlier this month I came to see Paul Saffo’s talk.  Famed as a forecaster and future thinker, I was expecting to hear what lay ahead in the world as the steepness of the technology curve continues towards cliff like proportions.  Instead all were treated to a reminder that our new future is represented overwhelmingly in the negative by our artists and poets.  He points out that if we can only imagine an awful techno future, that that is what we will get.

So Saffo read the one piece he could find that depicts a world run by computers in a positive light.  Amazingly it was written in 01967 by someone who was likely programming computers with punch cards.  It is shown in the original above and the text can be found on Saffo’s journal.

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