TR Picks 10 Emerging Technologies of 08 76
arktemplar suggests Technology Review for their annual list of 10 emerging technologies that the editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. Quoting: "This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, social interactions. Two of the technologies — cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers — are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five — surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications — represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three — graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power — are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new."
What's old is new again (Score:5, Funny)
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- cloning arteries to replace the my current, aged, clogged-with-cholesterol pipes.
Also a new cloned heart and lungs would be good, but without clean pipes to carry the blood, they won't get the oxygen they need to survive. We need to be able to clone brand-new arteries! (Alternatively they could design little nanobots that "eat" cholesterol off the walls of arteries, and use said cholesterol for the bots' power sources, thereby making my pipes nice & clean again.) (
Exactly the same occurred to me. And... (Score:2)
Clarified... (Score:2)
At current effective ranges, it doesn't "solve" any problems, because your plug is no farther away. If the range is extended, then you lose efficiency...
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At current effective ranges the 'charging station' can be:
1. A desk/nightstand drawer, glove box, or other places where people put phone, PDA, iPod, or other items when not in use.
2. A desk surface, where wireless mice, keyboard, and other computer peripherals often sit.
3. Other surfaces where other new technologies may require power (maybe refrigerator magnets that display the weather).
As for just 'plug the little sumbitch in', the charging station can be built to be unive
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This technology could be modified for 1-2 feet range, rather than just 1 inch. Although it would be inefficient. (And I'm not sure I want strong EM waves penetrating my body. Who knows what might happen to body cells being heated by power waves, even if only 1/2 a degree.)
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I have a shaver that way. I was thinking of why this would be useful, beyond technophilia. But since it's in the bathroom, and the shaver can be used in the shower, this would prevent shorting and corrosion from water that could drip into a conventional charger. But there's a big drawb
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Um... you might want to think about that again... (Score:2)
These are non-problems for anyb
Top 10? (Score:1, Offtopic)
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My favorite. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My favorite. (Score:5, Interesting)
A few others, among many:
* Long-lifespan, passively safe lithium-ion batteries hitting the market
* Vastly more energy dense energy storage techs in the lab
* The resurgence of the electric car (for example, the $27k highway-speed Aptera [wikipedia.org]).
* Rocket launch costs for less than half what even the Russians, Chinese, and Indians are selling via SpaceX
Re:My favorite. (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot flying car [moller.com](Henry Ford said it would happen!), personal pneumatic transportation [wikipedia.org], cure for baldness [whiteoak.org], miniskirt [wikipedia.org], and communication with animals. [wfmu.org]
Why can't you believe it? Same old... (Score:2)
thin film PV (Score:2, Informative)
I have to apologize for this comment up front because my chemistry is really rusty and my biochem is non-existent, but here it is...
Thin-film PV was a problem last I checked due to the use of cadmium. While you get a nice solar product as a result, you also get a highly toxic, difficult to handle material to dispose of... somehow. (The nice thing about silicon is that it's not terribly reactive with much of anything.) AFAIK, CIGS *sometimes* uses a problematic form of cadmium. If there's one thing we ne
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Ah... I thought I saw something about Cd incorporated in part of the production process, maybe a separation layer or something, but I can't find the reference now. Maybe I imagined the whole thing. If so... then good!
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http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/13060/page4/ [technologyreview.com]
--Tim
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I thought it was a joke at first. This line actually made me check
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Imho the power of adobe flex combined with the hoards of flash developers out there will do a great deal to make AIR a success.
There has been talk of downloading it automatically with the next iteration of the Flash plugin. The ubiquity that this product would achieve at that point in time shouldn't need explaining.
As long as its kept (relatively) open, in the same way as flex and flash hav
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Encrypted Trunking (Score:5, Funny)
I'm liking where this could take encrypted trunking systems.
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How good were their 2001 picks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Brain-Machine Interface | Flexible Transitors | Data Mining | Digital Rights Management | Biometrics | Natural Language Processing | Microphotonics | Untangling Code | Robot Design | Microfluidics
DRM hasn't really changed my life other than add one more annoyance.
"Data Mining" sounds basically like "Reality Mining" in the new list.
