Alex Pang's Future2: The Future of Futures

File Under Really Unexpected, Unintended Consequences

There's a lot of nasty chemical things in our world to be afraid of. We're increasingly aware of the risks from endocrine disruptors, and the toxicity of nanomaterials is a growing concern.

But I never thought I'd be afraid of sunscreen.

Why? Because there is new evidence that ingredients in the thousands of metric tons of sunscreen that washes off swimmers around the world each year is re-activating dormant viruses in the symbiotic bacteria that inhabit coral reefs.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Are Mobile Phones Disorienting Bees?

The recent global die-off off bee colonies has been another side of the rapidly shifting global food system. If the spread of wireless infrastructure turns out to be a culprit in damaging delicate apiaries, things could get a lot more complicated. Oh, the law of unintended consequences.

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? - Independent Online

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Ride sharing, parking markets, and the future of property

From time to time, we've written about experiments using pervasive computing technologies to turn private goods into sharable public ones: using virtualization tools to make computers more green, using computers and mobile phones to make carsharing programs easier to use or create dynamic ridesharing systems, using RFID tags to make sharing books more secure, building networking sites to create virtual libraries. (We're hardly alone: John Thackara identified the growth of sharing as one of six big design trends when he talked at IDEO.) Today I came across two more car-related examples.

The first is Peasy.com (like Parking easy-- get it?) a new "online marketplace for parking spaces, enabling drivers to search for and book spaces before they leave home, and letting British homeowners monetize unused parking spaces by adding them to the Peasy network."

To rent out a parking space, the owner needs to register and enter all relevant details, including price, when the space is available, and whether it will be rented out daily, weekly, or both. Those who require parking can then search for suitable parking spaces and securely book them online, or first negotiate a better price. To protect the privacy of owners, searchers can't view exact addresses. Instead, they're given the street the space is on, as well as its postcode and location on a map. Once booked, the renter is provided with the exact address. If booking on a weekly basis, renters are also given the owner's contact details, enabling them to introduce themselves and arrange for collection of keys or remote controls if required.

As Springwise notes, this hits a nice combination: a growing demand for a service (in this case, safe parking spaces), and a growing familiarity with online marketplaces.

The bigger picture is that it allows property owners (in this case, people who have parking spaces) to generate more use (and revenue) from that property. Such tools-- and the cultural attitudes that make such arrangements acceptable-- are potentially significant because there are many kinds of property that are used only a fraction of their lives. Most offices, for example, are used for a few hours a week; most power tools are used for minutes, when they're designed with useful lifespans of hundreds of hours. You might never want to rent your bed out to someone who works night shifts, but being able to generate some cash from that power tiller-- that's a different story.

The second example is an under-development New York service, Hitchsters, that facilitates ridesharing among air travelers.

Everyone loves New York, except for when they have to take a cab to or from the airport and it ends up costing almost as much as airfare. Which is why smart New Yorkers are starting to plan their airport commutes via Hitchsters.com... a combination of a social networking and a ride matching site. Hitchsters' software connects travelers scheduled on the same flight and living in the same area of the city so they can save money by sharing a taxi.

This is more an example of a service that tries to reduce the costs of a service by getting more users involved-- in a sense, it's like an ad-hoc buyers' club for cab rides.

Indeed, car and ride sharing schemes of one sort or another seem to be one focal point for experiments in either sharing services more effectively, or turning private goods into public ones. When I was a columnist for Red Herring, I wrote a piece about dynamic car sharing; its reproduced in the extended post.

Cybertracking animals

Wired News has a piece on CyberTracker, "a software program that allows conservationists to record their observations in the field on handheld computers linked to global positioning system, or GPS, units." Scientists and trackers recently used the system to research the impact on an Ebola outbreak on the gorilla population in the Congo, and have also used it to study other animals:

To [Louis] Liebenberg -- the South African founder of CyberTracker Conservation -- these findings not only illustrate the device's ability to enhance scientists' monitoring and interpretation of changes in ecosystems, but they also support the idea that illiterate trackers are just as capable of doing science as researchers with Ph.D.s.

Part of what's interesting here is that CyberTracker shows how handheld computing, GPS, and wireless can be used to improve scientific fieldwork. But the other thing that's intriguing about the project is that it explicitly recognizes the skills and knowledge that native peoples have about local flora and fauna. Native guides and assistants have long been critical to the success of scientific fieldwork, but often have been written out of the official histories.

Interview with Andy Clark

Several months ago, I conducted an interview with Indiana University professor Andy Clark. Clark is author of several books, most recently Natural-Born Cyborgs, a book that I found to be extremely stimulating.

I interviewed Dr. Clark in the course of writing the annual report for our Ten Year Forecast program, and a highly edited and compressed version of the interview appeared a couple months ago in the 2004 Ten Year Forecast. It pained me that we couldn't publish the whole thing; but space constraints prevented us from doing so.

However, there are no such constraints here; and so the interview can appear in its entirety. Here it is.

Regulating Internet cafes in Mumbai?

Following on the heels of the Paul Boutin piece in Slate (blogged here) comes a BBC News report that "Bombay [for some reason, the BBC style manual hasn't switched from "Bombay" to "Mumbai" yet] plans cyber cafe controls." The Maharashtra state legislature is considering legislation requiring cafes to be licensed, to install anti-porn software, and to require users to "fill out lengthy forms listing addresses, telephone numbers and other details."

