Off Course-On Target

Seeing Around the Corner of the Future of Photography

I continue to believe that we are hitting the tipping point of the exponential curve of the evolution of what we currently call photography.  I think photography and camera are becoming as ill fitting as terms like calling and phone.  Don't you find it interesting that one of the things you do the least with your "phone" these days is actually call someone?  Or at least your smartphone now does so much more than just act as a telephone that it seems quaint to call it a phone.

Capturing our world via sounds and images is being revolutionized as we see exponential increases in things like resolution, combining still and video capture with sounds, location and more and now being able to photograph things we can't even see such as with this recent development from MIT of cameras that can see around corners. 

With the note that all of these are all technologies which now several years old, as are my posts about them, consider some of the following examples of how rapidly and fundamentally things are changing in these areas:

Adobe and others have also developed cameras and what they call “computational photography” that can gather such complete information on a scene that focus becomes infinite and something we can adjust after the photo is taken. 

Or how about things like Photosynth which can align and stitch together thousands of photos and videos to create a “model” of the whole building or space which you can then walk through.

Add to this the ability to take photos with your “phone” and convert them into 3D models such as with apps like the Autodesk 123D series and how we are starting to see 2D printers replaced by 3D versions capable of "printing" full working 3D assemblies so you can “print” those models you’ve captured and snowflaked them to make them “just right” for you.

Add to the mix things like the Sixth Sense technology

and notions such as The Quantified Self 

and you will start to see how we need to completely rethink and reimagine what “photography” means and consider what we need to learn in order to make smart choices and use the power of these innovations for positive good and gain.

For now start to notice how the use of video is becoming more and more pervasive and consider that as the resolution of video cameras in our “phones” goes up and up, won’t still and video merge into one when you can grab just the perfect “frame” for a video anytime you want a “still photo”.  A little further out what if you don’t need to remember to take a photo or a video of an event before it happens because it you are capturing everything all the time. 

Scary?  You bet!  Exciting?  Absolutely!  Inevitable?  I think so.

Canadian Thought Control? Winter Olympics to Demo Thought-Controlled Lighting

Thought control is definitely on my What if the impossible isn’t? or WITITT? list and here is a recent addition to the list of examples.

I suspect we will do our usual underestimation on this whole area of brain direct or thought controlled interfaces in that we will underestimate how long it will take to mainstream but more so we will underestimate the impact it will have.  In any case while it is early in the development don't forget that history shows clearly that adoption and most every other type of change increased exponentially.  We therefore need to be thinking of things much sooner than in the past so we we will be ready to adopt and leverage these new enablers as they emerge from the lab and head increasingly quickly towards everyday use by the rest of us.

Consider this latest example and start pondering how we will use this to interact with and control our environments and interactions with information, technology and each other.

Winter Olympics to Demo Thought-Controlled Lighting

• By Priya Ganapati
• February 3, 2010

Read More Wired GadgetLab

Along with the figure skating, ice hockey and snowboarding, another event will compete for attention at the Winter Olympics in Canada this month.

A Canadian company has created what it calls the “largest thought-controlled computing installation.” It’s an experiment that lets visitors to the Olympics use their brainwaves to control the lights at three major landmarks in Canada, including Niagara Falls.

“When people put on the headsets and find themselves increasing the brightness of the lights by just thinking about it, you can almost see their brains explode,” says Trevor Coleman, chief operating officer for InteraXon, the company that has created this installation.

As consumers get more comfortable with going beyond the keyboard and the mouse to interact with their computers, companies are looking for alternate ways to make the experience better. Already, touch and voice recognition have become a major part of the user interface in smartphones, and harnessing brainwaves or other biological data is slowly emerging as a third option, especially in gaming.

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy | h+ Magazine

Developments such as this are of interest and value for seeing trends & directions relative to WITII? (What if the impossible isn't?).  While I would  not pretend for a moment to understand any of the details of DNA level work, what I do see is how advances in nanotechnology are continuing at an every increasing pace and penetrating new levels of scale.  The quote below summed it up nicely for me:

"The advances in DNA nanotechnology keep coming, and many observers are wondering if this will be the path that leads us to the next Industrial Revolution. Only time — and many more experiments — will tell."

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy

Written By: Michael Anissimov

Date Published: January 12, 2010

Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.

