Gray Matters

Went to an interesting discussion on the workings of the brain today, titled "Gray Matters",  at Stanford's Maples Pavilion. It was moderated by Juju Chang of ABC News and featured some really interesting panelists, including Bob Woodruff of ABC who went through a long recovery after suffering severe brain injury from a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2006. Brain science is still in its infancy, but more and more people are studying it, addressing questions such as: what are thoughts, how are memories stored, and how can we retain our mental agility. Much of the research is focused on gaining better understanding of ailments of the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease. All of the panelists seemed to feel that the research is moving in the right direction, although there's obviously so much more to be done.

Outsmarting Google

Evan Bailyn

I went to a fascinating talk yesterday by Evan Bailyn, author of the bestselling book "Outsmarting Google", which gives practical advice on how to increase your ranking in Google searches. If you own a business that relies on Internet sales, you know how important it is to appear at or near the top of the Google listings when people use search terms related to your products. Evan has founded and sold several companies that succeeded by using his methods of search engine optimization, and now heads a company called First Page Sage which works with companies both large and small to heighten their Internet presence. Among his recommendations are updating your site frequently with new material. He says if you add new content 5 days a week, Google will recognize it as a news site and give it higher ranking, but four days a week won't be enough. He also says that being linked to by a lot of other pages will increase your ranking, and he gives practical methods for getting those links. Interestingly, he advises an approach based on sincerity rather than attempts at manipulation, such as paying people to link to your site. He says that people who use manipulative or dishonest methods to increase their ranking are regarded as spammers by Google and actively fought against, and if Google thinks you're spamming, your ranking will be dramatically lowered with little chance of improvement. Evan has been featured in major media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and ABC News, and apparently has a lot of very satisfied clients. If you have a company that badly needs an Internet boost, you might want to look him up.

The Higgs Boson

Scientists around the world were elated by the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. The elusive subatomic particle was first postulated by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, and was finally detected for the first time this year at CERN, with its Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest particle accelerator at over five miles in diameter. The Higgs boson is believed to be what enables matter to have mass, and is thus part of the essential "glue" that holds the entire universe together. 

Interestingly, the particle was not so much detected, as created. Most people are familiar with Albert Einstein's famous equation e=mc² which states that when converting mass to energy or vice versa, the amount of energy is equal to the amount of mass times the speed of light squared, meaning that a very small amount of mass can produce a very large amount of energy. This is the principle of the atomic bomb. But in the Higgs experiment, protons were accelerated to nearly the speed of light, giving them a huge amount of kinetic energy, and when they were brought into head on collisions with each other, the tremendous energy released by the collisions resulted in the formation of numerous new particles, including the Higgs boson. 

The goal of particle physics is to discover the most fundamental objects in the universe, and explain their interactions in the simplest way possible. To learn more about the Higgs boson and the world of particle physics in general, you can view the current episode of Future Talk in its entirety by clicking here, or divided into three shorter segments by clicking here.

Build your own submarine!

Underwater exploration is finally coming within reach of the common man, thanks to OpenROV, an open source, remotely operated mini-submarine that can be customized with a variety of cameras and sensors. The co-creators, David Lang and Eric Stackpole, have put all the blueprints on the Internet and invited comments and suggestions for improvements, and they're also selling kits so people can put together their own OpenROVs at home. The OpenROV was featured prominently at the 2012 Maker Faire, and is very much part of the Maker culture. In case you think there wouldn't be much interest in this type of thing, David and Eric used Kickstarter, the crowd funding website, to raise money for their work. They set a goal of raising $20,000 in a month and raised more than $100,000, mostly in small donations. Even NASA has gotten actively involved in the project, because of the similarities between exploring oceans and exploring space, and because the open source methodology is something that NASA is trying to develop for its own use. The current episode of Future Talk features an interview with David Lang, footage of the OpenROV in action, and an extensive report on the Maker Faire itself. You can view the show in its entirety by clicking here, or divided into 3 shorter segments by clicking here.

The future of television?

        Many people have tried to merge computer technology with television, but the problem remains elusive. Although most modern TV's can receive digital input, there's still no universal standard for seamlessly merging the two technologies into one. Still, piecemeal advances are continually being made in the form of new products that give computerized features to ordinary TV's.

        One entrant in the field is Reincloud, a Mountain View startup headed by Dan Reitan. Dan has a long history of applying computer technology to television. He was a pioneer in augmented reality TV and one of his inventions in the 1980s scored the highest TV ratings ever in the history of automated television. I visited his office this week and he gave me a demo of his current product, which I found quite interesting.

        It's not quite ready for delivery and he's looking for additional funding to take it to the next step, but it's basically a platform that grants new capabilities to content providers. For example, it gives the content provider tools to create a real life three dimensional world where the TV screen acts as a viewport. By manipulating a few buttons, the home viewer can rotate that 3-D world to bring any portion of it into the viewport. This functionality opens up new possibilities for both producing TV shows and viewing them, and making them much more interactive than before. 

        He also showed me a segment from an old Monty Python program, and while John Cleese was talking, a can of Mountain Dew tumbled into the picture and landed on the desk next to him. Basically, the technology allows the easy placement of virtual objects anywhere in an existing program, in an appropriate place, for example on a table and not hanging in space. Ultimately, these objects will be live links, and clicking on them will lead to further information about them. Of course you'll be able to return to your original program at any time. The implications not only for advertising but also for news and documentary programs are huge.

        Although I'm not expert enough to predict how these tools will do in the marketplace, they do seem to add some exciting new dimensions to our current TV viewing experience.

Self driving car in your future?

Self driving car with Googlers (l-r) Eric
Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin

What could be better than letting your car drive you effortlessly through rush hour traffic, while you doze, read the newspaper, or answer your email? Although a number of companies, including Google, are working on self driving cars, they're still far from being a commercial reality. Getting a computer to operate the car's controls is the easy part. What's hard is to get it to drive safely and with good judgment in heavy traffic and unpredictable road conditions.  The car has to "see" the road and interpret what it sees in real time. It has to read and understand traffic signs, know all the traffic laws, and judge the speed, direction and distance of other vehicles. It also has to know when to break traffic laws to avoid dangerous situations, such as driving at the speed limit when everyone else is far exceeding it. It has to recognize emergency vehicles such as police and fire, and know how to behave when a policeman signals it to pull over. Although computers can already perform some of the functions of driving, it looks like it will be a while before we can yield total control to the machine.

The right to privacy?

Most people recognize the value of privacy, and the right to keep their personal life out of the public view. But is such a right enforceable in the Internet age? With almost everybody carrying miniature recording devices that take both pictures and sound, and with the ability to upload these images for the whole world to see, and with miniature surveillance cameras in almost every public place and every place of business, privacy may be becoming a thing of the past. Certainly, politicians have learned that the slightest misstatement on or off the podium can have instant national repercussions. Wikileaks has shown that secret diplomatic talks are not necessarily so secret anymore. And the potential for malicious spying just for the sake of causing mischief is very great. Technology seems to be moving far faster than any possible laws capable of restraining it. Does this new situation require changes in behavior? Will we have to be a lot more careful about we say and do, in both public and private venues? Although we still haven't digested the full impact of these changes, it might be a good idea to try to live our lives so that everything we do can withstand the light of day, because that light might be shining on us sooner than we think.