The Pew Internet and American Life Project presented 742 people with a set of seven scenarios meant to reveal the social, economic and political effects of the Internet by 2020. Below is a snapshot of the responses to each scenario.

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a ?flatteningworld.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and ’smart agentsproliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humansability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.
• Tech ‘refusenikswill emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
• People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.
• English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence.

Full Report

Today probiotics such as LAB are common in our foods and in dietary supplements, but in the future there will be increased use of probiotics in disease treatment and prevention. Recently researchers at Rutgers reported on a revolutionary treatment for periodontal disease. The innovation is a slow release polymer-based drug delivery system that may be implanted in pockets between the teeth and the gum.
The plastic material is inserted between the tooth and the diseased gum; as it breaks down it releases salicylic acid to treat the pain and inflammation and three antimicrobials each with a different release rate to treat the infection.

Human clinical trials may be two or more years away depending on the FDA.

Additionally, BASF Future Business GmbH and OrganoBalance GmbH are developing personal care and oral hygiene products based on lactic acid bacteria. The Lactobacillus (LAB) prevents cavities by binding to cavity causing bacteria preventing it from sticking to tooth surfaces. Researchers at OrganoBalance GmbH have discovered that LAB stimulans also promotes rapid regeneration of the skin’s protective microbial flora. They hope to develop lotions and creams using LAB that will have cosmetic applications.
via MedGadget

Warehouse workers will soon use HUDs (heads up displays) and wearable RFID to track and manage inventory. NEC and Muratec have developed a system that uses blinking light and head-mount displays to detect a worker’s location and guide them to RFID-tagged stock items. The workers use the wearable RFID readers to check the stock item.
via RFID in Japan

Sydney had to find the perfect pair of jeans for an upcoming event. She dreaded it . Past experience told her that she would try on lots of jeans before she found the perfect pair. This meant getting undressed and redressed over and over and searching racks and racks of jeans until she finally hit on the perfect fit. She felt tired just thinking about it.

Sound familiar?

Well when VOIP and RFID meet interesting things can happen. Mitsukoshi, a Japanese department chain just finished testing a system that uses mobile phone-like PDAs that read RFID tags on jeans. This system lets shoppers search the store’s inventory to find their size and availability from their dressing rooms. Not only that, they can call a sales clerk using the system and have the clerk bring the clothes directly to their dressing room.

This system was pilot tested beginning in February and during the test jeans’ sales increased 15.8 %.
US retailers such as the Home Depot, the Gap, Virgin Mega and Abercrombie and Fitch have expressed interest in seeing demonstrations of this system.

We first heard about this pilot on RFID in Japan.

On September 19 a flock of specially equipped homing pigeons will once again set out to blog about air quality, this time over Newport Beach, CA. The pigeon bloggers sport custom-built miniature pollution sensors that collect and send information to an online server where pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time using Google Map. This project has two main goals: 1) to re-invoke urgency around a topic that has serious health, environmental and political consequences, but lacks public action and commitment to change; and 2) to broaden the notion of grassroots scientific data gathering while building bridges between scientific research agendas and activist oriented citizen concerns.

PigeonBlog is one of the ubiquitous computing demonstrations planned for UbiComp 2006. UbiComp is an international meeting focused on ubiquitous computing. You should check out the other demonstrations of ubiquitous computing posted on the conference website. They range from A Persuasive Game to Encourage Healthy Dietary Behaviors in Kindergarten Children to a MASTABA: A Digital Shrine for Family.