Schematics (a) and Atomic Force Micrographs (b) of the Origami Arrays and Capture Molecules. Panel i of (a) illustrates the origami array containing slots for the cassettes and a notch to enable recognition of orientation; the slots and notches are visible in the AFM in (b). Panels ii show the cassettes in place; the color coding in (a) used throughout the schematics is green for the PX state and violet for the JX2 state; the presence of the cassettes is evident in the AFM image in (b). Panels iii illustrate the PX-PX state which captures a triangle pointing towards the notch in the schematic (a) and in the AFM image (b). Panels iv illustrate the PX-JX2 state (a), containing a triangle that points away from the notch, which is evident in the AFM image (b). Panels v illustrate the JX2- PX state which captures a diamond-shaped molecule (a); its shape is visible in the AFM image (b). Panels vi show the linear molecule captured by the JX2-JX2 state, both schematically (a) and in the AFM image (b).

via hplusmagazine.com

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Magazine

• By Jonah Lehrer      December 21, 2009  | 10:00 am  | Wired Jan 2010

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.  via www.wired.com

Erik Duval and I have long shared a fascination and frustration with the notion of learning from failure and particularly the lack of learning from failure, even outright refusal to do so.  I was therefore delighted to find this story and IMHO the excellent observations made by Jonah Lehrer about the nature of failure in science.  And how can you not love an article and writer who includes a quote from both Richard Feynman and Bob Dylan?!

I think Lehrer's comments and observations apply to most of us and life in general and I've found myself thinking more and more about this since first reading this article last month.  

I need to get better at following through on posting things soooner than later and so this has sat as one of more than hundred (no I'm not kidding) open tabs in my browsers waiting for me to post.  Thankfully Dan Pink provided the kick I needed to get this one posted when he took note of this same article and was apparently similarly struck by it and his noting of this as one of his 3 Articles Worth Reading.  (thanks Dan!)

I strongly encourage you to read Lehrer's article as I think it truly thought and action provoking.  Read for example such notes as:

• Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
• If humans — scientists included — are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer?
•  “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”
• The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

And consider closely his suggestions on 

 

How to Learn 
From Failure

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.

1Check Your Assumptions

Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

2Seek Out the Ignorant

Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

3Encourage Diversity

If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

4Beware of Failure-Blindness

It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

 

These seem to match extremely well with my experiences and observations and include why the overly hyped attention on so called "social media" has some great promise by adding in this cast to making steps 2 and 3 above very easy and effective.

Hope you enjoy and get as much out of this as I continue to do.

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens: IEEE Spectrum WITII

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight

Image: Raygun Studio

BY Babak A. Parviz // September 2009

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

 

via IEEE Spectrum

Here is today's addition to the WITII list (What if the Impossible Isn't?)  I've been writing more about AR lately (who hasn't) and expect to continue as both research such as this and infant applications increasingly merge into the mainstream.  Glasses and goggles make sense too and may be possible sooner.  Implants have additional benefits and applications.

This is a longish article, at least by today's online reading standards, but it is well worth the read to get a glimpse at what is currently possible and what is about to be. 

First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive

The latest entry on my “What if the Impossible Isn't?”  list is this research breakthrough that takes transistors down to the molecular level, which Privya Ganapati describes in this December 24, 2009 article “First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive” on wired.com. This technology is still many years away from any commercial scale or production, but these kinds of examples are what enable things like Moore's Law to continue long after many "experts" predict it has to come to an end.

“Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough.

Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The molecule’s different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it.

The transistor, or semiconductor device that can amplify or switch electrical signals, was first developed to replace vacuum tubes. On Dec. 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain (who’d built on research by colleague William Shockley) showed a working transistor that was the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of effort.

Vacuum tubes were bulky and unreliable, and they consumed too much power. Silicon transistors addressed those problems and ushered in an era of compact, portable electronics.

Now molecular transistors could escalate the next step of developing nanomachines that would take just a few atoms to perform complex calculations, enabling massive parallel computers to be built.”

Speaking of Moore’s Law, I recall back in the early days of modems when the "experts" said that 9600 baud was the physical upper limit of speed. It was simply physically impossible to go any faster. Then they figured out compression techniques, then new transmissions, then optical, and so on. Now we can't even imagine how slow 9600 baud is. 

Well, I can actually, because I still run at such speeds, sometimes even less, when I'm on my satellite phone data modem, which helps me remember such times, but you get my point.  Even when we are so sure, when it is "just a fact", and there seems to be consensus amongst experts, scientists, etc. as to what is and is not possible, we humans have a wonderful history of discovering or inventing a new way of doing things which eliminates or obviates such barriers. This remains more true than ever and is happening at an exponentially increasing rate, which is the real difference to pay attention to.

Keep thinking about it. What if the impossible isn't?

-- Wayne

3D Printing Your Own Body Parts

I received a lot of comments about my previous posting on the up and coming application of 3D printing to build new human organs. Here is another article on treehugger.com with more details and video.

Kinko's for Kidneys: 3D Printing Your Own Body Parts

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.22.09

3D printing to order is a regular subject on TreeHugger; we love the idea of making things when you need them, where you need them. And soon you will be able to order up body parts, at a sort of Ponoko for pancreas. Now people sit on waiting lists, hooked up to expensive equipment while they wait for donors and fly body parts all over the world; soon you will order them up fresh and hot. Perhaps, like Philip K. Dick did, we might even call them artif-orgs.

