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London's a leader among smart cities. Photo courtesy of Flickr user UGArdener

The torch relay for the London Olympics began in England over the weekend. Officially, this hearkens back to the original Olympics in Ancient Greece, when a flame was lit to commemorate the theft of fire by Prometheus from top god Zeus. Unofficially, this is when the people running the Games go into panic mode because they have just over two months to make sure everything works.

It will be one of the first big tests of the modern “smart” city. Roughly 11 million people are expected to visit London later this summer, with 3 million more “car trips” added on the busiest days. The city already is wired with thousands of sensors which will let engineers closely track traffic flow, with the goal of curbing nightmarish gridlock–although it probably says something that the people manning the city’s data center will be provided with sleeping pods so they don’t have to venture out and risk getting stuck in traffic. (Not that London doesn’t have some experience in using tech to help drivers move around the city. When members of the International Olympic Committee were in town several years ago to see if London would be able to host the Games, their cars were outfitted with GPS devices, which allowed city officials to track them and turn stoplights green as they approached intersections.)

In response to the likely heavy traffic, a sensor system called CityScan is now being installed atop three buildings in London. It will be able to scan and read air quality all over the city and produce a 3-D map that lets people know when and where pollution may be getting unhealthy.

Machines talking to machines

No doubt that the Olympics will have a profound effect in shaping London’s future. By the time the Games begin, for instance, it will have Europe’s largest free WiFi zone, with the city’s iconic red phone booths converted, fittingly, into hotspots. But another opportunity London landed earlier this month could have just as much impact, perhaps more. A company called Living PlanIt announced that it will begin testing its “Urban Operating System” in the Greenwich section of the city.

What does that mean? Put simply, London would have its own operating system, much as your PC runs on Windows or your Mac runs on Apple’s IOS. This ties into the latest hot buzz phrase, “the internet of things,” which describes a world where machines talk to other machines. No human interaction required. So, for a city, this means sensors in buildings would connect to sensors in water treatment plants which would connect to sensors in stoplights. It would be one gigantic, computerized urban nervous system, which a lot of experts think is the only way cities can survive a future when they’ll contain more than two out of every three people on Earth.

Based on what sensors reveal about the location and movement of humans in a section of a city, for instance, buildings will automatically adjust their temperatures, streetlights will dim or brighten, water flow will increase or slow. Or, in the event of a disaster, emergency services would have real-time access to traffic data, trauma unit availability, building blueprints. And soon enough, our smart phones will be able to tap in to the Urban OS. So will our household appliances.

This is not some 21st century analogue of the personal jet pack. The Urban OS is the driving force behind a smart city being built from the ground up in northern Portugal. Construction is scheduled to be completed in three years; eventually it will have about 150,000 residents. It will also have more than 100 million sensors.

The U.S. soon will have its own real-world, smart city laboratory. Late next month, ground will be broken near Hobbs, New Mexico, near the Texas border, for a $1 billion cutting-edge ghost town, where researchers will test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets. It will be a very cool place–except no one will live there.

Just machines talking amongst themselves.

Sense and sensorbility

Here are other ways cities are getting smarter:

• And you thought telephone booths were so over: Meet the Smart Booth, or as it’s being promoted, “The Telephone Booth of the Future.” Not only is it solar-powered, not only does it allow you to make calls on its touch screen or get tourist and shopping info, but it also offers WiFi, monitors pollution and has a surveillance camera connected to the local police station. It’s being tested in Turin, Italy.
• In the future, there’s no such thing as a free park: Not everything will be better in the future if the new smart parking meters in Santa Monica, California are any indication. Sensors are able to tell when someone leaves the space and the meter automatically resets itself back to zero time. So you can no longer park on someone else’s dime.
• Flowing pains: When you hear “smart meter,” usually you think power grid. But cities are also looking at how effective smart water meters might be. Places where water efficiency is given a high priority, such as Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, can use 50 percent less water than comparable cities in the region.
• So, the train is late. Buy some eggs: Now people waiting for SEPTA trains in Philadelphia can food shop instead of checking their email. Passengers can download a free mobile app for Peapod, the online grocer, then aim their cameras at the codes next to pictures of food on billboards at SEPTA stations. Your order is delivered to your home the next day.

Video bonus: Why is it going to be tough for a lot of American cities to get 21st century smart? Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, a leading expert on what’s become known as “global cities,” offers her take in this clip produced by Time. Oh, and there’s the obligatory “Jetsons” intro.

