Some of you may have heard of XKCD. It’s a brilliant commentary on life, science, technology and everything in between. It has been around a long time and not lost any of its edge. One of its more well known entries, and that’s saying something because there have been a few, are the maps of on-line communities done in 2007 and then again in 2010, with the size of the community represented by comparative volume of web traffic to the site. I have included both below, with the 2007 version presented first. They’re big, with the first one over 1000 pixels wide and the second over 3000 pixels wide, mimicking the exponential growth of the Internet itself. Not only that, they include a whole lot, especially the second version. If you look at them both closely it is quite amazing to see how much they – in other words, the Internet – change in just three short years. Many once-powerful and influential sites shrink to almost nothing, while ones that were barely born rise to dominate. The most glaring example: Compare the relative size of Facebook to MySpace in the first one. Even Friendster (remember them?) is bigger than Facebook! But look at Faebook in the second. And then look at MySpace.

But as much as I am a fan of XKCD, the map below by DeviantArt artist Jay Simons is the most impressive one I’ve ever seen. It’s not complete, or even to scale in some instances as the author notes on the map itself, but it is still beyond impressive. It’s huge, at almost 5000 pixels wide by just over 3000 high. You could spend a looong time just looking through it to see if you recognize any sites that eat up good chunks of your time. It provides a whole host of other information as well; it lists the top technology companies, codes countries by Internet penetration, lists the top 500 websites according to Alexa.com, has a website timeline, language breakdown, there is just a ton of information here. And in very, very, VERY tiny print acknowledges XKCD’s maps but in a demeaning way which mars the otherwise stellar job. Take a look below, and prepare to become enraptured. I was anyway.

His site, linked above, has other maps that are zoomed in areas of the above large map, but they pale in comparison. This one gives a visual, and gives some perspective, as to how huge the Internet actually is.

One other thing since I’m on the subject: the word ‘Internet,’ when referring to the one we all use, is always capitalized. Just wanted to throw that out there.

This will be another sensitive post, but one I feel presents an important issue. It does not condemn or condone any of the actors or agencies, it simply presents the story with a tinge of opinion.

When it comes to military firearms, one of the most legendary is the sniper rifle. A precision device for hitting a target at long range, it requires extensive training and skill. The sniper often has to lay low for hours, even days on end waiting for the right opportunity to strike their target. Sometimes the result, and the shot it took to get there, are unbelievable. On the other hand, as someone who lived in the area where the D.C. sniper went on his rampage, I know that like anything, if they fall into the wrong hands, very bad things can result.

Now, an article over on C|Net discusses the military’s interest in a system that could take some of the training out of being a sniper, and make even a mediocre soldier or possibly just an everyday yokel, a masterful sniper. They are currently researching a system made by Tracking Point that attaches to a regular sniper rifle, and can compensate, on its own, for wind, sun, barrel length, distance, and a host of other factors, making it much less difficult – easy, even – to hit the mark. In fact, they can hit a target SEVEN FOOTBALL FIELDS away on their own, and a video on the company’s product page claims their system “eliminates multiple sources of error.” The sniper would be pulling the trigger, but the system would be doing the shooting.

Note in the video below, that at only 11 seconds in, the narrator says “…enabling anyone to hit long distance targets.” It’s fascinating tech, but very chilling at the same time. It’s supposed to be for hunting, but it doesn’t sound like hunting to me.

I’m all for superiority in military conflicts, but my concern is the same as it always is with technologies of this sort. Although it’s a very limited application, and the systems can run between $23,000 and $27,000, I worry about this tech falling into bad hands. As mentioned above, they already sell similar kits to hunters.

Of course, military snipers carry out other, important functions and have significant training in many areas. I never thought I’d see the day when they might start losing jobs to technology.

The concept of deep learning, which is a subset of the Artificial Intelligence discipline, involves machines being able to extract contextual or inherent meaning from inputs. It’s much, MUCH more complex than it sounds; humans are great at it, machines not so much. But now the process has finally been put to some good use. Forget facial recognition or pattern recognition or interpreting blocks of text to find out what’s going on, now the machines can learn to play old Atari games.

DeepMind Technologies, a company that develops machines that try to learn as humans do, has published a paper showing the machine has learned to play games on the old Atari 2600. It may not sound like a big deal, except the machine learned only by evaluating the pixel on the screen and had no other inputs. No rules, no game-specific programming, nothing but what the screen outputs. The amazing thing is that it adapted to the visual cues to learn the games just as a human being would do.

The games weren’t terribly difficult: BeamRider, Pong Sports, Breakout, Space Invaders, and Seaquest. More complex games on the console, like Q*Bert, still cause it to stumble. But it’s ability to deduce rules solely from screen output is remarkable and unnerving at the same time, and shows promise.

Google recently acquired the company to help it parse data from images, and all large tech companies including IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and others use deep learning to help their systems perform better whether it’s financial analysis or speech recognition.

The earlier post today was about Apple, so here’s one tangentially related to Microsoft.

Actually, I’m just going to come out and say it. It’s Bing. It’s about Bing. It’s almost like a confession – “My name’s Darren, and I use Bing.”

