THE KONGQUEST

From the CTIA Wireless Conference, their theme was to add mobile data capacity to absolutely everything. This includes the human body. The more I hear about this stuff, the more of our shared nerd fantasy is coming true. The world is colliding together at a superfast pace. When Edward Lorenz theorized about the effect of butterfly’s flap of its wings on weather patterns, he probably didn’t know that it exactly the same with today’s progressing technology. It’s amazing how one person could in effect do something so simple like post a short message in a remote location with a cell phone and affect the whole world in an instant.  Data and pushing boundaries of our understanding of the world is the future, we will be one giant hive-mind progressing towards new frontiers of thinking. Crazy.

Inspired by this post: Everything Networked - Knowledge @ Wharton

That is predicted in this Scientific American article on the way robots are being programmed to learn from experience. This is pretty exciting and potentially scary news. If today a robot is capable of learning at the rate of a 2 year old, what happens when it’s learning ability surpasses the lifetime capabilities of human beings?

Link: Can Robots Be Programmed to Learn from Their Own Experiences?

As I had said back in December about data storage and Netbooks, local data storage will be obsolete in the future. Aside from having small temporary local data on your computer, everything will be accessible from the internet through secure cloud computing. PSFK has a great article highlighting quantitative data on “The Death of Music Ownership and Illegal Downloading.” Basically, this is just the beginning of how everyday users are moving away from downloading and storing their media and relying on streaming data instead. It is exciting to see how our technology and human habits will progress with other forms of media.

Many people these days go through the whole education process and come out with jobs they hate. At the end, they wonder why life has taken them down this path. Ken Robinson brings up a good point that schools were once created and geared towards industrialism. Today, this system is antiquated and does not fully cater to the multiple facets of a productive human life. Watch the video to learn more!

I want a powerful web tablet already! I came across The Net Impact of Netbooks? article from Knowledge@Wharton and became very curious about this recent market for the middle ground between a laptop and smartphone. Which led me to do a little research online about what other people are thinking and doing about netbooks. This is how I found TechCrunch’s dream project for the perfect netbook. A “Web Tablet” is what they call it and they’re doing it on their own. It’s one thing to wish and tell the world what you want and another to be actually developing it on your own from scratch.

If you don’t know already and want a little run down, a netbook or web tablet works much like a laptop would but is stripped down to the bare essentials to do the most computing experience through the internet. This is important and is a huge game changer because people are starting to trust storing their data online. You can now do all your office work online without having to use any space on your hard drive through services like google documents, Zoho, or any similar host of services online. In addition, all entertainment needs are starting to be provided outside your physical computer. You probably already watch a majority of your videos through services like youtube or vimeo and can listen to music on demand through services like imeem or last.fm. In addition, services like netflix can stream movies online and more and more TV stations are allowing full episodes of their shows to be streamed through the network websites such as ABC. Sooner or later, the original idea of the PC will be distant memory and we will have super fast, light weight, touch screen, wirelessly connected computers in our homes and offices in place of laptops and PCs.

The use of all data storage and cables that is not directly linked to the internet will be obsolete for the average consumer. This would include satellite TV, cable TV, large hard drives, CDs, DVDs, tapes, casettes, and 8-tracks. I will guess that most major data will be based online. Personal data that we’d like to carry around will ultra small like mini-SD cards. I see a market for encryption and privacy on accessing this type of hardware.

I am interested to see how fast our technology will develop to where all we have are wirelessly connected windows into the online world. We’d come home from working on our touch screen tablets where ever we wanted to work and watch TV on a super flat widescreen with over a million streaming feeds on whatever suits our desires. We would talk on our touch screen phones that have video feeds of who we’re talking to and we can go online and get feeds of information on whatever we wanted to know and get mini-entertainment on the go.

Image via Wikipedia

Cheap food is about to end and when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil calories and spewing greenhouse gases. Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the future president purposing some solutions for new food policies. He says that we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food. These new policy suggestions will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our national security.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

Here are some paraphrased notes from the long letter:

1. How We Got Here
   1. Diversified Farming -> Cheap Energy, WWII, & Government subsidization of commodity crops -> Farming Monocultures -> Cheap Grains -> Animal Farming Monocultures -> Two Problems: Fertility problems on the farms & Pollution problem on feedlots
   2. Cheap Energy -> Global Transportation Networks -> Global Food Economy
   3. Now when the era of cheap energy is over, both massive farming monocultures and the global food economy will collapse. We need reform!
2. Resolarizing the American Farm
   1. Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion.
   2. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.
   3. The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today.
   4. We need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.
3. Reregionalizing the Food System
   1. Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.
   2. Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.
   3. Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.
   4. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would prevent huge swings in commodity prices and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.
   5. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.
4. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture
   1. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.
   2. To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children.
   3. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking.
   4. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced.

This concept may not be a new one and this video is pretty old already, but I think as time progresses, this video is becoming more and more relevant to our culture and future generations. Michael Highland has created a documentary called As Real As Your Life that foreshadows how our technological innovation is going to affect children and adults in the future. Just as some books and movies tell us how machines will be integrated into our lifestyles in the future, Michael Highland shows us the reality and unreality of video game addicts that is today. The integration is almost part of our real world and will be reach the masses in the very near future.

No more excuses.
No more procrastination.
It’s time to be daring.
It’s time to make mistakes.
This is where the fun starts…