Recently I was in Atlanta to address the annual breakfast gathering called “State of the Region,” which is put on by the Atlanta Regional Commission. This particular year the focus was on introducing a new regional effort called “50 Forward,” which is literally an attempt to imagine the region in the year 2060. [...]

I spent yesterday at the Discover Brilliant conference in Seattle. Very nice, long first day. PS Reilly, the conference organizer, made a choice about how to start the conference. She trotted out one of the bigger elephants in the climate change room and let it wander about and break some myths. [...]

I’ve been managing geographic information systems (GIS) professionals for a long time, I’ve listened to Jack Dangermond, who owns the biggest GIS company - Environmental Systems Research Institute talk passionately about mapping as a way to save the world. Look in our archives for an article I wrote in 2000.
ESRI has always [...]

Brenda’s previous blog rings true, and rather than adding a comment, let me add this way. The two major computing input forms, the qwerty keyboard and the mouse have been around since 1873 and 1981 respectively. Amazingly little has changed. Until now.
About five years ago at the University of Washington Human Interface [...]

We typically talk to our computers through a set of buttons that transmit one letter of a command at a time, a mouse that can select whole words or phrases, and a smallish glass-like window where we see what we’re saying. We typically do that sitting down and a little hunched over – [...]

Glen Hiemstra (that’s me) is among a few featured experts in a current article at MSNBC. In a story by Allison Linn, entitled “Big business in seeing the future of business,” I make comments on global warming and the future of autos. It is an extensive and interesting article, and good company to [...]

I’ve been listening to The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, by the Dalai Lama. There are strong insights in it about both topics - spirituality and science. There are great stories about many of the famous people in science and about the upbringing of tibetan monks. [...]

I noticed a CNN article about a Japanese robot serving tea today.
Bill Gates wrote an article about robotics that appeared in Scientific American in January, where he makes the case that robotics today is where PC manufacturing was about the time Bill Gates and others started Microsoft. I think he’s right, and [...]

Synchronicity, or maybe just the luck of a vague clue about the issues, strikes today. I posted yesterday about a coming budget tension between space (defense, weapons, and exploration) and climate change mitigation. Well, today, Wired is displaying an article headlined: Bush Budget Funds NASA, Cuts EPA, by Luke O’Brien. The [...]

The medical field is far behind most others in technology deployment. Unlike car sales, Amazon.com, or even real estate, there are few sophisticated customer support systems (some exist in HMO’s such as GroupHealth). I have good insurance, but I can’t email my doctor, I can’t see my own medical records easily, I don’t [...]