… and points beyond

I’m a bit of a latecomer to the Singularity concept. As I understand it, the singularity occurs when technological evolution is able to reproduce human intelligence, likely by simulating a human brain. It must happen, but when? Kurzweil gives a date of 2045 and gives a strong justification. My favorite part is right after that when he explains that, even if his estimate of the computing power required is off by a factor of a billion, that’s only 15 years in the exponential worlds of computation and storage. It’s coming, just wait.

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near

Building the Cortex in Silicon — Models of the brain built from specially designed computer chips could reveal the secrets of our cerebrum.

Mimicking How the Brain Recognizes Street Scenes — First Computer Model Based On The Brain Works Well For Artificial Vision

Via infosthetics. This map of the zip code hierarchy.

Upload your data to Swivel, manipulate it, share it and compare it with other data sets. This article on TechCrunch has more.

Via Visuale. At the 3 minute mark it discusses the advertising potential–hence we are guaranteed to see this in the future–and some interesting game enhancements like a ripple of light emanating from the goal when a team scores. The video uses only yellow light, but I imagine that multi-color LEDs can be used in a high-resolution pattern turning the entire rink into a Jumbotron.

Click Here

QlikView is an amazing product. I say this as an end user and implementor for the past 5 years.

• A versatile data warehouse with multi-billion-row capacity and incredible speed.
• A BI front end for report generation, interactive analysis, dashboard design.
• Complemented by a platform for distributing data securely to customers, suppliers, contractors, etc.
  
• End-user applications are intuitive and have a high wow-factor.
• An easy to use ETL tool for extracting data and building the data model. You can even have several models in the same application.
  
• It is not OLAP. It smokes OLAP in performance and development time.
  
• You can build a proof of concept in days and a final application in a few weeks. Seriously.
  
• The rapid, iterative development means precise results in less time and lower cost.

If you check it out after reading this post, I would really like to hear from you. Send a note to blog (at) datapacifica . com. In the interest of disclosure, I have consulted to several of QlikTech’s customers.

I saw this video last week and I have been wondering what makes it so powerful. Authenticity. Just the process, done as it has been done for a long time by the men in the video. No sound track. No deep sonorous voiceover. It is like a video of a hurricane–documenting what is independent of meaning and judgment.

So how does this relate? I have the same kind of reaction watching this video as when I watch Hans Rosling’s Gapminder presentation. I feel confronted and enlightened by facts presented intuitively and honestly: measurable actions, a trend over time, a demonstration of misconceptions, hidden insights.

Now I always think of Rosling’s work when deciding how to present the what-is-so reality for my client. And with videos like this one I think of how that same kind of authenticity (as delivered by anyone with a camcorder, video editing software and YouTube), can impact my society and the world. And if this video doesn’t strike you, there are others that have had a recent impact.

Data visualization tools such as Swarm are crucial to sifting through the hordes of detritus on Digg. Because of these tools, Digg was able to harness the collective intelligence of its users and serve up speedy results that, in this case, bested Google’s specialized algorithm.

Use the Google Maps interface with your own images through Maplib.net. Via O’Reilly Radar.

Flickr has assembled stats on the cameras used over time. Take a look at the stats page for Canon cameras. And some of the photos from the number one camera. Nice shot. Via Boing Boing.