There is some good explanation of the technique in this posting on SmartPlanet.

This stuff easily makes it onto my "What if the Impossible Isn't?" list for the year!

All of this adds to my conviction that the big change required to make the most difference in the world is to check and change our historic baselines and assumptions.  To switch from thinking that we need to plan within the constraints of what we think is possible and increasingly design and strategize with the assumption that most anything IS possible, or soon will be.  We need to be more imaginative, more creative, more demanding than ever in the increasingly unconstrained world of abundance which more and more of us are privileged to live within.

Think about it.  What if the impossible isn't?  What, if it were possible, and would have the most positive and profound affect on your profession, your world?  What will you do when it is possible?  Are you ready?

-- Wayne

Wish Upon a Star(fish)?

In a previous posting on September 21, 2007 called “New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under”, I wished for a “sea” feature to compliment the “sky” feature Google Earth had recently added back then. While I have no illusion that I had anything to do with it, you can still imagine my delight when Google Earth recently did just what I was hoping for... and then some!

With the new update to version 5, Google Earth now gives you the ability to explore and see the sea—you know, that stuff that covers more than 70% of the planet and of which we know embarrassingly little of?

But don’t take my word for it, go get this major update to an already fantastic tool and check it out for yourself.  If you already have Google Earth installed, then just go to the Help menu and choose “Check for updates” and it will install version 5.  Otherwise, head on over to the Google Earth download site and install it now.

I’ll let many of my fellow bloggers and reporters provide you with reviews and details to help you find some of the new nuggets that may be lurking below the surface (sorry!).  A quick search will give you lots of choices, such as this review in the NY Times and this one from the BBC and these videos over on CNET News.

I thought there were some very telling quotes from the Google Earth staff, such as:

“We had this arbitrary distinction that if it was below sea level it didn’t count,” recalled John Hanke, the Internet entrepreneur who co-created the progenitor of Google Earth, called Keyhole, and moved to Google when the company bought his company in 2004.”

And as fascinated as I am with the sea and this major addition to Google Earth, don’t let me limit your exploration of the new version to just the underwater world.  Google Earth has many other new features that are almost as exciting, such as “Historical Imagery” which let’s you go back in time and scroll through satellite images to see a time lapse visual display of things like the spread of disease or urban sprawl (or maybe those are the same?)

And for those like me who are also interested in the learning aspects of all things, be sure to check out new features such as a function called Touring which the NY Times article described as:

“.. let’s you create narrated, illustrated tours, on land or above and below the sea surface, describing and showing things like a hike or scuba excursion, or even a research cruise on a deep-diving submarine.”

And as Christopher Dawson reported in his blog on ZDnet Education

“Google has partnered with National Geographic, the BBC, Cousteau’s Ocean World, and several others to provide a wealth of information about everything from the global fishing crisis to footage of shipwrecks. Marine life census data, scientific expeditions, and countless links to information outside Google Earth make this a free treasure trove for science, social studies, geography, and even math teachers (how better to learn about coordinate systems?).”

OK, enough from me. Stop reading this and fire up this latest offering of Google Earth and have fun doing your own exploratory and experiential learning.  Enjoy! 

Lucky for me, I am off in the morning to help a friend sail his boat from St. Martin to Miami. While you are in Google Earth, you may also want to check out this area and get a bit of a geography lesson while you’re at it.  Meanwhile I’ll be busy doing an even more intimate form of exploring and experiential learning. Which, by the way, is part of the reason for my limited access and postings of late, something that will continue for another week or so while I’m making this 1400nm crossing.  "Sea you" on the other side!

Is the Sky Really Falling?

I recently read the article "AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010", which is pretty much summarized by the title and the opening line:

"U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010."

You can read more in the article, although they digress into some net neutrality issues.  However, this latest prediction reminds me of similar predictions throughout history that "the end is near", and I'd like to explore them further here.

The "Limits" of Physics

I can recall back in about the late 80's when experts were making similar predictions and warnings that we had reached the upper limit of how fast data could be transferred through phone lines via modems—9600 baud! These same experts claimed that we'd reached the limits of physics and it was just a "fact" that we needed to accept. 

As we can now see (with the benefit of hindsight, of course) that entirely new materials and techniques, such as optical fibre, compression algorithms and other breakthroughs, were developed to get around some of the limits that existed for wire-based data transfer. Wikipedia has a good history of modems, bandwidth, and the inventions along the way.

