...Google, however, has been very reluctant to use all this data in its advertising business. One reason is that it has other information that solves its main problem: picking the right ads to show on each page. It uses what people are searching for on its search site and the content of other pages on which ads appear (including, of course, the content of messages displayed in Gmail).

But as Google gets bigger it is tiptoeing into using more data for targeting. It tries to determine the location of users in order to show ads of local businesses. It also gets some personal information about users from partner sites on which it displays ads — like MySpace — to help it choose ads.

And Google has now started dipping its little toe into the pool that Madison Avenue calls behavioral targeting. That approach is based on the idea that the best way to pick an ad to show you now is to look at your online activity from a few hours or days ago. The classic example is showing car dealer ads to someone who searched for minivans yesterday. ...   more »

...What makes WiMAX so special? Think of it as WiFi’s big brother. But where a wireless network in a home, hotel lobby, airport lounge or coffee shop can provide reliable wireless connections at speeds of one or two megabits per second over distances of a few hundred feet, WiMAX is good for at least 10 megabits per second over five miles or more. Better still, in its latest guise, WiMAX can “hand off” connections from one radio tower to the next as users roam around—just like a cellular network.

WiMAX can thus fill the gaps in internet coverage, especially in rural areas and developing countries, where laying cables or telephone lines is too expensive. WiMAX can also provide internet access to mobile users from nearly anywhere. That opens up a whole new market for mobile carriers as well as for makers of internet-access equipment and suppliers of web services.

But WiMAX is not just for people on the move or in remote places. It can also provide internet connectivity to all sorts of devices. Intel wants to put its cheap WiMAX chips in traffic lights, surveillance cameras, television sets and medical equipment. Expect to see them also in digital cameras, iPods and dozens of other portable gizmos. ...   more »

I think this may be an important development. My intuition tells me that Lisi is really on to something here, that we'll be hearing lots more about this, and if his predictions are verified when Large Hadron Collider comes online next year, physics will never be the same. ~ rj

---

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. - Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt)...

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. ...   more »

"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...   more »