Julian Stevens, of Moorfields Eye Hospital, is an expert on laser refractive surgery. He has, in the past, offered tailored treatment for members of the special forces. “They require 1,000-metre vision at night,” he said. “It is the same for fighter pilots.”

Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual’s life and career – Times Online.

We are entering an age where we will have an unparalleled ability to alter ourselves, specializing or bodies as much as we have specialized our minds through education.  This kind of tinkering will forever change our society.

Look at the NFL today vs. 60 years ago.  Players are bigger, stronger, and faster.  But that difference will be nothing compared to what science will soon allow us to do.  In 50 years, what physical enhancements you have may be more meaningful than your education or experience on the job hunt.

I don’t know if it will be good or not, but it will certainly be different.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Financial Fix
2. Creative Destruction and Government
3. The rising marginal cost of originality

“While several previous studies have looked at the robustness of food webs to a variety of sequences of species loss, none of them have come up with a way to identify the most devastating sequence of extinctions,” said food web biologist Jennifer Dunne of the Santa Fe Institute, who was not involved in the research. Using a modified version of PageRank, Dunne said, the researchers were able to identify which species extinctions within a food web would lead to biggest chain-reaction of species death.

via Google Algorithm Predicts When Species Will Go 404, Not Found | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Greenpeace 2.0, powered by numbers, can’t be far behind.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Secrets From the School of Googlenomics
2. Google Wave will change the world
3. Yahoo Finance is Fun

But the internet has been paving the way for a change.  Like reading articles on wikipedia, hyperlinks allow you to create a new manner of reading though a story. A story cam be told out of sequence with the characters rambling thoughts being linked to other parts of the story (imagine Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury with hyperlinks connecting parts of each characters viewpoint in the book – imagine if Faulkner could have used random hyperlinks to further the effect of the mentally handicapped first narrator).

Some point not to soon from now, we will have ebook only releases, and when that happens, it will only make sense to take advantage of the greater richness linking and embedding can provide.  When something reminds a character of a story, the full story can be linked, half remembered lyrics can cue the tune or even the full song.  Ebooks will truly change the structure of story telling forever.  Those that don’t augment words with the risher conent and context the medium provides will surely be left behind.

Think of the last time you spent an hour or more clicking through Wikipedia – the future of books may soon resemble that experience.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. CustomEyes
2. Hyperlink or Kill a Tree
3. A Lack of Innovation?

While the US Postal Service (and the reporters covering it) focuses on doom and gloom and how mail is dead, the Swiss post service is adapting.  There are many companies, like Zumbox and Earth Class Mail, getting in the game and providing forward thinking solutions. Now the question is: will the USPS change or continue to turn money into nothing (because like legends, government funded entities never really die)?

ps – sorry for loosely quoting the sandlot for cynical purposes but like a true member of gen y, pop culture constantly explodes forth from my mind.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. The Oldest Government Run Business
2. Putting It All Together
3. Freedom to Act (like an idiot)

What I really like about this possible solution is that it could kill two birds with one stone (forgive the pun): making hydrogen viable and affordable and reusing rather than disposing of chicken feathers.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Financial Fix

what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that’s true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

via The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. – BusinessWeek.

I would recommend you read the entire article, but if you don’t have time, you can skip to the punch line:

“A high-wage country such as the U.S. either has to develop innovative products and services to compete with low-cost countries such as China or accept a lower standard of living.”

We need to avoid policies that distort market incentives, because these policies (more often than not) draw capital (time and money) away from the efficient and growth producing uses.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Financial Innovation in a Sentence
2. Trading in the Fast Lane
3. The Government Can’t Count Right

Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the world of advertising, removing human guesswork from the equation.

The move was risky. Going ahead with the phaseout… meant giving up campaigns that were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the unproven possibility that the auction process would generate even bigger sums. “We were going to erase a huge part of the company’s revenue,” says Tim Armstrong, then head of direct sales in the US… “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have said, ‘Hold on, don’t make that change.’ But we had Larry, Sergey, and Eric saying, ‘Let’s go for it.’”

via Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability.

This is an amazing, must read article.  On it’s face, it is about the chief economist at Google, but it is really about how Google (and other itnernet busienses) are combining technology and economics to create better (more efficient and profitable) business models.

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Google Wave will change the world
2. Yahoo Finance is Fun
3. Big Money In Finance

Possibly (Computer Generated) Related posts:

1. Saving the Whales, Google style
2. Secrets From the School of Googlenomics
3. Yahoo Finance is Fun