![smarterplanet:
Leathernext: Marines Want Better Networks, Sensors — And Terminator Vision | Danger Room | Wired.com
The Marines of the future are all about communication.
The Leathernecks want data networks that can keep them connected all the way from the decks of their ships to the beaches they storm. They want online search tools that rely on natural language instead of keywords (like the rest of us). And they want software that can sift through the oceans of data their wartime sensors and cameras collect — including tools that can scan through faces in a crowd, like the Terminator, and alert Marines to danger.
That’s according to the Corps’ blueprint for its science and technology needs over the next 20 years. Communications are a big, gaping hole for the Marines of the present, and the Marines want to hand their successors more seamless, networked ways of talking. That’s on top of other wish-list material, like advanced sensors that can sniff drugs and homemade bombs — oh, and laser-stopping goggles.
The blueprint (.pdf), first published by Inside Defense, doesn’t come out and criticize the Corps’ current suite of communications tools and sensors. But there’s a yawning technological chasm in-between the present-day Marines and where the Leathernecks want to be in 2025.
From “flagpole to fighting hole,” the blueprint writes, Marines need to be in constant communication: “The objective is to provide a holistic, end-to-end, turnkey [command-and-control] capability to execute commander’s intent, facilitate implicit communications, visualize battlespace reality, promote initiative, enable centralized command and decentralized control, and ultimately accomplish the mission.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3en8nUr0h1qzs4rbo1_500.jpg)
In the spring of 1997, during a presentation in Paris on IBM’s new e-business strategy, the CIO of a major European retail chain mentioned that his company had just spent a lot of money remodeling their stores. He was wondering if they had done the right thing, given all this new economy talk. We were in the middle of the dot-com frenzy, and the buzz in the air was that in the Internet-based new economy, brick-and-mortar businesses, like other businesses grounded in the physical world, could not possibly compete in this fast-moving digital space and were therefore headed for extinction.
Similar questions were being raised all around us. In my local library, in whose advisory council I have been serving since those days, we were making plans to leverage the new Internet capabilities, such as introducing an online catalog and providing wireless Internet access in the library building. But we were also wondering if a library building would be needed at all in the future, given the growing digitization of books, music, videos and just about all content.
As it has turned out, the Internet, along with the overall digital revolution has proven to be a transformation of truehistorical proportions, propelling us from the industrial society of the past two centuries to a new kind of information society and knowledge-based economy. But, it has not quite worked out the way some predicted back in those dot-com bubble days.
The physical world continues to be alive and well. No one is asking questions about the viability of cities, given that people can now work and shop virtually. To the contrary, urbanization is one of the biggest trends of the 21st century. According to the UN Population Division, more people now live in urban areas than in rural areas. That proportion will rise to over over 60 percent by 2030, and close to 70 percent by 2050. Over the next four decades, all the world’s population growth will take place in urban areas, in addition to the continuing migration of the rural population to cities.
Furthermore, the Web has evolved toward its Web 2.0, social networking phase. And, these social networking capabilities have reminded us that humans are inherently social. We get together, establish communities and organize into a wide variety of institutions to get things done more effectively. We like to communicate, share ideas and learn from each other.
(read more on Irving’s blog)
![theatlantic:
Infographics Say It All in Facebook’s Latest SEC Filing
In the amendment Facebook filed Monday to its S-1 SEC filing, some of the best information about the company is embedded in the infographics it used to illustrate its points. They show a company that’s booming, with rampant growth of users and revenue, but they also show a behemoth that’s saturated much of the globe save for one glaringly dark patch where China sits. […]
Look at the mass of darkness where China is located, the stark border of Russia, the largely un-Facebook penetrated Africa, and the bright slash of Indonesia (at one point,Indonesian became the most-used Asian language on Facebook). That dislocation between population and Facebook users bears out some of the projections the company follows with in its filing, in particular its expansion plans.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire. [Image: Facebook]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2y9n9VOSc1qcokc4o1_r1_500.jpg)
Reblogged from smarterplanet|30 notes |# Comments