human20.alexbowyer.comHuman 2.0

Technology changes you man. Follow us by: RSS Twitter E-mail iTUNES Home Posts Links Audio Video Featured Thumbnailed Featured Items Lytro – Start of a photography revolution? An innovative new type of camera being developed in Silicon Valley offers the potential to refocus and explore photos in 3D after they are taken. Read more » Can computers help us remember? With more and more things to remember every day, will we trust computers to back up our brains? Find out in this interview with Sunil Vemuri, e-memory enthusiast and founder of reQall, the digital memory aid. Read more » Periodicity We apply sentiment analysis to social networks to understand what communities think about a particular brand. What if we applied it to a person? Could we tell when they’re in a good mood, or angry, or ready to buy? Read more » Behavioral Analysis and the Age of Metrics Product design has always involved watching people. But now, armed with detailed real-world data, researchers can understand and visualize human behavior (such as gameplay) better than ever before. But what will happen when we analyse our everyday lives in this way? Read more » Tablets, unions, and education – part one Tablet computing could save our educational system. But tablets aren’t just a digital textbook — when you learn from a tablet, it learns from you. What if it learns that your teacher is bad? This four-part series looks at the coming war between teachers’ unions and the digital classroom. Read more » Balancing taste and novelty: The spaghetti fetish problem When our communities are online, our tribal brains get tricked into thinking we’re all in the moral majority. If we’re going to find common ground, we need to start thinking about the moral minority instead. Read more » Bitnorth 2010: The Weekend On August 27th to 29th, the third annual Bitnorth event in Quebec adopted as its theme – resulting in some great ideas, presentations and discussions about the ways in which technology is changing society, for better and for worse. Read more » Is photography a human right? There is growing fear over the photographing of police by citizens and journalists. Should such recording be criminalized? Or should we re-assert our fundamental right to capture anything we experience? Read more » Who owns your voice online? If I want to friend” you, I can only do so if we both use Facebook. New digital forms of communication that did not exist before the Internet are now controlled by corporations and the messages you send with them are restricted in audience and reach. We are in a poor state for a free, open exchange of ideas. Read more » Recent Items To what extent are algorithms controlling our world? by Alex Bowyer ( @ ) on August 28th, 2011 Increasingly, our everyday lives are influenced by computing algorithms that we cannot see or control. This is the somewhat alarmist but nonetheless grounded in truth statement by Kevin Slavin in his recent TED talk (shown in the embedded player to the right). It’s not just financial markets, but movie scripts, book recommendations and advertising selections… the online and media world is increasing using software algorithms to tailor itself to what a mathematical equation thinks we want. I find one of the most alarming examples is Facebook’s algorithm to determine what warrants top news”. Effectively, Facebook is deciding for you which of your many friends’ updates is most important. And the implications of that are quite scary.. What if a friend thinks you are not listening because Facebook filtered out their update? Or what if you miss an opportunity for a future romantic involvement because Facebook hides a party update from what it thinks is someone you don’t care about? Increasingly in the future we are going to have to think carefully about what decisions we allow software to make for us, and what things we should keep full control of ourselves. Watch the TED video here or embedded above, or read the BBC News article for more information. Dystopian Deus Ex trailer is frighteningly plausible by Alistair Croll ( @ ) on July 21st, 2011 The sequel to Deus Ex, one of the top-ranked games of all time and a pioneer in the cyperpunk genre, is nearing release. The sequel paints a pretty bleak picture of human augmentation. But this live action trailer goes way beyond promoting a game; it’s nothing short of a short film on the consequences of human augmentation. Watch the clip. Forget it’s a video game. How likely is this kind of thing in coming years? Lytro – Start of a photography revolution? by Alex Bowyer ( @ ) on June 26th, 2011 You know that scene in Bladerunner where Harrison Ford uses a computer to zoom, refocus and travel in 3D space within a photograph? For years we’ve all thought that would be forever impossible, but new technology from Lytro suggests that this sort of thing may soon be possible. Their forthcoming light field camera captures not just one perspective of a scene, but uses a lenticular array to capture the entire light field, meaning that the 3D space from which the light originated can be explored after the photo is taken – so you can change which part of the scene is in focus, generate 3D images or even peek behind” foreground objects. The Silicon Valley startup clearly faces technical and financial challenges to change their prototypes into an affordable consumer product – but the cat is out of the bag on the idea, and we can expect camera manufacturers to race to catch up and enter this brand new market. This is a disruptive technology with huge potential to change the way we think about photography. Soon we may have a completely new kind of camera, which can truly capture a moment in a way we never thought possible. Some are wondering if it will take the skill out of photography, while others are already speculating about what this might do to re-ignite 3D film-making. Read more details at AllThingsDigital and try refocussing images for yourself in Lytro’s Picture Gallery . General-purpose object recognition could enable exciting new applications by Alex Bowyer ( @ ) on April 1st, 2011 Zdenek Kalal, a PhD at the University of Surrey, has developed an impressive real-time system which looks within a live camera feed for an identified object or person, then watches and learns to track that object as it rotates, moves or disappears, reappears. He demonstrates a prototype of the system in the video shown to the right. The project won him the ICT Pioneer award and has attracted a great deal of attention from press and industry alike, as this could enable a plethora of image-tracking applications, from security systems to video stablization and control systems for the handicapped. What is remarkable about the system is that it needs no special training (for example learning what a face is), you can simply identify an object on screen and the system will learn to track it. It looks like the stuff of science-fiction, but it’s very real. Read more on his project page . An audacious plan for global Internet access: Let’s buy a satellite! by Alex Bowyer ( @ ) on February 16th, 2011 The non-profit grassroots organization ahumanright.org recently launched a bold new campaign to help to bring Internet access to some of the 5 billion people who aren’t online. They hope to raise sufficient funds to buy the abandoned TerreStar-1 satellite and offer free Internet access to citizens of impoverished nations, funded by renting usage of the satellite to other communications companies. If it succeeds, it could become a lot harder for governments to shut down the Internet in their countries during civil unrest, as the satellite coverage would span international boundaries and the organization would be managed with a human right to information at its core. If you have a spare $1m lying around you can make a donation at http://www.buythissatellite.org/ . Read more at TIME or watch the TEDx talk . One step away from lost privacy? by Alex Bowyer ( @ ) on...