via https://twitter.com/#!/nchirls/status/204405738158825472

In about a year, we'll drop the "new" from new media.

Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that the words describe.



Knowledge Graph? “Graph” is a technical term used to describe how a set of objects are connected. Google has used a “link graph” to model how pages link to each other, in order to help determine which are popular and relevant for particular searches. Facebook has used a “social graph” understand how people are connected. “Knowledge Graph” is Google’s term for how it is building relationships between different people, places and things and report facts about these entities.

Microsoft has officially launched an “experimental” social networking site called So.cl, which combines facets of social networking, search, and media sharing with a user interface resembling Google+.
When we last heard about it, So.cl (pronounced “Social”) was being billed as an “experimental research project” and was only available to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. While the project is still billed as experimental, it’s now open to anyone who wants to give it a shot.

I The Technium / II Jerusalem Assignment / III The Theology of Virtual Worlds / IV Bicycling across America / V The Long Now / VI The Future of Reading

One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.

Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vault blog.

“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogues and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogues, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalogue.”

“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”

“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”

The very scary future of state control, censorship, and totalitarianism in the age of the internet. A presentation from Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull S.A. "explained the significance of Eagle to a government seeking to control activities inside its borders. Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. This database, in turn, could be integrated with other sources of intelligence, such as phone recordings, allowing security personnel to pick through audio and data from a given person all at once, in real time or by historical time stamp. In other words, instead of choosing targets and monitoring them, officials could simply sweep up everything, sort it by time and target, and then browse through it later at their leisure. The title of the presentation -- ”From Lawful to Massive Interception” -- gestured at the vast difference between so-called lawful intercept (traditional law enforcement surveillance based on warrants for specific phone numbers or IP addresses) and what Amesys was offering."

Summary: Lots of people have postulated that Naruto's good at financial planning. Let's follow that thought a little farther into the future. || Just plain fun and awesome. ||

A little-known fact is that Uzumaki Naruto has been balancing a budget longer than he's been molding chakra. It began when he started writing down how much spending money the Third gave him each week, and then began subtracting from it with every purchase he made.

This had a very interesting side-effect when he was nominated to be the next Hokage.

"There are no answers," there are indeed, the honour-based "Do not track" setting and the rather more effective Ghostery.

An analysis of how far into the future SF has been set since 1880s.