Hello, I am Robert G. Male. Welcome to TechStop™. Here you will find links that I think are of interest. Furthermore these are links that I want to keep track of because they have given me either ideas or some other form of inspiration for my writing. Links are listed in order lowest to highest both in the date they are given and the order in which they appear (meaning: read them from the bottom up for a certain day's list). Some of these sites may require you to sign up for free. Without further ado, the links...

August 2010.

August 26, 2010

• This video shows something that appears to be the epitome of spiffy. It could be the basis of living spaces in the short term future or the accommodations of a spacecraft in any future time period. This is maybe a little more geeky sharing than story fodder, but the application of such space saving function can, as indicated by the designer responsible for this, evoke a different mood depending on the audience. This is a matter of does it lend a warm and efficient feeling to the inhabitants, affecting their mood which in turn affects the reader, or does it feel cold and cramped creating that sort of feel.

August 12, 2010

• This immediately draws comparison with the movie Minority Report as the software is expected to pinpoint terrorists before they strike using things they say and even what they don't say along with and using connections between people, events and ideas. This could be tasked to provide a lot of the necessary language, ontologies, grammar and such required for a semantic web that can assemble its information after the fact without programmers putting much of the intelligence within the data sources themselves. What's most interesting is synthesising information that isn't directly there, the predictive part of it. This presents so many implications across many disciplines beyond just thwarting evil.

  That first article further presents interesting avenues of thought regarding the perceived connection between Google and the CIA and--this is covered more in the second article--how corporations could leverage this, and all sorts of conspiracy ideas involving governments and countries' economies. As commenters to the first article mention, and the second as well, then comes the push and pull as people game the system and the system is tweaked by both sides in a perpetual complication spiral like many other arms races before them. Note also the immediate and wholly inaccurate jump that no one will ever consider secondary checking or looking for evidence to back up the predictions.

  Here is even a third article showcasing an existing implementation of such "predictive analytics"... ‘Minority Report’ technology used by police to predict crimes

  Quote of Interest:The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players.

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