Body suits are allowing paralyzed people to stand and move. Photo courtesy of Ekso Bionics

Chances are you saw the video of a woman named Claire Lomas finishing a marathon in London last week. If not, I should tell you that it did not end with the classic pose—head back in exhaustion, arms raised in joy.

No, Lomas’ head was down as she watched herself literally place one foot in front of the other. Her arms were down, too, holding on to metal braces. Directly behind, husband Dan moved in stride, steadying her with his hands. And Lomas wore something never seen before in a marathon–a body suit of sensors and motors, which, along with a small computer on her back, moved her legs forward.

It took her 16 days to finish the race, covering just under two miles a day. On the last day, there was a crowd gathered at Big Ben, her starting point. She thought they were tourists. But they were there to cheer on Moser, who’s been paralyzed from the chest down since a horse-riding accident five years ago. Afterwards, she was hailed as a “bionic woman”—an allusion to the ReWalk suit she wore that took steps forward in response to shifts in her balance.

For many of us, our first exposure to the notion of bionic humans was the 1970’s TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.” It was ostensibly about science, but really was a fantasy about man-made superpowers. (You knew when they were kicking in because lead character Steve Austin would go all slo-mo on you and you’d hear this oscillating synthesizer note suggesting strange and powerful things were happening inside his body.) Turns out, though, that so far bionics has come to be about repairing bodies, not enhancing them, and making people normal, not superhuman.

But the effect is no less remarkable.

I see the light

The ReWalk suit, invented in Israel, allows people with paralyzed lower bodies to sit, stand, walk and climb stairs. And now similar “lower body systems” are being sold to hospitals and rehab centers. Another model, created by a California company called Ekso Bionics, works much like the ReWalk suit, not only giving paralyzed patients an opportunity to stand and move, but also helping people rebuild muscles after an injury or relearn to walk after a stroke. It’s powered by a battery that could run your laptop.

Equally amazing advances are being made in developing a bionic eye. Earlier this month came reports about two British men who had been totally blind for years, but now, after electronic retinas were implanted in their heads, they’re able to see light and even make out shapes.

The device is a wafer-thin microelectronic chip that’s placed behind the retina and connects through a very fine cable to a small control unit and battery placed under the skin behind the ear. Pixels in the chip serve as the eye’s rods and cones. When light enters the eye, it stimulates the pixels, which then send a message to the optic nerve and ultimately, the brain. So the light is “seen.”

And just last Sunday Stanford scientists published research that refines the bionic eye even further. Their artificial retina would largely function the same way, except it would be powered by light. So, no wires, no battery.

Instead, a pair of glasses fitted with a video camera records what’s happening before a patient’s eyes and fires beams of infrared light on to implanted chip. It messages the optic nerve and the brain processes the image.

This device has been tried only with rats so far, but scientists in Australia say yet another version of the retina implant could be tested in humans as early as next year.

Which leads to the obvious question: Isn’t it just a matter of time before eye implants will come with apps that zoom, record, maybe throw in a little augmented reality? Some would say–such as those in the transhumanist movement–that we have an obligation to be the engineers of our own evolution.

Maybe some day we will be able to run like the Six Million Dollar Man. Hopefully, minus the sound effects.

Going bionic

Here’s more from the cutting edge of bionics innovation:

• Straight to the brain: Two Rhode Island scientists have invented a robot arm that people can control directly with their brain, allowing them to bypass a nervous system damaged by a stroke or accident.
• Sugar control: Later this year trials will begin for a handheld artificial pancreas. It will automatically regulate the insulin and blood sugar levels of Type 1 diabetics. A person just enters what he or she ate and the device adjusts insulin levels appropriately. No more pricking your finger five times a day to check your blood sugar.
• Joint action: An engineer at Vanderbilt University has developed the first prosthetic leg with powered knee and ankle joints that operate in unison, and with sensors that monitor motion. If the leg senses the person is about to stumble, it plants the foot securely on the floor.
• Stick it in his ear: A new invention could mean an end to cochlear implants for people with serious hearing problems. With this device, all of the components would actually be inside the ear, including a very tiny microphone.
• Take that, Mr. Tooth Decay: Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a nanocomposite that can not only fill cavities, but can kill any remaining bacteria. But wait, there’s more. It apparently can also regenerate the part of the tooth that’s been lost to decay.

Video bonus: Watch Cathy Hutchinson, who hasn’t been able to use her arms and legs for 15 years, pick up a coffee cup, using only her brain to control a robotic arm.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg thinks watching TV should be a social experience. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Today Mark Zuckerberg turns 28. Friday, he turns billionaire.

