The Tech Challenge - Students collaborate state wide for best earthquake disaster robotic solution.

Sponsored by Cisco Systems and hosted by The Tech Museum in San Jose, 1400 students from across the state of California, from elementary to high school, created various robotic solutions for rescuing people who have fallen off a bridge like the Golden Gate.  

Dr. Future interviews two of the main organizers of the event, Tim Ritchie, president of the Tech Museum and Richardo Benavidez, Senior Manager of Community Relations, at Cisco Systems.

And here, all three of us chat with the girl’s team from Cupertino High School, “CRACK CITY,” about their experience of The Tech Challenge.

This article in the Mercury News give you a good sense of this year’s Tech Challenge.

Ancient Computer, Robots, Source Code, mobile HAARP, & Charles Ostman, Historian of the Future

Dr. Future Show 4.05.11 Charles Ostman

Click here to Listen

In the first hour we chat with KSCO host Corey Gold, check out Source Code, the new film, discuss the radiation-hardened robots in Japan, celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first portable computer, look at the latest with the oldest computer, the Antikythera mechanism, have  fun wtih  public broadcasting, and explore some the latest augmented reality apps for your smart phone.

Guest for our second hour is Charles Ostman, historian of the future, with whom we broach such topics as new mobile HAARP installations, Chinese government hacking, and the evolving synthetic sentience of the internet.

Guest is Dave Warren, organizer of upcoming TEDx Santa Cruz!

Dr.Future Show 3.29.11  Click here to Listen

This week we are still concerned about Japanese radiation, but have robots to the rescue.. we find new value in old pottery shards, and explore towards the center of the earth. Also, will better batteries help you find your future you, and will that be enough of a scare to save money?

 Deep questions, but for even deeper ones, consider coming to TEDx Santa Cruz, this summer, June 11.  Retired prof and organizer of TEDx, Dave Warren, visits us in studio and gives us an understanding of just what TEDx is and what to expect from this most auspicious, if not futurely historic gathering about to unfold in our midst..

Techno Singularity on Schedule, & Meet the WWW father of "Transclusive" info publishing

Dr. Future 2.22.11 Ted Nelson Listen

This week in the future is raging with controversial characters from the past and the future. Today is the anniversary of the birth of Dolly, the first cloned mammal in 1995, who sparked a new debate about the ethics of humans playing GOD with their scientific pursuits. Yet the gifts of the research abound, with discoveries such as new skin for burn victims, driverless cars, robocops and mechanical hummingbirds. With a nod to current events of the day such as Obama’s budget for “Exascale” computing, and the Social computing shoot out in the Google VS Facebook saga, we turn to our excellent guest, inventor Ted Nelson.

For BG, a few lines from Wikipaedia:
Ted Nelson is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag,^[6] which is described on the Xanadu project website. ZigZag is Ted Nelson’s trademark on a data model he has designed for computer interaction, both for users and between programs. The design is centered around an information structure called a zzstructure and its interactive visualizations. Nelson’s stated goal is on one hand a platform for theProject Xanadu hypertext and on the other a complete computing system built on new conventions. Instead of the conventional textual formats and tree structures, zzstructure is a multidimensional extension of a spreadsheet whose cells can contain various kinds of data. 

The Birds, Fish, Optical Alchemy and Canine Intelligence

Dr.Future Jan 4th, 2011

The first Dr. Future show of the year features a really useful blood test, analysis of the birds falling en masse from the sky, an amazing new iPad App, Dog tech, CES expectations, Stem cell breakthroughs, Rudy Rucker blog, robots, and Agent Nada’s sexy commercial.