Sunday, November 20, 2005

Dreamland Massmoving tendencies

Another Project Dreamland news from our scientific advancements and technology department that brings us knowledge from the next century. This time they calculated an early estimate on a prediction function that would output the development of humanity and our nice little environment given some crude but essential variables of our times. It's something like a weather forecast and in the 22nd century pretty essential. You'll not be hearing wether it's going to be raining today, but if there is a mass protest and a civilian uprising, wether there are any wars coming up or if economy is taking a hit next week. This is similar to what Isaac Asimov already predicted with his brainchild the Psychohistory and it's becoming a reality. Ofc, it's not that accurate and it's error prone to unknown outside factors, but in the short to middle term it should provide us with good knowledge on where we are heading.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Dreamland Watch your Emotions (Live)

Another activity report from our social engineering department that sounded interesting. It deals about human conflict, aggression and how to better deal with them. The first part summarizes several real world conflicts of our time and how they get stuck with the sides moving, but not changing. How can these situations be solved?
This question is answered in the second part, where they present the idea, that it's important to live your emotions. When you hide them, they will aggregate, change you accordingly and explode later on. Humans become dangerous time bombs. It's important for everyone to live emotions, but unfortunately it's only possible in the rarest instances. To counter this they propose a device that feeds your mind with the satisfaction you need in this very moment. When you're aggressive, you're shown lots of pictures that feed your aggression and instead of enraging the participants, this had calmed them down. Sexually intensive persons were calmed by feeding them with sexual images in the right moment.
An advantage of this device is that it doesn't create images, but rather strengthens the participants fantasies and puts them in a more concrete context.

We understand that this is not a tool for everyone, but a help for people who cannot cope with their emotions. On a grand scale people vs people, it'd still be best to organize a football match!

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Dreamland Travel Tubes

The future kind of transportation has recently been developed in our mobility technology labs and it's amazing. The basic idea is to have a system of tubes with a certain size, much like our streets, but below earth. They are designed in a hub like system where the bigger cities distributor nodes are connected through various tubes, which in turn are connected with smaller distributor nodes and finally to the end user or public terminal. Instead of a car, you'll own a cylindrical carrier device. You get into it, enter the destination and it will take you wherever you want and wherever you have access to. At first the system will be mostly public, but as the technology becomes cheaper it will connect to each and every household. The advantages of this system compared to the automotive transportation of the early 21st century are:
1. Higher throughput - the whole system will be computer operated and highly efficient, gone are the times of waiting infront of a street-light with no car coming from either direction and gone are the days of human error. Computers are not perfect either, but there will be a lot less accidents.
2. Greater speeds - the technology to move these devices will be similar to the technology of maglev trains which could already reach speeds of 500kph in the early 21st century.
3. Mixture of public and individual transportation - it's still individual transportation as you can get to any point from any point, however it can also be used publically if the state provides several carrier devices for public use, anybody could call them and use them to go wherever they please (or wherever they are allowed to go with them).
4. As green as the sources you generate electricity from and in general there will be a lot less contamination than with cars
5. Different tubes for different services - a passenger tube has different requirements than one for goods.

Basically it's like a gigantic pneumatic post system.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Dreamland Evaluater

Project Dreamland Inc. has to announce that we made a mistake. The "Understander", the machine we proudly presented last time proved to be inusable. We operated on some test persons, but none was able to reproduce the knowledge he or she gained during the operation. We could not even measure brain activity or receive any electrical signalling from the head, owing to some of the heavy force-fields we had to implement. Additionally the participants of the test showed signs of neural disorder after they had been enlightened and it seemed that the brain would undergo a rapid degradation process while being inside the tunnel. Unfortunately we have to conclude that this project failed.

We've also made a lot of thoughts on how to prevent this from happening in the future and we've come to the conclusion that only a solid autonomous machine evaluation process could help us in our future goals. We are thus trying to invent several automate "evaluaters", to aid us in determining the quality of our work. We are not thinking that they'll replace human evaluation in the near future, but as we've noted human descision making often is error prone and we felt the lack of a machine based approach in addition to the human jury.
The various thoughts on this machine circled around two basic ideas. First, we think about a very specific single-domain evaluation process implemented in a machine with detailed knowledge on the single topic only and a more general cross-domain evaluater that will try to link paths and determine the quality of our work given more general knowledge about a multitude of fields. We consider both evaluaters to be equally important, yet in some cases one might prove to be more useful than the other.
We're also using them to evaluate their own application in all the different fields and so far we could even think of a DSS aiding judges in court. It'll be interesting to get an overview of all the possible implementations and how they'll turn out.