That’s when his creation, Facebook, is scheduled to go public, a move that, by some estimates, will make Zuckerberg worth about $19 billion. Not a bad week, eh?

But with all that fortune comes some pain. Soon every move he makes will be subject to Wall Street’s unsparing scrutiny, every misstep analyzed as more proof that he’s still closer to his Harvard dorm room than a CEO suite. He sought to reassure the skeptics and rouse the boosters at a pre-IPO roadshow last week, starting on Wall Street and ending in Silicon Valley.

Zuckerberg told potential investors that the company’s top priorities will be to improve the Facebook mobile experience–its members now average seven hours a month checking updates on their smart phones–and to develop a model for mobile advertising so each of us sees only the type of ads for which we’ve expressed a preference.

But Zuckerberg also mentioned another big Facebook frontier, one that could be just as big a part of our daily lives. It’s what’s become known as social TV–basically using social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to connect people viewing TV shows, even though they’re watching on different screens in different zip codes, sometimes on different continents.

People have been talking up social TV for a few years now, but no question that it’s moving mainstream. Next week the first social TV “world summit” will convene in London and last week, at a social TV conference sponsored by Ad Age, network execs, such as Bravo EVP Lisa Hsia, suggested that all the the social chatter before, during and after programs is being seen as actual content and not just promotion. On Bravo, for instance, a new series, “Around the World in 80 Plates” was kicked off with a contest on Twitter and this summer a Facebook game tied to “Real Housewives of New York” will roll out, with top online players getting shout-outs on air.

But Facebook’s immersion in our TV-watching could go well beyond games and fan pages. At that same Ad Age conference, Kay Madati, who heads the social network’s entertainment division, raised the possibility of Facebook-enabled TVs being able to automatically record programs that a certain percentage of your friends had “liked.”

That’s what friends are for, right?

The power of the second screen

Some go so far as to suggest that Facebook could actually save TV. One is Nick Thomas, an analyst for London-based Informa Telecoms and Media. He acknowledges that, at the moment, Facebook seems more threat than boon because research shows more and more people are actually focusing on their small screens–laptops, tablets, smart phones–while occasionally looking up at the big screen.

But he argues that savvy TV programmers will tap into Facebook and Twitter chatter to boost a show’s fan community or turn live TV into a special event shared by millions–some with something actually witty, poignant or insightful to say. More often than not, the best part of award shows now are the tweets about what’s happening on stage. (There were an estimated 13 million social media comments made during this year’s Grammy Awards.) And nothing cranks up the drama of a sporting event like a torrent of tweets.

Case in point: Last week, after Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton hit three home runs in a ball game, word spread quickly on social networks, according to Bob Bowman, an exec for Major League Baseball. By the time Hamilton smacked a fourth homer, the audience for the game had swelled.

“As the player hits that third home run, fans are all over the place chatting about it,” said Bowman. “I think it’s complementary. As soon as something is happening, fans want to get to as many people as possible.”

Social behavior

But social TV isn’t just about the big boys. Here’s a sampling of some of the startups hoping to cash in on the obession with the second screen:

• Who says they couldn’t pay me to watch TV?: Oh, yes they can. Viggle is a free app that rewards you for watching TV shows. You simply “check in” by holding your iPhone to the TV screen and that earns you points depending on how long you watch. Once you earn enough–and it will take awhile–you can redeem them for products at Best Buy, Amazon, Starbucks, etc. Plus, the app keeps you entertained while you watch, providing you with games, quizzes, real-time polls, even video clips tied to the show. Active Viggle members–there are now 625,000–now check in about five times a day, with each session lasting an average of an hour and a half.
• Talk amongst yourselves: For those who want to bond with people who like the same TV programs, there’s GetGlue. It’s a social network designed to connect people around entertainment, but most of its action has been about TV shows. Once they check in, fans can let their friends know what they’re watching. They also can post comments, ask questions of other devotees, rate snarky retorts. Plus, members can collect stickers of their favorite stars. (I’ll trade you a Don Draper for a “Game of Thrones.”) So far, 2 million people have signed up.
• But wait, there’s more: When it started out, Miso was another iPhone app that let you check in to flag your friends about what you’re watching. But it has ratcheted things up with a feature called SideShows. These are slideshows of additional content–some of it created by fans–to run in sync with the show on the big screen.
• Making trends meet: BuddyTV combines a viewing guide on your smart phone with chat and fan discussions and also being able to announce what shows you are watching on Facebook and Twitter. But it also suggests shows that are airing now, coming up, trending, or on your favorites list.
• Name that tune: Shazam first became popular as a smart phone app that could identify songs for you. It made a big splash with its second-screen content during the Super Bowl and the Grammys and now SyFy, Bravo and USA are “Shazaming” shows and ads to keeps viewers engaged with a show from episode to episode.