I won’t start a big debate about whether Bing is better than Google or Yahoo is better than MSN or whoever is better than whoever, that’s for you to do in the comments. Instead, I will focus on a very small aspect of the site’s design, point out one of the things I like about Bing, one of the small touches that make their site appealing. Just as Google used a minimalist design to make the site appealing and showcase it’s results (or at least said they did – note point #3), Bing tries to make their site visually appealing through the use of daily images.

However, while the images are nice, every once in a while they have one that is animated, using the new-in-Internet-years HTML5 standard. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they’re more animated, but I’m always mesmerized by them.

If you go to Bing today, February 10th, you’ll see the header image for this post with animated water. A nice, subtle touch. If you go after February 10th, you can click on the little left-arrow icon next to the (info) button at the lower-right of the screen, and it will cycle through the previous days’ images. I’ve also included a couple of videos below that show animated wallpapers they’ve had in the past.

Then, if you really want to get the discussion heated, you can go to www.bingiton.com and do a blind comparison of  Bing v. Google to see which one reigns supreme. Do you dare? Just to show you I’m fair in my approach, here are my results from last year. I’m not proud of this.I still like Bing! Anyone ave any preference? Want to defend your search engine? This is the place!

Here are a couple of videos of some animated wallpapers they’ve had in the past. It was surprisingly, and sadly difficult to find any.

As I mentioned in class, below is the 1984 advertisement for Apple that was shown during a commercial break during Super Bowl XVIII. Except for a local showing the previous year, this was the only time the advertisement appeared on television, but it began a storied marketing fable for Apple.

Honestly, the ad doesn’t make much sense in terms of the times (the PC industry hadn’t yet matured to the point where one could say there was attempt at conformity, except perhaps for the interface), but it was a brilliant way to get the company and the name noticed. It was years later with the iPod silhouette ad campaign that they again came right to the forefront of advertising. You can see all of them in the single YouTube clip below.

The thing about the 1984 ad is that some are now saying Apple is the giant oppressive company demanding you do things their way, which is the very thing the 1984 ad was showing they *weren’t.* In fact, if you listen closely to the voice preaching to the gathered gray masses, you can hear him talking about the ‘garden of pure ideology’ they can all live and work in in, when Apple’s platform has been referred to as a walled garden again and again and again. And again. And again and again. You get the idea.

Still, great ads. And when Microsoft tries to imitate them and be hip and edgy, it just doesn’t work. Not at all. You can see their attempt to be Apple-like below, and while the dancing is impressive and I can appreciate what they were trying to do, that image doesn’t sync up properly with Microsoft (although they’re trying to change that). And frankly, if I worked at that company I’d be looking for a new job.

Here’s an earlier one that, while still not saying anything about what the Surface actually does, didn’t bug me as much as the one above.

Advertising is a funny thing. Not only does it have to represent the product, it has to represent the company and the public’s perception of that company. Apple has always nailed it perfectly.

This isn’t an easy or necessarily pleasant subject, but it is a very important and perhaps even personal one. With colorectal cancer being the third leading cause of death in the United States, and actually the second when not considering gender differences (source), and over 52,000 people succumbing to it 2010, it’s a condition that needs to be detected and diagnosed early. This is not news. The question is, why *doesn’t* it get detected early when it could save so many lives?

That answer is complicated, but one of the reasons is very easy: The procedure of screening for it is, shall we say, unpleasant. The patient has to be put under general anesthetic, and a long camera snaked through their intestine to take pictures and check for lesions or polyps, both of which could indicate a potential problem.

Nothing about that sounds fun.

But it needs to be done when someone starts getting in to middle age, even earlier if there’s a family history. It’s understandable people don’t want to go through that process even if they are asleep through it; if only there was a way to make it less…snakey.

Sadly, there’s not. However there may be hope on the horizon. A new camera-pill that can be swallowed and will take pictures as it works its way through the digestive tract has been given FDA approval, and has been given he not-so-great name of PillCam Colon. In the event of a test being inconclusive, incomplete, or not possible because of other complications, the pill cam can be swallowed and pictures taken that way.

Watch it work!
It’s pretty remarkable – it can take multiple images per second and contains LED lights that provide illumination because it’s dark in there, and relays the images taken to a receiver on the patient’s body. Also, these have been around in some form for at least 15 years, but this is th first time for FDA approval.

This wouldn’t be a first line of defense, however, because the images are not of the same quality of a proper colonoscopy, it doesn’t allow for real-time evaluation and interpretation, and it only takes pictures, no samples for biopsy. Still, we all know how fast camera-phones improve, so I suspect this might be a picture (get it?) of the future of this procedure. If it reduces the death rate, increases the early-diagnosis rate, and saves lives, then I hope to see its continued development and advancement.

Now this is a novel approach. Kentucky has made it law that students can take programming to meet their foreign language requirements.

I think this is a great idea. One of the important things to remember when learning to program is that all programming languages follow standard syntax, structure and grammar just like regular spoken languages. You learn how to assemble phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that result in something being communicated. As we’ll soon learn, it’s communicated to the CPU first and then to the user, but it still needs to be written out properly.

