Y. Karp? Why Not!

What is the perfect human? Tall, strong, immune to disease and with a flawless set of pearly whites. Intelligent and creative, with a mild temperament and exceptionally good hair, the world will be a better place when this superior form of human becomes the norm. Well, it's a Hollywood fantasy - but for how long? Gene editing lets scientists change DNA. Since DNA is the code for everything that makes up living creatures, being able to manipulate it gives scientists incredible power. The whole idea of editing genes began in the early 1900s but it is only now that we are benefiting from the more than 100 years of research and experimentation. Modern gene editing removes or changes genes to prevent and cure diseases. This is an extraordinary step forward. But the ethical and moral questions are numerous. For instance: Is it moral to edit the genes of an embryo without its permission? Is the parents' permission enough? Gene therapy is expensive and so only the wealthy will ha...

I have great respect for anyone who publishes a novel. Dedicating the massive amount of time and energy required to bringing an original work to completion is almost enough to win my envy. Or scorn. It's true that writing a book is an impressive accomplishment, but don't waste my time. Novels built on the weak foundations of overused, formulaic writing serve no purpose. A book like that adds no more to the knowledge of the universe,  or the entertainment of humankind,  than does an instruction manual for a chocolate kettle. (Actually, that might be a fun read.) The problem, though, is that novels and stories have been around since, approximately,  the beginning of time. It's difficult to come up with something new. The human race has heard it all before. We are savvy story-listeners. And we are clever. Whether we realize it or not, people are excellent at predicting outcomes. Some of us are better at it than others, but we can often spot a punchline...

oldcomputers.net I was introduced to computing in the 5th grade. My first computer class was in the school's brand-new Apple IIe computer lab. On that first day we had no idea what to expect. Our teacher held up a 5¼" floppy disk and proceeded to demonstrate how not to treat it. He threw the disk across the room, he crumpled it in his fist, tossed it on the floor and jumped on it. He then attempted to rip the disk open with his bare hands. He let loose on the disk with a pair of scissors, dropped it into a metal waste-paper-basket and set it on fire. The folks at Verbatim would have been horrified; we thought it was funny. And from that moment on, the teacher had our attention. I probably still have a bunch of floppys sitting in a box somewhere. I used floppy disks all through university, so I still may have some assignments I wrote using Zardax , an Apple IIc word processor. Alas, the floppy disk is a relic of a bygone era. File sizes have far surpassed the capabilitie...

Zynga reported a $22.8m loss . Its shares plummeting, analysts are forecasting an uncertain future for the maker of the hugely popular game, Farmville, and six other top games on Facebook. Whoa! Unsatisfactory revenues for the developer of popular games? Yes, because the number of users of largely free games doesn't reflect earnings. Zynga makes its money by selling virtul goods, like tractors for Farmville. Selling virtual goods for a web-based game is a relatively new business model. No inventory to warehouse, no deliveries to make, and no storefront to pay for. Selling virtual bits and bytes (things that don't exist but that people pay for) sounds great, but is the experiment failing? I am tempted to argue that paying real money for a virtual tractor in a game that I don't personally own, is a waste. But consider this - we have been trading in virtual goods for quite a while. Some examples: Virtual money (credits) for online stores - eventually you can exchange ...

Now that 2011 is coming to a close, all the tech blogs and online magazines are predicting what to watch out for in the coming year. I wrote about how futurists predict tech trends in a blog I posted on 6 December 2011 , so I thought it would be fun to list some of the technologies people say we can expect in the coming year. I compiled a list of 20 "in 2012" lists, culled from Twitter, LinkedIn, and a variety of online publications. Interestingly, a number of themes are prevalent in these lists: Social media Gamification (see my previous blog post on this topic ) Tablets and phones/mobile computing Cloud computing Curiously, HTML5, one of the biggest revolutions in the Internet world, was only mentioned once. Mobile payments was mentioned a few times, which I think is going to be the next big thing (maybe not in 2012, but in the coming years.) Lists 11 and 13 are not strictly trend-related, but I thought they were still appropriate to include here as they do s...

In my previous post I said that I love it when life imitates art. Science fiction gadgets, as we see them on the screen, often turn up in real life in one form or another. I think that the reason for this is that sci-fi writers are futurists at heart. They see the technology as it is now and extrapolate its development to the future. Take a look at the following video, released by Sony in the last week of November 2011. Are we getting closer to inventing a real holodeck? And, just for the fun of it, here is a satire on the whole Start Trek/futurist thing: According to Bryan Alexander's article " Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality ", there are a number of different ways to predict future technologies: The Environmental Scan: Repeatedly survey the technological horizon, looking for the leading edges of new projects and trends. One website that does just th...

I really enjoyed this Businessweek article about Microsoft's Kinect (3D sensor, gesture-based hardware for Xbox gaming without the need for a hand-held controller.) The article contends that MS is so big and so set in its anti-hacker mode of thinking that it cannot see that it is on the threshold of dominating the next generation of human-computer interaction. Imagine using hand-gestures to replace the mouse and keyboard or to control your robotic vacuum cleaner. MS has the tech for this, they are just too narrow minded and suspicious of open source to see the future. As an aside, this sentiment sort of goes together with this other Businessweek article about knowledge workers: Everyone in an organization has ideas for improving systems and products and should therefore be given the opportunity to contribute. For instance, if you ignore an idea because it came from a delivery guy, you may miss out on productivity improvements. Similarly, if MS ignores ideas just because those ideas...