It's interesting to note that these types of warnings and stories are usually accompanied by quotes from the experts and other "facts", which prove that they are "true" and inevitable.  It reminds me of this quote from a  great scene in the movie Men in Black:

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

BTW, you can find this quote and just about any other kind of movie-related trivia from the handy Internet Movie Database.

The "Limits" of Technology

Going much further back, dire warnings in the late 1800's said that we needed to seriously curtail the expanding use of horses, cows, and beasts of burden or else the planet would soon be covered in several feet of manure!  The experts had "done the math" and this was an inevitable and irrefutable prediction. But ooops! We didn't allow for the invention of the internal combustion engine, electrical power, and other energy sources that significantly reduced our reliance on animal-based power. Of course, we also didn't anticipate the whole new series of problems and challenges of global warming that many might argue make the manure problem look like a good one!

I sometimes have the sense that some of the more dire predictions about global warming and other imminent disasters are similarly exaggerated and misdirected. Please do NOT misconstrue my comments here to mean that we have nothing to worry about or to work on. I want to champion quite the opposite reaction!  To be sure, all of us have much to be concerned about. We need to be more diligent and work harder than ever to ensure the sustainability of ourselves and our environment so that we can ensure an ever brighter future for us all. 

The "Limits" of Human Capacity, Foresight, and Imagination

History has shown that we are capable of doing some VERY stupid things and can exhibit great ignorance and lack of foresight.  However, as illustrated by my prior examples, history also shows that we need to take into account our even greater human capacity for invention, discovery, creativity, innovation, and design.

I'm sure that many of you may have similar Chicken Little "the sky is falling" * stories, and I'd be most appreciative if you'd post these to your blogs or send comments here to help all of us learn from these historical examples.

I'm was in Mexico recently and I'm told that the story of Chicken Little (and the saying "the sky is falling") are well known there and translates to El Cielo Se Esta Cayendo. For those not familiar with this reference the previous link will give you the background.

In the end, I have huge faith in our collective powers for invention, creativity,  innovation and designing solutions. What we need to watch out for is the flip side of this where we become smug, arrogant, or cynical based on what we "know for sure" today.  I hope that examples such as this latest prediction about the limits of Internet capacity will only serve to help us balance these forces and inspire and motivate us all to work towards new ways to improve our lives and those of all others. 

Rather than imagine what we'll know for sure tomorrow, imagine if ................ Not only is the sky NOT falling, it is the limit of what is possible.

Google Oceans: Another wish comes true!

While I  can neither take credit for nor claim any influence on Google's recent announcement, I'm pleased to say that some of the things I wished for last year in my posting "New Perspectives; Looking Down and Under" are about to come true!  In that posting, I wished that we would soon have similar capabilities as those provided by Google Earth and Google Sky, but these would vary in that they would look down and under to the earth's oceans and seas. Well, the title of this posting pretty much says it all, and you can read about it in the WebWare article "Google Diving into 3D mapping of Oceans".

Google Ocean (the name is tentative), shares similar goals, as well as the potential of increased collaboration, mass contribution, and "networking" that Google Earth and Google Sky present.  See my previous posts "New Perspectives: Looking Up" and "New Perspectives: The Third Wave" for more details and context about how powerful this can be. These views were summed up in the article:

"In addition to the 'wow factor" Google Ocean will no doubt have for amateur oceanographers, marine enthusiasts, and anyone fascinated by the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the project has the potential to promote more collaboration and advance research."

They also reflect my previous comments about how little we know about the 70% of our planet that is covered by the seas:

"'We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored,' said Miller of Scripps. 'We know far more about the surface of Mars from a few weeks of radar surveying in orbit than we know of the bottom of the ocean after two centuries.'"

Unfortunately, Google Oceans is not yet released, and Google is not saying much officially yet.  I'll be watching for the first chance to start using this new capability, and let you know as soon as it happens.  Since I live full time at sea now, this announcement is particularly relevant and practical for me. I already use Google Earth extensively for surface information, such as exploring a port or anchorage I'm about to put into.  In addition to my charts of the area, the photos and the ability to fly over the area before I get there have made a huge difference in terms of safety and in my confidence for sailing to new places, especially at night or  in poor weather with low visibility.  But I suspect that many of you would have similar fascination with the earth's oceans and be just as anxious to learn more. Perhaps some of you will have research or other information to contribute, and we can add yet another way in which mass contribution and the power of networking helps us all get better at getting better.

This announcement about Google Oceans is yet another great example of the power of wishes and how they often do come true (you might want to read about another wish come true in my recent posting "The Future is about Winning!", which highlighted the wish that turned into Pangea Day).

Although we may want to be careful what we wish for, I could not be more serious or sincere about my wish that you'll keep believing in the power of wishing and do some of your own!  I'll continue to share some of mine. I'm also interested in knowing what are some of YOUR wishes for positive change.