Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.

The date was July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon at 20:17:40 UTC according to NASA. (For those who like precision, Neil stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility 0°40′26.69″N 23°28′22.69″E / 0.6740806°N 23.4729694°E / 0.6740806; 23.4729694 based on the IAU Mean Earth Polar Axis coordinate system .) I will never forget that date and time because I witnessed this historic event at 3:17 pm in the induction center at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. It was a very odd moment in my life. I had left my wife early that morning in a very frightened and emotional state by herself in Milwaukee; travelled all day by busses without airconditioning in 100+ degree heat; met up along the way in various little towns with what seemed to me at the time to be a very ragtag and slightly dangerous bunch of fellow draftees; and then arrived at Leonard Wood to the welcome of a bunch of screaming Drill Sargents just 30 minutes before Neil's famous landing. Mostly because the Drill Sargents want...

Wolfram Alpha is endlessly facinating. For example, I learned a little trivia factorid today that my wife and I were both born on a Thursday [by putting our birth dates into Wolfram Alpha and comparing them.] It also instantly computed that someone with the equivalent of my current salary would have been making about $23,000 / year in 1946 when I was born. There is a great list of examples here .

Stephen Wolfram is at it again. This time he's going to show that you can make all human knowledge "computable" so that you can ask a computer (albeit one with "access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms") any factual question and it will "compute" the answer. What a guy, I just love the way he fearlessly tackles these massive undertakings. Assuming it works, if there was ever an application that could rival Google search, it could be something like this. See Wolfram's blog entry for more detail Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!

PW Singer on military robots and the future of war Video on TED.com Listen to this talk by P.W. Singer about military robots. It's pretty scary. Singer is right, it's not our war machines that are the problem, it's us.

Prof. Wing at Carnegie Mellon coined the term "computational thinking." The term is actually a bit difficult to describe. Personally, I don't think even Prof. Wing has captured it's essence in a pithy phrase yet. For those who are familiar with computer science this definition resonates. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking is really about applying what mankind is learning by working with computers to the everyday problems of society. I particularly like the historical analogy that Prof. Wing uses to describe the potential significance of computational thinking. The analogy is to the invention of the printing press. The printing press had a profound affect on societal development by enabling wide spread dispersion of reading, writing, & arithmetic skills, and resultant development of problem solving, design and human...

Seldon Laboratories is a small nanotechnology company in Vermont run by an amazing young man named Chris Cooper. It is initially focused on using the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to develop water purifications systems. Inexpensive and highly effective at removing microorganisms from fluids without the use of heat, ultraviolet radiation, chemicals, contact time, or significant pressure; Seldon's purification systems could literally eliminate millions of human deaths every year caused by polluted drinking water. In addition, the technology is also potentially applicable to sea water desalinization.

I'm headed to PC Forum this weekend. The speaker list, as usual, is awesome and the theme... "Erosion of Power: Users In Charge" ...takes the premise that "the power institutions once held over (people) is eroding for three technology-based reasons" and the implications of that is what the conference is going to explore.

Dan Bricklin [the author of VisiCalc] has come up with another brilliant idea called "wikiCalc." Here's how he describes it at the alpha test site "The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet..." Daniel Terdiman of CNET News.com wrote about it here today. WikiCalc kind of looks to me like a poor mans [open-source] version of what I think Quicken is trying to do with QuickBase and what Dan suggests Microsoft might be trying to do with Grove . Some people will object to putting the data in spreadsheets out in the open like this but the dirty little secret of private spreadsheets on individual PCs is that they are full of errors and inconsistencies. A little openness [in other words transparency] is likely to be a very good thing both f...

Here's a wonderful little online tester to find out what kind of actual Internet Connection you have.

Webby Awards: 10 Web Moments That Changed The World The folks at "The Webby Awards" recently published their list of the "ten web moments that changed the world." The moment that made me a believer that the web might change the world happened sometime around 1994 or 1995. I got on somebody's list [probably because of my involvment in Georgia Tech's GVU annual WWW user survey , which was pretty unique at the time] and I was invited to become an early user of something called PointCast . I became a very enthuastic PointCast user long before Yahoo, Excite, etc. had really developed anything comparable. PointCast was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize the potential of automated delivery of [nearly] real-time news and information to the desktop, personalized to an individuals particular interests. They ultimately failed because they didn't adapt their clunky [ push ] technology, but the idea and the early execution, including the user interface, was bri...

I'm totally addicted to Podcasting. My main source of Podcast marterial is Doug Kaye's " The Conversations Network " which covers an enormous variety of conferences and other interesting conversations. I'm able to make much better use of almost three hours every day with Podcasting [two hours during my commute & an hour when I walk & exercise] . But this has some implications and that's where the "& Cars" comes in. Many people have observed that Podcasting is taking share from mainstream Media [e.g. I never listen to radio anymore, even PBS] and that its business model is disruptive. But I discovered another little subtly of Podcasting that's a bit problematic. I listen to my iPod via a pair of good noise-cancelling headphones. The obvious benefit is great audio quality. But there is a downside that I discovered today. It's kind of a guy thing. You get accustomed to the sounds that your car makes especially if you like cars and yo...