“Each year, Technology Review selects what it believes are the 10 most important emerging technologies. The winners are chosen based on the editors’ coverage of key fields. The question that we ask is simple: is the technology likely to change the world?”

This year’s list contains three technologies that caught my eye:

• Real-time search — search engines wrestling to make sense of streams of real-time information from sources like Facebook and Twitter
• Social TV — remember all of the talk about interactive TV? Seems we have arrived there given the use of social media tools as a back channel for conversations amongst friends watching TV (same time / different place). But there is research underway to enhance this.
• Cloud programming — featuring research from those working on better programming tools for cloud computing

Worth the read.

Check out:

• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask about IT; and,
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask about Governance Assessments.

I also found their IT Advisory Committee page. Here are some of the additional resources they have there:

• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About IT Projects (2007)
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About the Information Technology Aspects of Business Continuity Planning (2005)
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About Information Technology Outsourcing (2005)

Thanks Jerry!

“… created what he called advanced chess, in which players are assisted by off-the-shelf software. Each competitor enters the position of their pieces into a computer and uses the moves that the program recommends to inform their decisionmaking.

At a “freestyle” online tournament in 2005, where any kind of entrant was allowed, such human-machine pairings were absolutely awesome. In fact, the overall winner wasn’t one of the grandmasters or supercomputers; it was a pair of twentysomething amateurs using run-of-the-mill PCs and inexpensive apps. …”

Clive notes that

The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.

And …

As we face that trade-off, figuring out how to integrate machine intelligence into our personal lives becomes the key challenge. When should you rely on online tools to fill you in on the news or your friends’ lives? When should you forage on your own?

There’s no one answer — and there never will be, because everyone is different. It’s a personal quest. But there’s also no avoiding the question, because it’s clear that serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines.

Ultimately, the real question is, what sort of cyborg do you want to be?

This article is worth reading. It leads to the conclusion that the answers to performance (personal or organizational) lie not in ‘either | or’ trade-offs but rather in how we combine the power of machines and humans.

In a nutshell, this article provides links to research and cases where the promise of electronic health has not been realized. It is always good to see the other side.

As I watched this story, I was reminded how even biology today is an information science. The importance of data and information to generating knowledge about this virus is underscored in stories such as this.

Enjoy.

Now several sources are reporting a third undersea break — this time affecting Iran. These outages remind us of out dependencies. With three incidents, the conspiracy theorists are out in full force.

Lest we doubt it, be reminded – the Internet forms a major backbone for both commerce and everyday life.

[Postscript | 2008.02.18] – turns out that there may not have been a third break. Conspiracy theorists will continue to find pictures in the shadows..