kathleen forden

Mapping the internet as it goes truly global (Image: Matthew Hurst/SPL)

Imagine what browsing the web would be like if you had to type out addresses in characters you don’t recognise, from a language you don’t speak. It’s a nightmare that will end for hundreds of millions of people in 2010, when the first web addresses written entirely in non-Latin characters come online.

Net regulator ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – conceded in October that more than half of the 1.6 billion people online use languages with scripts not fully compatible with the Latin alphabet. It is now accepting applications for the first non-Latin top level domains (TLDs) – the part of an address after the final “dot”. The first national domains, counterparts of .uk or .au, should go live in early 2010. So far, 12 nations, using six different scripts, have applied and some have proudly revealed their desired TLD and given a preview of what the future web will look like.

The first Arabic domain is likely to be Egypt’s and in Russia orders are already being taken for the country’s hoped-for new TLD. The address HOBЫЙyЧеНЫЙ.pф – a rough translation of “newscientist” with the Cyrillic domain that stands for Russian Federation – can be registered today.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427395.800-2010-preview-the-polygot-web.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

For the past two months I’ve been running a large project for the world’s largest provider of higher education and have not really had a lot of time to post.

During that time I kept seeing signs of what I call the start of the human-machine convergence.  Yes, I know there are precedents for this and these are not the “true first signs”.

I’m interested for another reason, the way it is being marketed.  For some reason it’s being commercialize this holiday season.  Several “toys” are being promoted to consumers that allow brain reading to control objects in front of you.

Mattel and StarWars Science are both offering these toys at your local Walmart or Target.  But good luck finding them, even with a $100+ price tag they appear to have sold out.

I don’t have the time to post all of my thoughts, and came across this article below that sums up what I was missing above.  Have fun and enjoy the read, let me know your thoughts too!

Mind Reading (Neural Decoding) Goes Mainstream | h+ Magazine.

Other Resources:

Animated time-lapse map of county-by-county unemployment rates in the U.S. since January 2007.   Jarring.

Evolution of unemployment in the US, down to the county, from 2007 to 2009

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

Posted via web from kforden.com

I just got home from a business trip to Seattle. I’m sorry I missed TEDx Phoenix tonight in Mesa. I’ve been a fan of TED for a few years now and was excited to hear about the Phoenix edition.  Here’s one of my favorite TEDs

Wordle example of blog

I love seeing data in a Visual Data Diagrams almost as much as I love Augmented Reality.  It’s become my second biggest interest in emerging technologies lately.

Thank you IBM Research for allowing Jonathan Feinberg, the ability to reuse code he wrote on your dime to develop this awesome, fun, cool, educational application.

Try it – you too will fall in love – http://www.wordle.net/

<from the site>
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.</from the site>

Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it’s not Gen Y that’s getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.

Forrester’s analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don’t yet have the clout within organizations to make real change. The same Gen X employees who are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook are the ones getting management to accept new technology as more than a fad.

Just Ask Employees

A common method for researching about how people use technology is to ask industry experts and management about what they’ve provided to workers and how they think it’s being used. That’s how many market researchers go about their business.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/forget-gen-y-gen-x-is-making-r.php

It’s time to start looking at the missing pieces with Augmented Reality being pushed today.  Demos and videos make it appear as if it’s possible to do anything with AR.  Not entirely truthful as we don’t even have set standards.  There are still other issues to face that are the same as any other venture.  Finally, there are still technical challenges that we need to meet.

This column by Ben Lorica mentions them all and in great detail, it’s worth the read.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/resetting-expectations-some-augmented-reality-links.html