The word “metadata” has been popping up in the news a lot lately, thanks to the revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency has been collecting it from millions of Americans for years. And this is no flash-in-the-pan political scandal that will be forgotten next year; as our ultra-connected, electronic future continues to emerge, we’ll … Continue reading
Picture this: it’s the near future, and you’re on a first date. You’re at an average restaurant in the suburbs, somewhere in the US. Your date, like half the people in the restaurant, is wearing a flat pin the size of a postage stamp on one lapel. As if you didn’t have enough reasons to … Continue reading
Imagine you could build the city of the future, from scratch, right now. What would it look like? What would it do? It’s not a hypothetical question. According to this Salon article, software developer Plan IT intends to do exactly that: “Plan IT Valley” will be a new city located in northern Portugal, and is … Continue reading
Social networks like Facebook and G+ are great, but they all harbor a major bias: they’re restricted to human users only. Robots, tired of the lack of access and the blatant discrimination, have taken matters into their own hands and created a social network of their own. When the machines eventually rise up in revolt, … Continue reading
Look, here’s a picture of a tiger: A century ago there were about 100,000 of these guys in the wild. Today, that number has dropped more than 95%, meaning tigers might soon be gone forever! And there are thousands of other species in peril too (some estimates range as high as 30% of all species on … Continue reading
Wired is reporting the debut of a tracking bracelet called the Larklife. It’s a simple wristband with an accelerometer that can tell when you’re sleeping, exercising or neither. It comes with a connected iPhone app that allows you to add information about your meals, then crunches all the data for you and reports back. This … Continue reading
Do you talk about politics? Do you share opinions on Twitter? If your answer to both questions is “yes”, then your tweets are helping to drive analysis of the political landscape. Twitter is calling their new project the Twitter Political Index, or Twindex. It works by searching out all the public tweets about each candidate, … Continue reading
I came across a very intriguing post on NPR’s 13.7 blog this week, suggesting that the internet has made us all immortal – sort of. In the post, physicist Marcelo Gleiser describes how he searched the internet for his stepmother after she passed away. He found a lot, including photos of her, activities she liked, … Continue reading
This is Future Bites, a clearinghouse for bite-sized morsels of future news. Offered every Monday. To get a mix of Future Bites and future-focused essays delivered to your inbox, click “subscribe” at the right. This week, I offer you the latest in navigation apps. This one can not only route you around traffic jams, it … Continue reading
We’re producing information faster today than ever before. Some studies suggest the amount of data in the world doubles every two years! Certainly between Twitter and Facebook, newsfeeds and friend streams, there’s far more information being thrown at me than I can process. How do we make sense of all this? And what’s the effect … Continue reading
Cosmic Revolutions 