Life and Times

Here is my premise. Technology has been allowed to "evolve" over time based on open market forces. The best technology implementations are usually driven by user requirement specs. How can society drive technological development to obtain the benefits that we all want?

Consider how many man hours are devoted to creating a financial applications. Realistically how many accounts payable packages are required in the world? Shouldn't this effort go into solving some of the challenges we see in the world.

I've been researching and dabbling in writing the user requirements for how the world should be but it's huge and not really a a one person job. There are a lot of innovative ideas and maybe some off-the-wall ideas but if we don't say we want it, it will never be done.

As an example, I think we are working on the wrong end of the global warming problem. People talk about CO2 reduction targets. How about better carbon fixing methods? OK plants are ideal but maybe we can create artificial carbon fixing using nanotechnology that would only need sun and no water. These could go into the deserts. There are some people looking at fixing carbon by creating fuels from electricity during off peak times. The problem is they are looking at it from producing a fuel product that can compete in the market on price. They don't get paid anything for removing CO2 from the air. Hmmm, maybe our economics aren't really aligned to user requirements.

Topic headings for write up include genetic engineering, democracy/government, intellectual property, recreation, biometrics, RFID, and more.

My crossroads is how do I get it out there? Traditional try to find a publisher and write to deadlines (does anyone know one who would be interested?) Self-publish chapter by chapter online and hope that I can create a way fund it (Paypal?). Try an online publisher? Put it on a website and try to get ad sponsors? Let me know what you think.

They used to sell red firecrackers at the corner store. Perceived better quality ones were black and yellow checkered. As 12 years olds we'd buy as many as we could afford and go down to the ravine and set them off. We'd come home smelling of gunpowder. Probably why I still enjoy doing backyard fireworks. Somehow the fireworks these days seem more dangerous than those little crackers. Some kids would hold them as they went off. One game was to try to have them explode in the water of the stream. To do this you would drop it at the last second. If you drop it too soon the wick goes out. Too late and it goes off in your fingers or in the air as it drops.

Days of a misspent youth.

First of all I really like the Facebook blogger interface. As you can read down, I've had this blog for years but rarely updated it. Now when I publish in blogspot it posts automatiically into Facebook, so I know at least my friends get a news item.

Oh yeah, the movie. I consider it worth seeing, especially on a large screen. We ended up nearer the front than we would normally sit. The actor close-ups look huge but the action scenes felt like you were in them. Since this movie has been done for Imax, the Imax viewing wisdom should prevail. It's always been said that the best Imax effect is 6 rows from the front since it bathes the whole field of vision with the view. Carmen said she felt a bit of motion sickness after the movie.

I went to a IT conference at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre. Don Tapscott was the keynote speaker. As co-author of the book Wikinomics, he envisions the new era using the Web 2.0 with new collaboration tools like Face book.com and Digg.com.
These tools are becoming ubiquitous and global. They are the way of doing business in the future and are altering the business landscape. He cited one example of Goldcorp that published all it's mining data and challenged the public to find their best locations for mining. It paid off. The $0.5M company grew to $3.4B in net worth.