THE FORSAKEN CONTINENT (excerpt from my unfinished Novel - No Title - by Giselle Rakobowchuk ©. All rights reserved. ©

 

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH: THE FORSAKEN CONTINENT (excerpt from unfinished Novel - No Title - by Giselle Rakobowchuk ©) All rights reserved. ©

On did the paths without borders take them. Ahead did their feet traverse. The whiffs of haze veiled their eyes; the memories of smoke, of a land of cement, of a dreary past resurfaced in her mind. A turn to the left, an ascending slope. A turn to the right, a rugged ground. The presupposed hour transformed into two for the steps of the lady were slow. Time wore on as hope for an end diminished. But, halt! No further could they go. Before them stood a great wall of dried out bushes which, being perplexingly entangled into each other, blocked their path (...) It was not long before the way was finally cleared and a small entrance made. (...)

“There, before me thou art, but I do not fully see thee for a concealed part of thy soul is what I am seeking. Aye, those eyes of thine that shine like dew...so many significant expressions are captured in them...and they alternate, as the changing climates of the year; they flash with irrevocable signs of fury; they shimmer with enigmatic gusts of joy; cry they do, but no tears have I seen fall; whisper they do, but their words I comprehend not; they express all that is in thee...yet I cannot grasp what ‘tis. What...what...I ask of thee is this; what lieth beneath all that?”
Her heart softened as irrepressible joy overwhelmed it. Clearly, in her eyes, he had not only given her his friendship but had been expecting hers in return.
by Giselle Rakobowchuk © All rights reserved. Reproduction in any form only admitted with approval from author...

The Goggles of Google, Google Glass and Google Plus, Oh My!

We all know that the Goggles of Google is Google Glass but do we know who the leaders of Google+ are? It seems like I've been binge-surfing Google and G+ recently, and particularly working on my account on the latter these past few days. Well, I have always found G+ to be a more time-consuming social media platform than its more popular counterparts, but I have always thought of it as being indubitably more elaborate and perhaps even more intelligent. I have, nonetheless, never quite immersed myself in that world of Google Plus therefore I cannot give detailed accounts on its intricate design. (Ha, I could never actually really do that as I am a writer and not a computer scientist).

 

But I digress, what I really wanted to write about was the news about Google+ that I happened to read by actually having followed +Bradley Horowitz on G+. (My, little wonder G+ is not popular, it does take me forever just to find the plus sign on the top of my keyboard. It is the least used value, I am sure. on any keyboard wherever it is situated).

This is what I like about modern technology and the digital world. Merely owing to the simple fact that I had followed someone and was browsing my stream, I was able to know in advance the soon-to-be-announced mainstream media news announcement. It is a fascinating little wonder in today's globalized world to be, though even just a "millistep" - no such word, I know - ahead of the big strides and leaps of the popular news outlets by knowing the big news before the general public.  I am repeating myself. Very well, so in their quick roundup Reuters tells us that "Google Inc's (GOOGL.O) Bradley Horowitz will run the company's Photo and Streams products, in a move that indicates the company may be reorganizing its Google+ social networking site.

Horowitz, vice president of product management since 2008, announced the move in a Google+ post late on Sunday." http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/02/us-google-managementchanges-idUSKBN0LY0WH20150302

 

Exciting news, I am certain, for the business world out there but I will be quite frank, I never really knew who was in charge of Google + before Horowitz BUT I am content to know that there will be changes and I hope these changes will concern both old and new users to G+ or, to use Shakespeare's  timeworn phrase I also used in a comment: a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I also hope that Google Plus will be more attractive for users though I can hardly imagine how separating the stream and photos will make it more simple. I cannot imagine yet how it will all work so we will have to wait to see.

Davos: The Old and New; Eric Schmidt and Emma Watson

Despite the fact that most news headlines say "The Internet will Disappear" according to Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman was in fact elaborating on the fact that the internet will dramatically change from its current primitive state to becoming something of a technologically advanced seamless part of our lives Chris Matyszczyk CNet article here

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2525914/thumbs/o-ERIC-SCHMIDT-570.jpg?5

Mashable explains that Eric Schmidt didn't predict the end of the internet, he instead said that “there will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it". These statements were made by Google's Eric Schmidt on a panel titled "The Future of the Digital Economy." at the World Economic Forum at Davos. He also said: "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges."

In "The Business Insider" Jim Edwards tells us that, according to Schmidt, Google's dominance as one of the main companies on the world wide web may also have to give way to new platforms, like the smaller tech businesses for apps in the mobile world. "On the question  of dominance, you now see so many strong tech platforms coming through and you're seeing a reordering, and a future reordering, of the leaders because of the rise of the app on the smartphone."

It seems the virtual world and the real world will be evolving into the one world of the future.

