Thursday, November 21, 2002

No more arguing with the referee Credit-card sized microwave transmitters are fitted in players' shin-pads. A peanut-sized transmitter goes inside the ball. Each produces a signature pattern several hundred times a second. Up to 10 antennas around the pitch relay the information to a central computer, which pools the data to reconstruct the game. Within milliseconds referees receive information via a wrist receiver. "The system can give information before the referee understands what's going on," says Sylvia Couronné of makers Cairos Technologies based in Karlsruhe, Germany. The computer sounding the alarm also collects statistics for coaches, pundits and fans. It can even recreate the game online, or control television cameras. This winter, a full test will begin at a stadium in Nuremberg, Germany. Cairos hope to persuade FIFA, football's governing body, to use the technology in the next World Cup, to be held in Germany in 2006. [Smart Mobs] One of the many dreams of 3D was to recreate/simulcast sports in 3D, such that a viewer could dynamically control her viewpoint while the game was taking place. One of the requirements of such a system would be to faithfully capture the movements of the players on the field. Looks like we've taken one more step towards our dreams. 2:38:13 PM

Grandma Anne is being moved to a healthcare facility in No. Hollywood, hopefully to be transfered to a hospice shortly thereafter. I feel so distant from it all... 12:28:50 PM

Last night I got a chance to meet up with many long-time friends, most of whom I haven't seen in ages. Mike, Nancy, Karen, Colin, Lana, Jen, Greg, and Richard all made it out. We can't go months (or years!) before we spend time together again! 12:21:34 PM

Friends Mike and Nancy shared good news with us last night. Its early still, and hopefully their folks won't read this before they tell them :-) Looking forward to growing the extended family! 12:17:25 PM

Doc talks Creative Commons Doc "Doc" Searls interviewed today for the Creative Commons: Well, as we pointed out in Cluetrain, business is thick with the language of shipping. We have something we call "content" that we "load" into a "channel" and "address" for "delivery" to a "consumer" or an "end user." Even a category as human-oriented as customer support talks about "delivering" services... That said, the businesses that are most afflicted with pipe-mindedness are the ones that are quickest to call everything "content." It's amazing to me that I used to be a writer, and now I'm a "content provider." Entertainment and publishing are the biggest offenders here, at least in the sense that they see the Net entirely as a plumbing system. The whole notion of a "commons" is anathema to the plumbing construct. This was the problem with all these dot-com acronyms with a 2 in the middle -- B2B, B2C and so on. "To" was the wrong preposition. As Christine Boehlke put it to me once, the correct middle letter should have been W, because in a real marketplace we do business with people not to them. Does anybody ever shake hands and say "Nice doing business to you!"? Because the Net is more fundamentally a place than a pipe, we do business with each other there, not just to each other. Critical difference. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Lisa!) [Boing Boing] Of course, this makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure I grasp the significance in terms of implementation... 10:32:14 AM

Google your life MSFT's new project takes all of your life experiences and puts them in an unstructured database, making a searchable record of your life. I imagine this will including your GPS readings as you walk around, the RFIDs your PDA logs, the numbers you call and the numbers that call you: It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers. The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC. Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the "giant shoebox problem". "In a giant shoebox full of photos, it's hard to find what you are looking for," says Microsoft's Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Will!) [Boing Boing] Ah, the shoebox problem. It's gaining scale like the AI problem. "Let's solve the meta problem to solve all the real problems, that should be easy!" Har har. I say, solve the immediate problems first, so that you can identify the root issues, THEN try to refactor the solution to scale. 10:29:12 AM

The yam solution I yam what I yam, Popeye says. Making that clear, and respecting that same self-determined power in each individual, is what digital identity is all about. And Jon Udell nails a critical requirement of it: each of us has to assert our inner Popeye: For a very long time, I've thought that digital identity is the solution to spam. That's one of the reasons I attach S/MIME signatures to my email messages. As a standard practice, this could divide the world into two camps: those serious enough about email communication to acquire and use digital certificates issued by (and revocable by) some well-known third party, and everybody else. Client-side filters would begin by splitting inbound mail into two piles. If you wanted to land in the first pile, you'd assert your identity. Right arm. Soon as I get my email working again, that's what I'm doing. And so should the rest of us. How about making it a goal for all bloggers to traffic in certified mail? Seems like a good place to start. [Doc Searls] I'm in. how about you? 10:23:45 AM