I'm sure there has been great strides in "Robot Design" that help in manufacturing, but what about the others?
I don't think these technologies have changed my life at all seven years after they were predicted, or have they?
*iza
Re:How good were their 2001 picks? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How good were their 2001 picks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Data Mining: Remember Total Information Awareness? Just about every government anti-terrorist intelligence program that isn't intercept-based or human intelligence based is a data mining program
Biometrics: Fairly important, gotta give those data mining programs something to mine. The ability to authenticate a tape from Osama Bin Laden has been in the news. Facial recognition software has been burgeoning. And cheap thumbprint drives are available off-the shelf. Not to mention new governmental requirements for passports and driver's licenses
Natural Language Processing: Apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking now works really well with just a minimum of training. Internet translators are getting better, but still are pretty awful. I won't speculate about NSA and Echelon's abilities to focus in on keywords.
DRM: It's everywhere, and it sucks.
Robot design has made great strides. iRobot is selling ton of bots for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they've been proven to save lives. Predator and Global Hawk drones are critical tools in both wars. We've got two robots wheeling around on Mars exploring new things every day. And another robot craft in orbit around Saturn.
Microfluidics are becoming important in biotech from what I hear, but it's not my field.
No idea bout microphotonics.
BMI hasn't made it out of the lab, except for the Braingate chip which is still in limited use
Untangling code is not in wide-scale use.
Flexible transistors have not thus far proven important. There's only one device that I know of out there with a flexible screen and it uses digital ink tech,
So, all in all, I'd say MIT did a pretty good job of prediction in 2001.
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Stanford,MIT,Caltech have been devoting considerable resources to microfuidics, they have had this for the last four years or so I believe. Microphotonics is a really interesting topic (I know a guy who is doing his masters in this, and from what he tells me it seems to be extremely interesting).
NLP has come a long way, I beleive that I can without violating the NDA inform yo
Not so bad, really, except that it's bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Brain-machine interface has made some real progress, but sorry you can't get a videogame controller just yet. Wait another 5 years. (And such things must ALWAYS be voluntary! Never, ever, ever mandatory. Ever. Period.)
"Flxible" transistors are a reality and today you can buy a gadget with a roll-up screen. Okay, the transistors themselves are not flexible, but every
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Contrary to what others here have been saying, Dragon Naturally Speaking and similar programs are NOT "Natural Language Processing". They are, instead, language translaton programs. The former refers to extracting actual meaning, of some kind, from the input. The latter means little more than determining what words you said closely enough to perform some pre-programmed actions. The two things are worlds apart. There has been some real progress in the latter... but computers really don't "understand" language any better than they did decades ago.
Do you have any specific source for that? I would say that most anything that fits as an ACL paper is also NLP of some sort, or at least that's the current trend in modifying the definition. With the advances of statistical systems in many fields where "real" content extraction was once thought to be the holy grail, the actual difference is blurred. I think that we will define away anything close to strong AI as "something else" for quite a long time, even at the point when it is obvious that the only thin
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Seriously....all the new laptops with their useless fingerprint scanners. >_>
Holy Buzzowrds, Batman. (Score:5, Funny)
Surprise modeling?
Connectomics?
Reality mining?
Nanoradio?
You gotta be freakin' kidding me.
Re:Holy Buzzowrds, Batman. (Score:5, Funny)
Look, you may not understand surprise modelling, but there is a whole subculture dedicated to it.
http://www.projectvoyeur.com/ [projectvoyeur.com]
http://www.voyeurweb.com/ [voyeurweb.com]
Just to name a few!
Re:Holy Buzzowrds, Batman. (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god I don't have a job.
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I'm not convinced. Do you have any other references? The more the better.
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Is it here this year? Damn. (Score:2)
Reality mining (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently, out there in the so-called "real world" -- you know, the place where the lights are only on for half the day and the heat doesn't work at night -- there's stuff to be found. Valuable stuff like gold, silver, copper, coal, diamonds... and you can just dig a hole to get access to it.
