At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Pretty neat demos.

Mike Treder at IEET writes a little about a new device from a UK company that is essentially a camera worn around the neck, photographing every significant moment of our lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.

Mike predicts that we might have devices like this that take video as well, and not on light- or location-triggers, but all the time. This would be useful, he says, for re-living past experiences (and for “gathering data to be used in re-creating a personality embedded in silicon”, whatever that means).

In a similar vein, Wired has a review of the Fitbit Fitness and Sleep Tracker, a beefed-up pedometer with a triaxial accelerometer and a computer docking station. The Fitbit clips to your clothes and tracks how far and how fast you move, how you sleep, and the accompanying web interface lets you input calories consumed to complement calories expended. Interestingly, the Fitbit has a focus on data, metrics and trends for everything it tracks.

This is an interesting trend that I think will become more and more prevalent. Combine these devices, or allow them to gather data in a standardized way, and you can get a pretty accurate picture of of someone’s doings. Combine with a GPS receiver, a heartrate monitor, perhaps a light-level sensor, etc and that’s a whole lot of data that could be mined for interesting patterns.

[Miami Herald: Oh baby, it’s a long life]:

Today’s babies will be tomorrow’s centenarians. A new report says that reaching the age of 100 may become ordinary for most American babies born since 2000. How will living for a century affect our kids? And what quality of life awaits those who live this long?

An interesting article with some facts about the growing number of centenarians in Japan, the US, and other first-world countries.

Japan’s quickly-growing  older population has already begun changing the how it’s society views them. There are an increasing number lifestyle products to make the lives of the extremely elderly easier.

But, what will happen when old people are more healthy, still self-sufficient, presumably still employed, and otherwise active? Will their longer experience and accumulated wealth become an insurmountable obstacle for newer generations?

Fashions in ideologies also tend to shift when the older generations die - will our politics become stagnant with the over-repeated ideas of the older giants who refuse to die or retire? Will the younger voice be drowned out and ignored?

CCNx (code) is a next-generation content-centric “networking” protocol born from the CCN research group at PARC. Instead of connecting hosts like traditional protocols, CCNx creates a P2P model where clients address data instead of other clients (protocol overview).

I, for one, don’t want to ask the lights of my home-of-the-future to dim by way of an IPv6 address, and I don’t think we’ll be running DNS servers for our homes either - naming every appliance and application would be a chore. I hope to explore the implications of “everyware”, as Adam Greenfield calls it, on future networking in later posts.

(via Trivium)

We ought to set down some core principles to refer to when discussing the future.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Predictions aren’t very useful without hard evidence to back them up, and the best sort of evidence is reality. All short-term predictions, if they are viable, ought to have a clear next step to bringing about their existence. The most reliable and trust-worthy predictor will have already taken this step.

With that said, the next best way to make a prediction is to examine the past. In general, history is an excellent resource to inform us about how we act, perceive, and record. For example, I have trouble believing we will ever have personal jetpacks - the history of air travel is predisposed against it (not to mention physical impracticalities, fuel costs, inconvenience, and general sentiment for public transport). A good prediction will examine historical precedent.

Beware Science Fiction.

Science Fiction is fiction first, science second. Sci-Fi has some neat ideas, but they ought to be examined carefully. Many times, Sci-Fi will introduce seemingly near-practical inventions while failing to take into account their full implications. Predicted inventions should not be considered out-of-context.

The future will be messy and human.

There will be no clean lines and gleaming surfaces, there will be no single human government, and there will be no universal hive mind. The future will be distinctly human, because it will have been built by humans. No purely technical change will unify humanity, solve it’s deficiencies, or end all suffering.

The future may not be good.

Humanity, indeed, all life, is a happy accident, and we are still in a very fragile position that is  not getting any better. There is no reason humanity has to survive. We have only one habitable planet, no easy way of reaching others, no inexpensive way of Terra-forming others, and an steadily-increasing population.

There are no aliens.

At least, we won’t ever run into them. The universe is very very large, life is very very fragile, and if we encountered any extraterrestrial life, we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it as such or communicate with it. Drake’s Equation examines many factors necessary for meeting intelligent life, and the end result gives us almost no chance at all.