A 26-year-old PhD student from the University of New South Wales has patented a new way of exploring the web that could revolutionise existing search engines.

Developed by Ori Allon, the Orion© search engine is designed to complement searches conducted on services such as Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

Search engines find pages on which keywords occur. Sometimes these pages are important to the topic. Other times they are not.

Orion© finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines.

And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant - China - eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.

The new supercomputers will not be in use until the end of the decade at the earliest, but they are increasingly being viewed as crucial investments for progress in science, advanced technologies and national security.

Once the exclusive territory of nuclear weapons designers and code breakers, ultrafast computers are increasingly being used in everyday product design. Procter & Gamble used a supercomputer to study the airflow over its Pringles potato chips to help stop them from fluttering off the company's assembly lines.

The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun, now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web; the day after, everything.

Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.

At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had plenty.

Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and "intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.

I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

You've likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founding of Apple, and the Jobs visit to PARC that inspired the Macintosh.

But what you may not know about is the really early history. The stories of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy, of the Augmentation Research Center, and of the early days of the Stanford University AI Lab (SAIL) are not well known. Yes, you may have heard that Engelbart invented the mouse, and that SAIL and Stanford led to companies like Sun and Cisco. But there are better stories, great and old ones from the early days of computing, about the events that led to personal computing as we know it.

In his wonderful new book, What the Dormouse Said..., John Markoff tells these stories.

Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound.

Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself.

One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck called a tuned electromagnetic resonator collar (TERC). Using sensing techniques developed for magnetic resonance imaging, the collar detects changes in capacitance caused by movement of the vocal cords, and is designed to allow speech to be heard above loud background noise.

Forget about smartphones. Two of the big brains behind those essential toys say they will build the basis of smart--really smart, like humans--machines, everywhere.

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, creators of the Palm and Handspring personal digital assistants and the Treo smartphone, have formed a software company built around a powerful and unorthodox vision of how the human brain works. In its early stages, they hope to create predictive machines useful for things like weather forecasting and oil exploration. Further out--much further, says Hawkins--they plan to lay the basis for cosmologically attuned robots that conceive and reflect on the universe itself.

Okay, it is a big idea. And so far the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, called Numenta, has built what the creators say is a set of tools for creating pattern-recognition software capable of "learning" shapes and events, with a goal of foreseeing what the pattern will next create. Yet these tools draw on decades of work that Hawkins has done on how the brain works. If it pans out--and there is an attractive logic to much of his thinking--Numenta may certainly oversee the creation of embedded software that adapts and improves its own performance.

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

IBM has devised a way to let computers think like vertebrates.

Charles Peck and James Kozloski of IBM's Biometaphorical Computing team say they have created a mathematical model that mimics the behavior of neocortal minicolumns, thin strands of tissue that aggregate impulses from neurons. Further research could one day lead to robots that can "see" like humans and/or make appropriate decisions when bombarded with sensory information.

A research paper on the model is expected to come out this week.

The brain consists of roughly 28 billion cells, Peck explained. The 200 million minicolumns essentially gather sensory data and organize it for higher parts of the brain. The minicolumns also communicate with each other through interconnections. Minicolumns are roughly 1/20 of a millimeter in diameter and extend through the cortex.

The mathematical model created at IBM simulates the behavior of 500,000 minicolumns connected by 400 million connections. With it, "we were able to demonstrate self-organization" and behavior similar to that seen in the real world, Peck said.

In a new volley in the battle for digital home entertainment, I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba will announce details Monday of their newest microprocessor design, known as Cell, which is expected to offer faster computing performance than microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

Anticipation of the announcement, to be made at an industry conference here, has touched off widespread industry speculation over the impact of the new chip technology, which promises to enhance video gaming and digital home entertainment.

Sony plans to use the new Cell in its PlayStation 3, likely to be introduced in 2006, and Toshiba plans to use the chip in advanced high-definition televisions, also to be introduced next year.

However, many industry executives and analysts say that Cell's impact may ultimately be much broader, staving off the PC industry's efforts to dominate the digital living room and at the same time creating a new digital computing ecosystem that includes Hollywood, the living room and high-performance scientific and engineering markets.

"There is a new game in town, and it will revive an industry that has been kind of sleepy for the last few years," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry analyst and president of Envisioneering, a market research company in Seaford, N.Y.

The Cell's introduction also comes at a time when the computer industry has largely given up investing in fundamentally new processor designs and has instead chosen to use the additional space available on the newest generation of chips to place multiple processors and thus add performance.

