New Florence. New Renaissance.

Time's 10 ideas that are changing the world

More than money, more than politics, ideas are the secret power that this planet runs on. Here are a few Time magazine thinks you need need to know about 

* Common Wealth 

* The End of Customer Service 

* The Post-Movie-Star Era 

* Reverse Radicalism 

* Kitchen Chemistry 

* Geoengineering 

* Synthetic Authenticity 

* The New Austerity 

* Mandatory Health 

* Re-Judaizing Jesus

The "custom-made" Web

"A new research project from Intel Research, in Berkeley, CA, is trying to take some of the mystery out of crafting a mashup. Called Mash Maker, the project aims to let people use their ordinary Web browsers to combine information from different sites.

If, for example, you are looking at apartments on Craigslist, you can easily add information about nearby restaurants from Yelp, a recommendation site, essentially augmenting the data on the Craigslist page. With another few clicks of a button, you can put the apartments and Yelp listings on a Google map, which will also appear within the Craigslist page. The next time you visit the Craigslist page, you can reopen the mashup, and it will automatically use new data from the site."

MIT Technology Review

Camera 'looks' through clothing

"A camera that can "see" explosives, drugs and weapons hidden under clothing from 25 metres has been invented. The ThruVision system could be deployed at airports, railway stations or other public spaces.

It is based on so-called "terahertz", or T-ray, technology, normally used by astronomers to study dying stars. Although it is able to see through clothes it does not reveal "body detail" or subject people to "harmful radiation", according to the designers."

BBC News

Vatican Splendors

In time for Easter I took the family to the Vatican Splendors exhibition. While nothing beats going to Rome and seeing the Sistine Chapel, in 2 air-conditioned hours at the museum in St. Petersburg, FL without the crushing crowds at St. Peter's, we got a glimpse of many of Vatican treasures up close.

Three things in the exhibition stood out for me from a technologist's eye:

a) Even as recently as 2005, when the current pope was elected, the balloting process is manual.  Bruce Schneier who writes Crypto-gram describes the controls in the process.

The exhibit had a specimen of the paper ballot - embossed with Eligo in Summum Pontificem ("I elect as Supreme Pontiff") - where each cardinal enters name of their nominee.

The ballots are cast in the chalice with the sheep. Each cardinal places his folded ballot on the paten. Then he picks up the paten and slides his ballot into the chalice.It is designed to prevent stuffing of ballots.

When all the ballots are in the chalice, the first Scrutineer shakes it several times to mix them. Then the third Scrutineer transfers the ballots, one by one, from one chalice to the other with the shepherd, counting them in the process. If the total number of ballots is not correct, the ballots are burned and everyone votes again.

b) It took 900 men and 72 horses 5 months to move the 330 ton Vatican Obelisk  to its present location in 1585.

Today we would likely use a vehicle like the Shuttle Crawler. and do it in a day or so.

c) Every visit to the Vatican showcases the bright, Renaissance costumed Swiss Guards, who have guarded the Pope for 500 years.

Known for their halberds - half spear, half axe -I found this site describing how their weapons have evolved "Each member of the Guard has served his time in the regular Swiss Army before being allowed to join on a sponsorship from his local canton. A more sedate field uniform is available as is hard and soft body armor, Heckler and Koch MP5 series sub guns, SiG Sauer 550 assault rifles, and SiG P220 handguns with which they train regularly."

The exhibition moves to Cleveland end of May and next to St. Paul end of September.

Technology and Easter

Decorate your Easter eggs in Mathematica (as pictured)

Use your GPS and go for a Geocache Easter hunt

PCWorld highlights Google's "Easter eggs" in a gallery

TechShout has some Easter technology gift ideas

David Rumsey, Digital Cartographer

David Rumsey has collected over 150,000 maps of 18th and 19th century North and South America and has been digitizing them.

As his site describes:

"The collection on the Internet brings together the finest optical equipment and digital scanners, cutting edge viewing technology, the latest image processing software, powerful wavelet compression, and reliable long-term storage of digital images. The digitized maps are very high resolution images scanned at at least 300 pixels per inch, as measured against the original map's dimensions. The larger maps generate files frequently approaching two gigabytes in size; the average file size of images in the collection is 200 megabytes."

World Water Day

Join a virtual walk- or in-person in NYC, Seattle and Los Angeles - to support the UN efforts to bring clean, safe drinking water around the world.

Dean Kamen, of Segway fame,  showcased his water purifier has has out for a few years now on Stephen Colbert's show.

Even the Fed is Innovating

"Over the past 25 years, Wall Street wizards have moved away from plain-vanilla equity and debt, and constructed a staggering array of derivatives and other new forms of financial instruments. But while these instruments have been highly beneficial for growth, economists and policymakers have repeatedly worried about a major financial crisis triggered by out-of-control derivatives.

The long-feared crisis is now upon us—and the Fed, led by Chairman Ben Bernanke, is responding with a wave of new policy instruments. First came the Term Auction Facility, introduced in December, which allowed the Fed to better pump out money to banks without cutting interest rates. That was good, but it wasn't enough.

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)—announced Mar. 11—is a more powerful and more precise tool for addressing the dislocations in the credit market. It is aimed at the heart of the current problems: mortgage-backed securities. The problem is that nobody knows what these complicated securities are really worth, so they are clogging up bank balance sheets and impeding the normal flow of credit. Without getting into technical details, the TSLF elegantly sidesteps the problem—the big banks can use these securities as collateral, and borrow Treasuries from the Fed.

The intended result: more lending and borrowing, as nature intended."

BusinessWeek

and Bloomberg adds

"Bernanke and the four Fed governors voted yesterday to become creditors to Bear Stearns Cos., a securities firm that isn't a bank, by invoking a law that hasn't been used since the 1960s."

Birth of a Sales Tool: LinkedIn Meets eBay

Fast Company

"Let's say you're a seasoned salesperson; other Salesconx users can pay you a small fee (usually about $100) for an online "introduction" in which you introduce them to one of your contacts. The idea is that every introduction be mutually beneficial; a snowplow salesman, for example, might connect a tire salesman and a truck salesman. Sohn hopes the marketplace will be trustworthy enough that it will allow top salespeople to leave inefficient practices like cold-calling or mass-emailing behind. Think of it as LinkedIn meets eBay."

"Salesforce.com paved the way for enterprises to trust a hosted service with their business information. Ebay set the stage for a transaction between two individuals that have never met. And social networks have really re-invigorated the notion of a referral as a means of connecting with a targeted individual."

Technology and Traffic Lights

KVOA News 4 Tucson, AZ

Traditionally the timing of traffic lights is based on historical data.  For example, some green lights are longer during rush hour than they are earlier in the day.

But not on Speedway by the University of Arizona in Tuscon. Atop those lights between Euclid and Campbell, cameras count how many cars are backed up.  It feeds the information to a computer which decides in real time which intersections most need a green to keep traffic going.The program has been in development for years, even using smart bomb technology to count the cars.

"It may only be five seconds per vehicle, but when you take 50,000 vehicles traveling through today, that adds up to some real savings," says Tucson Dept. of Transportation Director Jim Glock.

"It uses a lot of advances in sensors, technology, increased computing," says researcher David Lucas.

"Our algorithm looks at all these predictions and decides how much time to give to each movement,"says researcher Pitu Mirchandani.