Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Current Affairs
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Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. Instead, information flows freely and often globally. We need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy.
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Explaining Science and Engineering
As I have followed the international news regarding the Japanese disaster, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical concepts. We live in a technological society, where understanding of scientific processes and engineering design balances are essential to informed debate and decision making.
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Ubiquitous Communication
I have posted a few thoughts on the coming Internet of Things and the implications for cognitive communication over on the Microsoft on the Issues blog. Everywhere, anytime communication is a notable result of recent computing advances, but it’s dependent upon available bandwidth, and that bandwidth is finite. Spectrum is, in many ways, like a…
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Intellectual Amplification via Computing
As the recent performance of IBM’s Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! Illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing is opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush’s 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.
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Disruptive Innovation: Changing Lives
In a world of exponential technological change, with its concomitant social and economic disruptions, it is all too easy for the intelligentsia and technorati to pontificate glibly on macroeconomic trends, demographic shifts and global talent flows while speaking sotto voce, if at all, about the human cost of technological future shock. I confess that I…
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DLD: Sprechen Sie Cloud?
This week, I had the opportunity to speak at the Digital, Life, Design (DLD) conference in Munich. I posted a few thoughts on the future of experiences over on the Microsoft blog.