Video bonus: Still not clear on social TV? GetGlue’s COO Fraser Kelton gives you the lowdown on the latest trends.

Moms will be moms. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Sean Dreilinger

It’s never been easy to be a mom. I don’t speak from personal experience, of course, but my mother had eight kids and, as I remember it, that was no slice of heaven.

You could make the case that all the technology we now have, all the whizzy whiz conveniences have made the job easier. But with that has come a pace that can be equal parts maddening and discombobulating.

So what does it mean to be a 21st century mom? You got me. But maybe science can provide some clues. Here are 10 of the latest studies and surveys on modern motherhood:

You’re giving me a big head: Of course, most moms nail the nurturing thing, but who knew it made their kids’ brains bigger? Or at least it does to the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with learning, memory and response to stress. According to a new study at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, children who had been nurtured more by their mothers in a stressful situation when they were toddlers tended to develop a larger hippocampus by the time they reached school age.

Not to mention there’s never a toilet seat issue: It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but now scientific research backs it up: As they approach middle age, mothers shift their focus from their husbands to their adult daughters. And that relationship deepens, peaking when the mom reaches 60, concludes the study published last month in Scientific Reports. The researchers said a mother’s ties to a daughter begin to strengthen when she, the daughter, reaches childbearing age.

He’s not overweight, he’s under tall: A report published in this month’s issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine discovered that an overwhelming majority of mothers in a recent study thought their overweight babies were the perfect size. And more than 20 percent of the mothers whose babies were an ideal weight thought their kids should be bigger.

She’s such a digital diva: Lose the notion that moms are behind the digital curve. A survey of more than 2,500 mothers, done for BabyCenter, found that almost two-thirds of them were using smart phones and that they were 28 percent more likely than the average person to own a digital tablet. Plus, they’re 50 percent more likely to watch video on the Web compared to the general population. And now one out of three bloggers are moms.

And she’s on that Facebook all the time: And another study, this one of 3,000 Americans, concluded that mothers are more likely to visit Facebook daily than other women (85 % to 73 %) and are also more likely than other women to buy something based on a recommendation on a social network (42 % to 29 %). “Moms continue to take advantage of the little spare time they have by utilizing all the tools at their disposal. This includes their mobile devices and social networks,” said Daina Middleton, CEO of Performics, the company that commissioned the survey.

When it’s good to get a fuzz on: That memory loss, stress and fuzzy-headedness that a lot of women experience during pregnancy? Well, a recent paper contends that it’s all part of the process of prepping them to be mothers. Psychology professor Laura Glynn argues that some of the worst parts about pregnancy—vague but nagging cognitive and memory lapses—may actually be side effects of the mental shifts that happen as a woman becomes a mother. She may be losing her memory at the same time she’s learning to bond with an infant.

You gotta problem with slaving over a hot stove?: If British men truly reflect their gender, a lot of sons would rather eat their mother’s cooking than their wives’. More than half of those questioned in a survey said they preferred their mom’s meals, and roughly a third said they thought their mothers took extra time and care cooking, while they felt their wives were more likely to dish up prepared food.

Live long and propagate: The more children a mother has, the longer she’s likely to live, according to a recent study at the University of New South Wales. Women with six or more children were found to be 40 percent less likely to die during the study’s follow-up period than women with no children, a likelihood that apparently increased with each child they bore. The researchers admitted that they did not really know why this was the case.

Go north, young woman: In case you wondered, the best country in which to be a mother these days is Norway. At least that’s what Save the Children concludes in its annual State of the World’s Mothers report. Its research showed that Norway does well across the board in terms of how mothers fare, from having a “skilled attendant” present at the birth of every child to the high level of education for women to the average life span of Norwegian women–83. Rated last is Niger, a country where almost every mother has at least one child die before their fifth birthday. The U.S. ranks 25th out of 165 countries.

Surely you jest: And finally, this report out of Chicago: A new study found that almost as soon as they’re born, babies can tell if their mother’s a loser. “From the moment they open their eyes, newborns can tell if their mother had no other options and was forced to settle for their father,” said researcher Dr. Stuart Lindstrom. Nah, just kidding. A little slice of The Onion.