Now you might be wondering why it's called "reality mining" and not "hole digging". Well, it's not quite as easy as I made it sound. You can't just dig any old place, you have to know where to look. And you can't just use a shovel; most of the time you need some heavy duty equipment. You have to sort through all the possible places to dig, filter that information, and somehow figure out which places are more likely to have the stuff you're looking for, and which approaches will work best to get it out. So it's kind of like data mining, but you're using it to get something in the real world.
It's fun, profitable, and best of all: you get to wear a hat with a light on it! Reality mining is the future, folks. Better get on the bandwagon while there's still room.
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It's fun, profitable, and best of all: you get to wear a hat with a light on it! Reality mining is the future, folks. Better get on the bandwagon while there's still room.
It has been around for like two hundred years, and is called Economic Geology.
sad (Score:1, Informative)
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I, too, wonder why we don't care about fuel economy. Europe currently has 70MPG diesels, but they're not exported into the US because there is no market for them here.
Cellulolytic Enzymes = Goodbye Corn Ethanol (Score:5, Interesting)
This "technology" basically involves feeding bacteria or protozoa on plant materials (AKA "Biomass") which are primarily composed of cellulose (which is really just chains of varying lengths of beta-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules).
(NOTE: We call the Alpha-glycosidic bonded glucose sugar molecules STARCH, and we can eat those, but NOT the Beta-bonded variety.)
The 'Cellulolytic' Enzymes are from genetically-engineered Bacterium or Protozoans which are utilized to cleave the glycosidic linkage in the Cellulose and are additionally modified and/or chemically engineered into Butanol, Ethanol, Methanol, and other biofuel 'alcohols'.
Think of the process like a big container full of termite guts that basically partially digest (break the beta-glycosidic bonds of) the cellulose from your yard waste, grass trimmings, leaves, logs, switchgrass, tree bark, recycled paper, etc.. into their base glucose sugars which can then be easily modified into alcohols by the same (or different) single-celled critters.
This process will truly reveal the hyped artificial market (largely tax-subsidy supported) of the Corn Ethanol "market". POOF! it will go away and foodstuffs will be affordable again (and the price of beer will drop from farmers planing more cereals again!). Jimmy Carter did this with the Peanut in the 1970's... Take away the artificial market, Poof! Farmers plant what is in actual demand, not what is only profitable due to tax subsidies. (And yes, there is a $0.50 per gallon tax subsidy for ethanol production.) Cellulolytic Enzyme tech can produce alcohols without the need for those subsidies. (oh, but you can bet they will still be there... that is, unless the ADM, et al "Corn Lobby" does not set a caveat in the law subsidizing only ethanol produced from corn (you call it maize)! ) -Sort of reminds me of Zymergy (AKA Zymurgy)... but then again, that is the (yeast) anaerobic fermentation of sugars/starches, a similar yet very different process.
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However, you still have the problem of finding enough biomass to produce enough liquid fuel. Even if you are growing cellulose instead of corn starch, it's still a lot of biomass. And there still is the energy needed to run the process.
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Offline web applications... (Score:2)
Of course when Adobe releases it, we can listen to the Notes trolls complain that Lotus didn't make their 6 year old technology conform to a 'standard' that was created in 2008.
OK, let's see what we have here (Score:5, Informative)
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7. Connectonomics Reverse engineer the nervous system. Eventually, someone will do that. But not too soon.
Well, we are currently working on somthing like this, only thing is we are doing circuit (RLC) simulaitons of the pathway, we are basically checking to see if an impulse is given at a point how it will propagate, so yeah, it is happening. It will not of course be a commercialsed/used in hospitals tomorrow type of a product but I am sure it will happen.
** If it doesnt I'm screwed with my pet project.
Why not Solar Energy? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the NPR show "Talk of the Nation (Science Friday)" airing February 1, 2008, host Ira Flatow spoke to two guests who believe that the construction of a very large solar array in the Nevada desert could generate enough electricity to power the entire United States (with some caveats about the distribution system technology). Therefore, one could also imagine a society of electric vehicles all powered by the sun.
Unfortunately I do
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And George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1948 and first published in 1949, just so you know I'm just joking and not clueless.
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It seems to be missing something (Score:5, Funny)
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Major error in the very first one mentioned... (Score:5, Interesting)
False.