The Cell chip, computer experts said, could have a theoretical peak performance of 256 billion mathematical operations per second. With that much processing power, the chip would have placed among the top 500 supercomputers on a list maintained by scientists at the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee as recently as June 2002.

Analysis No chip in years has caused as much excitement as the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It promises to be the most important microprocessor of the decade, with potentially enormous repercussions for how the industry computes, and how the rest of us use digital media. It will power the PlayStation 3 and technical and commercial computing.

Technical details of Cell will be disclosed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next week, and in anticipation we'll look first at how the Cell works and then tomorrow at what it means to the industry and consumers.

The flow of a document, including the topics covered and the ways those topics relate to each other, is clear to people. It would be useful if computer systems that process documents could also learn how to consider topic information.

Teaching a computer to discern a document's topics and create a summary that puts the topics in the correct order is a bit like teaching it how to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Current methods focus on finding the right match for a given piece.

MIT and Cornell University researchers have developed a system that does the equivalent of putting pieces that show parts of a mountain and pieces that show parts of the sky into separate groups, and putting the sky pieces above the mountain pieces.

After training on subject-specific sets of documents and document summaries, the researchers' automatic classification algorithm, or content model, can extract the topic structure of a group of related topics. It selects and orders topics to generate to summary.

Globally networked, easy-to-use computers can enhance learning, but only within an educational environment that encourages students to question "facts" and seek challenges.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has remarked that education in the 20th century is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant and being fed the menu. He meant that representations of ideas have replaced the ideas themselves; students are taught superficially about great discoveries instead of being helped to learn deeply for themselves.

In the near future, all the representations that human beings have invented will be instantly accessible anywhere in the world on intimate, notebook-size computers. But will we be able to get from the menu to the food? Or will we no longer understand the difference between the two? Worse, will we lose even the ability to read the menu and be satisfied just to recognize that it is one?

There has always been confusion between carriers and contents. Pianists know that music is not in the piano. It begins inside human beings as special urges to communicate feelings. But many children are forced to "take piano" before their musical impulses develop; then they turn away from music for life. The piano at its best can only be an amplifier of existing feelings, bringing forth multiple notes in harmony and polyphony that the unaided voice cannot produce.

The computer is the greatest "piano" ever invented, for it is the master carrier of representations of every kind. Now there is a rush to have people, especially schoolchildren, "take computer." Computers can amplify yearnings in ways even more profound than can musical instruments. But if teachers do not nourish the romance of learning and expressing, any external mandate for a new "literacy" becomes as much a crushing burden as being forced to perform Beethoven's sonatas while having no sense of their beauty. Instant access to the world's information will probably have an effect opposite to what is hoped: students will become numb instead of enlightened.

In addition to the notion that the mere presence of computers will improve learning, several other misconceptions about learning often hinder modern education. Stronger ideas need to replace them before any teaching aid, be it a computer or pencil and paper, will be of most service. One misconception might be called the fluidic theory of education: students are empty vessels that must be given knowledge drop by drop from the full teacher-vessel. A related idea is that education is a bitter pill that can be made palatable only by sugarcoating-a view that misses the deep joy brought by learning itself.

Another mistaken view holds that humans, like other animals, have to make do only with nature's mental bricks, or innate ways of thinking, in the construction of our minds. Equally worrisome is the naive idea that reality is solely what the senses reveal. Finally, and perhaps most misguided, is the view that the mind is unitary, that it has a seamless "I"-ness. Quite the contrary. Minds are far from unitary: they consist of a patchwork of different mentalities.

Hewlett-Packard's Alan Kay, who played a pivotal role in the invention of the personal computer, says business should think more creatively about the potential of technology.

I have a soft spot for people who say things like "The computer revolution hasn't started yet...we're not even close to what we should have." I'm prone to agree. But when the speaker is Alan Kay, who invented a huge proportion of what we do have today, I enthusiastically grant him credence.

This is the guy who, working for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late '60s and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early '70s, invented or contributed heavily to the invention of: the personal computer, windows-type graphical user interfaces, personal computer networks, and object-oriented computer programming. All of these seminal creations are baked into today's computing environment, which Kay casually disparages. They say that great inventors are often easily dissatisfied. An hour or so with Kay would suggest there's truth in that.