In the meantime, Emma Watson also made an appearance at Davos by addressing the leaders and continuing her "HeforShe" campaign for women's rights and gender equality. She was named Feminist Celebrity of 2014. For more details and photos see this Daily Mail article
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2923317/This-bring-end-inequalities-girls-women-face-globally-Emma-Watson-addresses-leaders-World-Economic-Forum-new-Women-campaign.html

She Sings a New Song

She has found the new world and traveled across the ocean. Vanadiel may have been left behind but Eorzea awaits. She sings the songs of the bards of old and is enthralled by that virtual world ever advancing in beauty and depth.

Credits to Square Enix for Final Fantasy XIV snapshots of my character and of the virtual world of Eorzea. By the way, as a sociologist it is very interesting to study virtual societies on an online platform and have immense fun at the same time.

The Fairy Robot

A miniscule masterpiece, which is reminiscent of something Leonardo da Vinci could have drawn, the four-winged robot that resembles a jellyfish and a little fairy, was created by Leif Ristroph and his colleagues at New York University. Weighing a mere 2 grams, the tiny mechanical creature needs no sensors and little effort to fly unlike robots designed after birds and insects, explains the New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24638-fourwinged-robot-flies-like-a-jellyfish.html#.UrMb_Z8o6Ag

Time says it could "usher in a new generation of smaller, cheaper drones".
http://science.time.com/2013/11/26/a-flying-robot-jellyfish-now-exists/

Here is the YouTube video, which I first saw when Clive Thompson, writer for Wired and author of "Smarter than you Think", posted it on his Twitter (worth following for cool updates @pomeranian99. He agreed that it was really "quite charming in flight!" http://twitter.com/pomeranian99/status/40518878255279308

                      

At any rate, it truly looks like a little fairy robot!

From the Clouds to the Earth

This is a short summary of a fascinating article on WIRED by Balaji Srinivasan http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/ which discusses the already present and the possible future where virtual communities existing and coming into existence in the clouds are taking physical shape on the Earth in real-life communities, groups and will perhaps even form new nations. "Software *is* reorganizing the world."

I find it important to touch upon this subject now as, I believe, we will sooner than we think be quite caught by surprise by new communities and a new world surrounding us and springing forth, as it would seem, from nowhere.

As our generation is, unfortunately, getting poorer, Srinivasan tells us that we are taking our minds to the clouds and are sort of "emigrating" there to seek work opportunities, like-minded individuals and, being of a social nature, communities to which we may belong. We may not have the slightest clue as to who our neighbour is but we may know someone as far as thousands of kilometres away like the backs of our own hands. Srinivasan calls this process, which "starts out internationally distributed and ends up physically concentrated" the "reverse diaspora". But the definitive tangible form of this new frontier is, as of yet, unknown to us.

For the present, Stanford, MIT, and others present us available quantitative studies with "cloud cartographies" that, instead of "mapping nation states" map the "states of our minds" by using the newer metric "geodesic distance" instead of just using the physical measuring unit "geographical distance". The former shows us the "number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network". I suppose these will be able to predict where and how the new geographical communities will take shape.

Reading the full article is worth the time. I certainly have much to learn and to find in the online world and I would not be surprised if my virtual explorations took me to places I have never even dreamt of. So we don't get left out of this brave new world let us, with caution of course, venture to connect online.

Virtually Everywhere

Technology, space, time and everything in between...countless opinions either in favour of this digitalized world or against it but the question of whether it is one of the most fascinating phenomenons of our time must indubitably have an affirmative reply. Just as much as the online world kept me in awe as can be read in my posts in 2009 so does it keep me amazed now.

We do not need to move in the physical space in order to be present at any event. Par example, the Large Hadron Collider exhibition at the Science Museum in London was easily accessible via live-stream, courtesy of The Guardian where we could enjoy the company of both Professor Higgs in the morning and Stephen Hawking in the afternoon. http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/nov/12/stephen-hawking-large-hadron-collider-live-stream-video?CMP=twt_gu

We could also view a cool photo of them both on @sciencemuseum's Twitter page: http://twitter.com/sciencemuseum/status/400675840775565312

But if the value and beauty of women in science were topics of interest to us we were able to hop over to Brussels and take a look at the inauguration of the "Science needs Women" photo exhibition held at the European Parliament http://twitter.com/4womeninscience/status/400400078516801536 or to travel to Moscow, Russia to see the nominees for L'Oreal's Women in Science awards http://twitter.com/4womeninscience/status/400307121771642880

All this on November 12, 2013, in one day!

Also the National Science Foundation was live-tweeting from the Gender Summit in Washington on the following day  http://twitter.com/NSF/status/400660834919018496

So thanks to our digital presence it is this facile today to be virtually anywhere and everywhere.