I wonder if this will lead to other districts/municipalities/states doing the same thing?  I respect people who can speak multiple languages, I can speak a few words here and there in a few, but I can’t speak one fluently. I also respect fluent programmers and their command of *those* languages. Hopefully, this will allow many students who already have an interest in technology – and perhaps already speak a second language or more – to get a head start in coding and begin to develop those skills formally to put into use later.

If you would like to experiment with code yourself, there is a great website over at code.org where you can learn all about programming – if you really want to see what a program looks like, you can go to the section on building an iPhone app in your browser and it will place you right into a programming environment complete with Objective-C code (the code apps are written in) to start. I like that because I think C++ and C# are the best languages out there right now, and Objective-C is as close to those as Code.org gets.

Or, if it’s an emergency and you have to act like you know what you’re doing right away, just go to this site and start typing anything you want – BAM! You’re a programmer. Sort of.

Or at least sort of? We post so much information about ourselves online that it seems only appropriate that with the right algorithms and information gleaned from what you yourself post, it would be possible to recreate a digital version of you that can actually carry on a conversation in your voice, mentioning things that you actually did, or enjoyed, or followed. Right?

Apparently so. And now there’s finally a use for just such a thing.

This post on nbcnews.com discusses a startup with the clever and slightly creepy name of eterni.me. This service will allow people to upload the various meaningful detritus (which I realize is an oxymoron) of their life, and the system will create a virtual representation of that person that will be able to carry on conversations, offer guidance and input, and generally act like that person after the actual person has passed away.

The system doesn’t officially exist yet, by the way, but I assume it will in short order. It was created , according to a caption on the site, at an entrepreneurship bootcamp hosted by MIT. These can be very effective; UNLV’s entrepreneurship program has resulted in several wonderful ideas, but nothing like this.

I can’t figure out if this is clever or morbid or both. Many people worry about leaving behind a legacy, something they can be remembered for by future generations. If people are already sharing so much about themselves, maybe this is a clever idea. I wonder if given the chance to talk to my uncle, or grandfather, or friend who passed away just three months ago, even if it were them only in a digital form, but their voice and mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, would I?

I honestly don’t know.

I had a couple of other posts ready to go when the news broke, and instantly took precedence over every other tech-related news story of the year so far. Microsoft has officially named Satya Nadella the new CEO of Microsoft, replacing Steve Ballmer who announced he was leaving the position last year. You can read Satya Nadella’s email to employees here, and Steve Ballmer’s email to employees here. Microsoft also moved board member and search chair John Thompson to the position of chairman.

Let me say right off the bat I am cautiously optimistic. An electrical engineer, he has been at the company a long time, 22 years to be exact, and has overseen Microsoft’s attempts to compete at the consumer level including the acquisition and continued development of Skype, as well as the development of Bing, and Microsoft’s cloud services, all of which I’m a big fan of. He also has significant experience in the enterprise sector of the company which is what drives almost two-thirds of Microsoft’s revenue. He is well liked and respected within the company and the industry and has the support of many people both inside and outside Microsoft.

From Microsoft’s Facebook page, a historic day at the company. From left to right: Chairman John W. Thompson, CEO Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer

On the other hand, some of those very same issues are what prevent me from being too overly-enthusiastic. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, as well as Google as a corporate entity, were and are well known for being very, very cutthroat when needed. This isn’t an industry where being a nice, amiable person will get your company very far. He has already been pegged as a ‘safe’ choice for Microsoft, and that could be a good thing, or it could turn out to be exactly what the company doesn’t need right now as it continues to struggle in the consumer devices and software sector.

He has said that it is important to bring new and innovative products and ideas to the market at a much faster pace and that is what we need to hear; in fact he states that the tech industry “does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation.” Whether he is actually able to follow through with that is something that only time will tell. If he can, that will be good for the company. If not, if his influence and vision meets any roadblocks, that could further hinder the company just as it seem to be getting its products and services in line.

The reason I mention that is because none other than Bill Gates himself is increasing his role in the company after having been away for quite some time, and Steve Ballmer will still have significant presence. How that will impact the new CEO’s ability to actually do his job in the way he sees fit is unclear, but their influence will undoubtedly be hanging thick in the air. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way, they built Microsoft into what it is, but it is something that might need to be kept in check, or may very well need to be embraced. A much more serious concern is the under-the-radar news that Mason Morfit, Head of ValuAct Holdings, will be coming on as a member of the board of Microsoft and wants to seriously shake things up, including the selling off of Microsoft’s hardware such as the Xbox and untying the software from the hardware. That makes me very, very worried.

Even so, I have high hopes. For all the grief it gets, Microsoft is a good, strong company. Their products are well designed, and although they’ve certainly had missteps, *no* company is innocent of that (Remember the Pippin? Or Newton? or Buzz?). I think this refresh of the executive ranks is needed, as long as the new CEO is able to lead and steer the company forward.

As a contrast to the previous posts about Sony and Blackberry, Facebook is doing well! Revenue grew 63% thanks to ad sales, which are mandatory for a (sort-of) free service like theirs.