Kay is now a senior fellow at HP Labs, where he continues his work. I was talking to him recently, though, because he has just been awarded an extraordinary trio of prizes—sort of a triple crown of computing—in honor of his many years of extraordinary breakthroughs. First, in February, he was one of four former PARC researchers to be given the nation's top engineering award—the Charles Stark Draper Prize—by the National Academy of Engineering. Then in April the Association for Computing Machinery gave him its Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." Finally, in June, he won the annual Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation of Japan, which comes with a cash award of approximately $450,000 and aims to recognize those who not only contribute to technical progress but also to "human development." This is a man with plenty of laurels to rest on.

But I was struck most by how much he thinks we haven't yet done. "We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."

But what about all those great things he invented? Aren't we getting any mileage from all that? Not nearly enough, Kay believes. For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short. At Xerox PARC the aim of much of Kay's research was to develop systems to aid in education. But business, instead, has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."

If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. But the computers most business people use today are not suited for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "The PC has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero—but that's what it's for."

Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web—it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it. "You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part."

Though Kay claims he's "not trying to sound like a crab here," he does border on it, especially when shortly thereafter he asserts "pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."

But a man like this cannot be dismissed merely because he occasionally creeps toward arrogance. What's much more important is that he does not merely complain. He has a vision and a team working to bring his alternate vision to reality. Over the past three decades Kay has worked at Apple, Atari, Disney and now Hewlett-Packard. Some of the researchers in his team have moved with him from company to company. At HP, he may have found the best fit yet. The world's second-largest computing company, it has the deepest pockets of any research outfit he's ever worked for, and far more ways to bring innovations to the market.

So what is Kay trying to build now? Nothing less than "a new way of doing objects, operating systems, and networks, that makes use of the infrastructure we already have." Kay's ultimate dream is to completely remake the way we communicate with each other. At the least, he wants to enable people to collaborate and work together simply and elegantly. For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person." In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines." In other words, a system by which anybody could connect to anybody else at any time without having to go through some server.

New technology could soon overrun all the existing forms of memory used in computers, according to the company developing it.

Carbon nanotube memory could be a panacea to all existing memory issues, start-up Nantero said, because it was cheap and did not lose its contents if turned off. Currently computer memory comprises DRAM, S-RAM and NV-RAM (or flash memory).

DRAM, used in PCs and servers, is fast and cheap but its contents are lost when power is switched off. SRAM or Static RAM is faster and needs less power but is more expensive and also loses its contents when power is switched off. It is used most commonly for cache memory. NV-RAM is slower, power-hungry, very expensive but keeps its contents when power is switched off.

But Nanotube-based/Nonvolatile RAM (NRAM) could eventually replace all three. It is not without competitors though -- Phase-change memory and Magnetic RAM are also competing for the prize. So what's special about carbon nanotubes?

It's faster than SRAM, it should be cheap and it doesn't lose its contents when switched off. It should have an almost unlimited life, it should eventually be denser than DRAM, needs less power than DRAM and is resistant to radiation.

Nantero CEO, Greg Schmergel, claims carbon nanotube memory could be made with conventional CMOS manufacturing, keeping costs low. PCs using it could have an instant-on capability, no more lengthy boot time. Servers could have the speed of SRAM without the cost. Devices using flash could have greatly increased capacity for much lower cost. This would be nirvana for all of us and billionaire status for Nantero founders. How is it done?

Gadgets that let you control computers with a wave or a nod could offer an escape from keyboards and mice.

For once, I control the weather.

I’m standing in front of a green backdrop inside a windowless studio at Cybernet Systems, a technology research and development company in Ann Arbor, MI. A digital camera in front of me is beaming my image, real time, to a television monitor that shows a scene typical of a nightly news weather report. There I am, standing before a map of the Midwest. I extend my arm and begin twirling my hand over the blip of Detroit. The map behind me zooms in on the area beneath my palm. The city widens into view and comes into focus. Looks like it’s going to be a wet one, folks.

This is GestureStorm—a software system Cybernet developed to let weather broadcasters run through their forecasts with simple flicks of the hand. No wires. No buttons. No geeky audiovisual control panels. Move a hand one way, and you paint raindrops on-screen. Move it another, and you stir up a tornado. The interface is completely a matter of gesture. And if a lot of people have their way, this is only the beginning. Gesture recognition technology aims to become this millennium’s remote control—a fluid, freeing means of interacting with all the digital stuff around us. Think Minority Report. In that film, Tom Cruise stands before a futuristic digital display, pointing and waving his way through a cascade of images and documents. This stuff, once the domain of science fiction, is finally creeping into the real world.