This is an example of a specialist like Arnold having her head buried in her own specialty, and ignoring what is going on in other specialties around her.
The new "thermal reactor" method of making biodiesel is already under way commercially, and can (and does) make biodiesel cost-competitively from nearly anything organic, including cellulosic materials. The difference is that this process bypasses ethanol entirely, and produces oil instead.
The corporation behind the first large thermal biodiesel plant has claimed that they could create more NET USABLE energy (i.e., production minus cost) via oil from waste cornstalks than could ever be produced via ethanol from the kernels. And probably cheaper... they are economically viable now while ethanol is still shaky even with subsidies.
This is not to say that advances made by people like Arnold are not valuable! Of course they are. But they do need to poke their head out of their offices once in a while to find out what else is going on in the world.
Disney world of emerging technologies (Score:2, Interesting)
The only real thing that will take off in the next two years is the offline webapps. And no - it's not Java applets. And I have doubts about the Adobe's AIR platform. My bet would be on Mozilla.
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Graphene (Score:5, Interesting)
The key to graphene (from a theoretical standpoint) is that its band structure is gapless and electrons (ok, quasi-electrons) are massless, moving at ~10^6 m/s! Normal (Si-based, GaAs,
*I'm currently working on a pretty interesting theory which may or may not solve the switching issue mentioned in the article; alas, the proof is too small to fit in the margins of this post!
OFFLINE WEB APPS ARE NOT (Score:2)
They may interact with their "online" counterparts when you go online... but again: there is NOTHING new there. This is NOT some late-breaking new te
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But "offline web tools" really HAVE been around for a long time. A long, long time as such things go. Not just a few years like Ajax.
For all the gritty details (Score:3, Informative)
Obvious new error message (Score:2, Funny)
Surprise Modeling (Score:1)
== MicrosoftSurprise® Alert ==
Microsoft Surprise has detected that your software is about to crash though there is nothing you can do about it.
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New ideas? (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprise Modeling: "To monitor surprises effectively, says Horvitz, the machine has to have both knowledge--a good cognitive model of what humans find surprising--and foresight: some way to predict a surprising event in time for the user to do something about it." You mean like weather forecasting? Isn't most, if not all scientific pursuit dedicated to the understanding of natural systems so that we can know what to expect where once we were attributing events to Zeus and such?
Connectonomics: "Lichtman is a neuroscientist, and the image is the first comprehensive wiring diagram of part of the mammalian nervous system. The lines denote axons, the long, hairlike extensions of nerve cells that transmit signals from one neuron to the next; the leaves are synapses, the connections that the axons make with other neurons or muscle cells. The diagram is the fruit of an emerging field called "connectomics," which attempts to physically map the tangle of neural circuits that collect, process, and archive information in the nervous system." --Well that's very nice, but perhaps he ought to examine the role DC currents play in cellular and nervous system activity. Broken bones don't knit back together through the application of electricity for no reason. What else does low-current DC electricity do in the human body? Actually, quite a lot; a fair bit is known about this subject, but that information seems to elude the Dr. Lichtmans of the world. --And why shouldn't it, what with such massive interest in the development of the following technological bonanzas. . .
Wireless Power: "Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up." --Yup. Tesla. And all this time I was thankful he never achieved his goal in this regard. Cell phones are bad enough [amazon.com] as it is, which is why I expect out of all these 'emerging' technologies, that this one will be unstoppable.
Reality Mining: "Researchers have been mining data from the physical world for years, says Alex Kass, a researcher who leads reality-mining projects at Accenture, a consulting and technology services firm. Sensors in manufacturing plants tell operators when equipment is faulty, and cameras on highways monitor traffic flow. But now, he says, "reality mining is getting personal."" What? So the massive profit growth [dmnews.com] of the whole Air Miles thing has up until now been sold simply as a way to keep track of how much milk is left in stock at the local 7/11? Gosh. Who knew?
Other people have commented on the bio-fuels thing, and the fact that we've had Java and Flash for some time now, and anyway I have to leave the house in a few minutes. So enjoy the future. Ciao.
-FL
Answer me this... (Score:1)
Personally, I found this list to be a rehash of so many old things with new names as to be pretty much worthless....