Video bonus: It’s just a few years old, but already it’s a Mother’s Day classic: Mr. T, in very short camo shorts and pounds of non-camo jewelry, raps a no-nonsense “Treat Your Mother Right.”

That’s an order.

Big Data is getting bigger at a stunning rate. Photo courtesy of Flickr user mrflip

We all know there’s a whole lot more information in our worlds than there used to be. As to how much more, well, most of of us are pretty clueless.

Here’s a priceless nugget about all that info, compliments of Dave Turek, the guy in charge of supercomputer development at IBM: From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated, according to IBM’s calculations, five exabytes–that’s five billion gigabytes–of information. By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days. By next year, predicts Turek, we’ll be doing it every 10 minutes.

But how is this possible? How did data become such digital kudzu? Put simply, every time your cell phone sends out its GPS location, every time you buy something online, every time you click the Like button on Facebook, you’re putting another digital message in a bottle. And now the oceans are pretty much covered with them.

And that’s only part of the story. Text messages, customer records, ATM transactions, security camera images…the list goes on and on. The buzzword to describe this is “Big Data,” though that hardly does justice to the scale of the monster we’ve created.

It’s the latest example of technology outracing our capacity to use it. In this case, we haven’t begun to catch up with our ability to capture information, which is why a favorite trope of management pundits these days is that the future belongs to companies and governments that can make sense of all the data they’re collecting, preferably in real time.

Businesses that can interpret every digital breadcrumb their customers leave behind will have an edge, the thinking goes–not just who bought what where in the past hour–but whether they tweeted about it or posted a photo somewhere in the swirl of social networks. The same goes for the cities that can gather data from the thousands of sensors that now dot urban landscapes and turn the vagaries of city life, such as traffic flow, into a science.

Not suprisingly, political campaigns already are taking the plunge, furiously mining data as part of their focus on “nanotargeting” voters so that they know precisely how to pitch them for their votes and money. Among the conclusions analysts have drawn, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, is that Republicans show a preference for “The Office” and Cracker Barrel restaurants while Democrats are more likely to watch “Late Night With David Letterman” and eat at Chuck E. Cheese.

This rush to interpret digital flotsam explains why Google last week announced that it will start selling a product it calls BigQuery, software that can scan terabytes of information in seconds. And why a startup named Splunk, which has technology that can analyze huge amounts of customer and transaction data, saw the value of its shares soar almost 90 percent the day it went public last month. This, for a company that lost $11 million last year.

Rise of the data scientist

But even access to the best data deciphering tools is no guarantee of great wisdom. Very few companies have people on staff with the training not only to evaluate mountains of data–including loads of unstructured tidbits from millions of Facebook pages and smart phones–but also to actually do something with it.

Last year the McKinsey Global Insitute issued a report describing “Big Data” as the “next frontier for innovation,” but also predicting that by 2018, companies in the U.S. will have a serious shortage of talent when it comes to the necesssary analytical skills–as many 190,000 people. And it contends another 1.5 million managers will need to be trained to make strategic decisions with the torrent of data coming their way.

Not everyone, though, is a believer in the magic of Big Data. Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School of Business, isn’t convinced that more data is better. Not that he thinks a company shouldn’t try to learn as much as it can about its customers. It’s just that now there’s so much focus on aggregating every bit of data that he thinks volume is valued over true analysis.

Here’s Fader’s take from a recent interview with MIT’s Technology Review: “Even with infinite knowledge of past behavior, we often won’t have enough information to make meaningful predictions about the future. In fact, the more data we have, the more false confidence we will have…The important part is to understand what our limits are and to use the best possible science to fill in the gaps. All the data in the world will never achieve that goal for us.”

Who’s your data?

Here’s a sampling of how Big Data is being used to solve big problems:

• They know when they’ve been bad or good: While most companies are focusing on analyzing their customers, Amazon is scoring points by using Big Data to help theirs.
• The study of studs: You want to know which bulls spawn the most productive milk cows? The dairy industry has devised a way to crunch the numbers.
• Diagnosis by data: Researchers at SUNY Buffalo are analyzing massive sets of data in their effort to determine if there’s a link between multiple sclerosis and environmental factors, such as not enough exposure to sunlight.
• Looking for trouble: A company called Recorded Future is mining info from social networks and government and financial sites to make forecasts about how population growth, water shortages and extreme weather could lead to future political unrest and terrorism.

Video bonus: Capturing data is one thing. Making it look appealing and understandable is a whole other challenge. David McCandless waxes on the power of “information maps” in this TED talk.