Not surprisingly, cafe owners are up in arms. Not only do they fear it would drive away customers, but if it passed, "cyber cafe owners would need permission from no fewer than 13 separate government agencies in order to set up shop and do business." (This kind of multi-level bureaucractic navigation, according to Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto (profiled here, interviewed here), forces many businesses underground.) Finally, the efforts marks another attempt to reduce the anonymity-- and privacy-- of Internet use:

[Cyber cafe owners] say it is important to prevent increasingly internet-savvy India from going down the China route of regulation and control.

If passed, the new law would come just weeks after Cuba controversially tightened its grip over internet access by making it impossible for many Cubans to dial up the internet from their home telephone lines.

Bombay's plans could set a precedent for other Indian cities, such as Calcutta and Delhi.

Interestingly, patrons quoted in the article were more sanguine about the idea of giving the names and contact information-- a reaction that jibes with Boutin's argument. As one visitor put it, "There's nothing wrong with giving your name and address. It's like going to a residential complex in Bombay, where a watchman is standing guard. You have to write your name and address before you enter the building. Why can't we do the same when we visit a cyber cafe?"

Paul Boutin on Web privacy

Paul Boutin has an essay in Slate on efforts to weave digital IDs and secure computing into the Web. (It's one of those meta-articles that were common in 19th century journalism, and have made a comeback in the world of Web publishing and blogging: an article discussing an article (Steven Levy's recent Newsweek piece based on another article, John Walker's "The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.") Walker (and Boutin) argue that digital IDs will be sold to the public as a convenience-- a way to cut down on spam, for example-- and as a way to protect against identity theft; but that equally significant benefits will go to media companies and others who want to tame the anarchy of the Web (and shut down file trading). It'll also spur a backlash:

"Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops," Newsweek concluded. They might as well have added: Cooooooooooool.

An ad hoc alliance of techno-rebels covertly transferring unauthorized data in defiance of network authorities-- sound familiar, Neo? It's such a popular scenario that the same Microsoft researchers leading the company's secure computing efforts wrote a paper two years ago describing this inevitable backlash, which they dubbed the darknet. The darknet! Jeez, are they trying to make piracy cool?

The essay, incidentally, is The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution."

Silicon Valley's Next Boom

Longtime Silicon Valley watcher Gregg Zachary has a long essay in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle on "Silicon Valley's next boom."

It's a good piece, though I confess I'm biased-- I'm quoted near the end.

Home networking

David Benjamin has a funny piece about a "home networking supersession" at the recent CES. Dana Blankenhorn comments that

The easily predictable result is we're about to see the Home Networking Bust of 2004. Vendors are going to do worse selling home networking gear this year than Howard Dean did in Iowa [W]hat's missing from this analysis... [is] the World of Always-On. In that world, moving your home entertainment files around is a low-value, extra capability. It is not the game. The game lies in collecting new kinds of data, with new kinds of applications, and creating value from them using a modular, scalable architecture. Don't try to organize my CDs. Save my life. Create new value, new categories of applications. Stop this running game. Throw the bomb.

[via Moore's Lore]

Microsoft and RFID

There's plenty of evidence building that 2004-2005 will be the year that RFID begins to have a serious impact on industry. Two European supermarket chains, Tesco and Metro, have announced plans to use RFID starting late this year; Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense are going to start using it in 2005; and there are tests or discussions underway regarding RFID and EPC's use in food processing and pharmaceuticals.

RFID Journal offers another data-point: a report that Microsoft is testing "its first RFID supply chain management (SCM) pilot project... to develop and test new RFID-capable software that it plans to bring to market next year." The test is being conducted with KiMs, a Danish snack food producer, and will be what in the industry is called a "pallet and case-level test"-- i.e., the RFID chips will be used to track pallets or cases of goods, not individual items. (This also keeps it firmly in the supply chain space-- essentially behind the counter-- and doesn't raise the kinds of consumer privacy issues that have come up with tests of smart store shelves or item-level tagging.) Microsoft's larger aim is to "market its RFID products to similar midsize companies... middleware developed for the KiMs pilot will be tested and integrated with Microsoft’s Axapta warehouse management system by next year."

Cnet also reports about the trial.

Social networking and Web searching

Technology News reports on a new search engine, Eurekster.com, which plans to leverage social networks in Web searching:

Eurekster.com will let users invite their friends by e-mail to try the search engine. The cluster of friends and friends-of-friends then becomes a social network whose Internet search queries shape the results of all its members.

Eurekster gets results like a normal search engine but ranks them according to the interests you and your friends have shown through past searches. For example, if many people in a social network use Eurekster to seek information about the Boston Red Sox, the websites they visit most will rise to the top in future Red Sox searches. Eurekster also lists queries that members of your social network have made -- although it doesn't say who made them -- and recent websites they have visited....

Eurekster is betting that "your network is interested in this, therefore you should be, too -- so go look at it," said Stowe Boyd, managing director of A Working Model, a technology consulting firm in Virginia.

Of course, Google uses hyperlinks to help it determine the relevance of pages, but this is something different: it sounds like it's more behavioral-- in the sense of trying to extract conclusions based on what a group of people do-- than functional or semantic (though of course, a Web link can be seen as an action, and thus behavioral).

This struck me because it's another example of how we're trying to use what once been private, fleeting activities (in this case Web searches) and turn them into public goods and something akin to social capital.

[via Wired News]