Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems.

About a year ago, a friend posed to me the following question: ”Why do students plunk down $150,000 for a 4-year education at MIT when virtually all of the courseware is available free of charge online?” Not only was it a great question, but answering it is critical to bringing elite levels of higher education to the online masses.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example.

A new sequencing service aims to take whole-genome sequencing mainstream.

All the elements are in place for cell phones stuffed with many different microcurrencies.

Wendy Barnaby was asked to write a book about water wars — then the facts got in the way of her story.

Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own -- any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

Dit is een verhaal over de manier waarop WIJ de informatie - die wij maken en gebruiken - móeten delen volgens de wet, kunnen delen door de technische randvoorwaarden die de infrastructuur van het internet op dit moment aan ons stelt en zóuden kunnen delen in de nabije toekomst.

"Kredietcrisis? Mevrouw, waar heeft u het over? Ik ben 21, ik heb nog geen krediet, en zie dus ook geen crisis."

Optimism is a political act. Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another.

Wat kunnen we in 2008 en 2009 van internetvideo verwachten? Sleutelwoorden voor de komende jaren zijn wat mij betreft kwaliteit en capaciteit.

Physical money is disappearing and we are moving towards a cashless society where hard cash only exists to avoid taxes or to buy illegal services and goods. A suitcase of money even had a magic cinematic effect making people do or believe in almost anythi

Europe's demographic developments will strongly influence the future of the continent.

Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

Chris Anderson’s FREE! essay in Wired is certainly a good think and is the culmination of a lot of thinking around what digital technologies mean for the economy. As a photographer, I immediately think about what Chris is saying in terms of photography.

We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders'. What we need is experimenters.The way to create working models that work better than the dysfunctional ones we have now, in a complex system where no one is in control and no one has the answers, is to try things.

To blame all the woes of the music industry on illegal downloads is poppycock. It's time for some new thinking

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and m

a product/business idea by Philip Greenspun in September 2005

"The 11th Hour picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off by drawing the connections between seemingly disparate environmental and humanitarian issues (global warming, deforestation, poverty, globalization, etc.) and defining the space where the viewer

Nrc Next had gisteren een interessant artikel over de muziekindustrie en een actie van popmuzikant Prince, die zijn laatste cd gratis weggeeft aan de bezoekers van zijn 21 concerten in Londen.

At the end of every interview someone inevitably asks “Where do you see 37signals in five years? Ten years? 20 years?” My answer remains the same: “Still in business. Beyond that I have no idea.”

Great presentation.

The implications of Google Maps' Street View are interesting. It's probably all legal, but it can be considered an invasion of privacy by a recognizable person. (One step further: imagine Google Earth offering more detailed zoom levels...)

an amazing collection of postcards from the dawn of the twentieth century that depict what life would be like in the year 2000.