“The blue moon jumps over the purple sky.” - Applied Minds voice key
The Vision Project, one of Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s key initiatives, was launched this week with the appointment of a 49 member Vision Committee. Members will spend the next year tapping the community’s aspirations and goals to map out a strategic plan for the next 30 years. Citizens of Oregon’s largest city will be asked to help set the priorities that will act as a roadmap for future.
Perhaps neighborhood “remote offices”, in remodeled schools and community centers, could utilize teleconferencing and Web 2.0 technologies. Both the employer and employee can save time and money. Child care downstairs. Walk to work. What’s the point of commuting when your fellow employees have left the building? Broadband workers now congregate in cozy remote spots. The trend is likely to continue.
How will office buildings and cities evolve?
On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny Hillis, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years (”The best ‘real job’ you can have,” he quipped).
Danny recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bram Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).
You pull up to Applied Minds unimpressed. …In fact, the place felt a bit cramped and claustrophobic.
That all changed once Danny came out to meet me. After chit chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood one of those classic red English phone booths.
We stepped inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.
From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things strange and beautiful.
Over to one side stood the Terminator-like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, it’s 15-foot pneumatic legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls, itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with built-in kitchen and bedroom.
The space was a great big project lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer picnic. It’s Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for geeks.
Applied Minds works this way: Bram and Danny and any number of partners contract with Very Large Companies or Organizations to think outside the box and come up with solutions to problems they might have.
Danny and Bram have, in essence, created a lab where they get paid to think orthogonal to a problem, and invent/design/prototype just about any kind of solution they can dream up.
I toured at least four massive warehouses full of projects (and they have more buildings up in SF), many of which I am bound to not report upon, but all followed this basic ethic: let’s imagine a new way to approach what otherwise is an intractable/frustrating/unglamorous business problem. With Northrop Grumman, Applied Minds built the TouchTable, a situational awareness system. It maps live geographic tracks on a 3d shape-shifting terrain model.
One company that thinks out of the box is office furniture company Herman Miller.
They worked with Applied Minds to develop Babble, a gadget that scrambles cubicle speech, creating sonic privacy in workspaces without walls.
It works by electronically listening, then repeating back random bits of what it hears. The resulting sound is blurred — as if familiar voices were speaking in a foreign language.
Recognizing that change is constant and buildings are rigid, Herman Miller’s Viaro division creates adaptable architecture. Advocating ease of communication and collaboration, ceiling-based rails support movable lights, displays, speakers, cameras, projectors, fans and space dividers.
The overhead rail houses a modular power system with wire and cable trays to transport data and physical dividers. Push a button. Reorg.
But gadgetry changes faster than people.
Portland’s initiative may be aided by people like Rex Burkholder who can connect the dots and do more with less. Affordable, appropriate technology can make a big difference in people’s lives.
Grandeous visions, developed in corporations or government think tanks, often fail. Successful visions can be enabled by people.
They’re viral.
Bringing together politicans, engineers, artists, business people and activists can’t hurt.
My view of a multi-cultural center would resemble a sports bar. Or a WiFi Loft
- Big screen displays supply hundreds of multi-cultural news and entertainment channels.
- Newspapers from Latin America, Asia and Europe would be available.
- Ethnic food and drink would be available with a wide-ranging menu.
- Free WiFi and computer access would be available with living room comfort.
- Child care and playrooms would be available for everyone.
- Meeting rooms would be available for lease.
- Remote Offices would provide teleconferencing and other features.
- New media projects would involve oral history, blogging and reportage.
- Video/Audio editing suites would be available at low cost.
A 300 GB DVD will go on sale in 2006, according to its developer InPhase, a Lucent spin off. The discs use holographic memory to store data and can read and write data at 10 times the speed of a normal DVD. Blu-ray and HD-DVD hold only about a tenth as much. One hundred holographic disks might hold the Library of Congress. At home. For a few hundred dollars.
It’s the connections.
An office environment might resemble a stock market trading room with a collection manager in each section. Just like the NSA.
Combining Teknowledge architecture with, Cycorp software, which codifies pieces of knowledge that comprise human common sense with supercomputer power from Sun’s HPC division and open source software from Open Source Development Labs, it might be possible to discover new ideas and trends in real-time. Microsoft hired Cray’s chief technologist, Burton Smith this month and unveiled beta 2 of Windows Compute Cluster 2003 at Supercomputing 05.
OWL builds on XML and is designed to link disparate data from different sources and determine relationships between them. It uses XML to transport data. OWL is designed to pursue the semantic Web, the next-generation “intelligent” Internet.
It’s the Grid Today. National LambdaRail, CANARIE, TransPAC2, Internet2 and UltraScience Net are the backbones.
Stock traders utilize supercomputers. Knowledge engineering might generate revenue in a similar manner. I have no concept how that might work, but generating wealth sounds good.
Here’s another idea; how about a wireless state?
It used to cost $M to play in the world series of supercomputing poker. At that rate only the elite could play. It’s time to take off the sunglasses and come out in the open. The ante to do interesting digitally assisted science has been systematically reduced from $M’s to $K’s. Hell the computer I’m using to hack out this blog has twice the Linpack performance of the Cray YMP circa 1995 with about the same memory and disk. The only limitation is creativity.
.gif)
