High-tech chastity belt

The people at Contagious Media strike again with this ultimate gift for the insecure husband/boyfriend.

forget-me-not panties™ have built-in GPS to pinpoint her location and sensors to monitor temperature and heart rate. Woo hoo. The "testimonials" are a riot. Unfortunately, they're Sold Out. Yeah, right...

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Tim Berners-Lee looks to life sciences to kick off semantic web

Computerworld story quotes Tim Berners-Lee:

"At the moment, I see a huge amount of energy from people in life sciences, getting excited by the Semantic Web and what it can do to solve the big-idea problems...

"Maybe we will meet a critical mass in a certain area. The Web, for example, took off in high-energy physics. When we got six high-energy physics Web sites, then it got interesting for physicists to be onboard," he said. "Similarly, if we could get critical mass in life sciences, if we get a half a dozen or a dozen set of ontologies, the core ones for drug discovery out there, then suddenly the Semantic Web within life sciences would have a critical mass. It'll snowball much more rapidly and it will be copied. Other areas will realize: Oh it's worth investing in this."

One example: BioDash, a Semantic Web prototype of a drug development dashboard, associates diseases, drug progression stages, molecular biology and pathway knowledge for users. A team of representatives from the W3C, IBM, Oracle Corp., University of Colorado and others developed the prototype. It includes a Semantic Web browser connecting information from public sources and chemical libraries with biological entities such as genes, proteins and pathways.

Berners-Lee, who invented key components of the World Wide Web such as HTTP and HTML in the late 1980s, has long envisioned an extension of the organic, unstructured Web. The W3C launched the first projects in the late 1990s, adding metadata to Web pages.

Berners-Lee hopes that life sciences will drive adoption of the Semantic Web, just as high-energy physics drove the early Web.

MORE.

Cringely on inflection points

I doubt if these three inflection points are as major as Cringely makes them out to be, but it makes an interesting read....

Here's the gist:
1. The Xbox 360 is set to become the home computer. Not only will Xbox 360 play video games, it will play music and movies, surf the web and probably even offer a non-PC platform for voice-over-IP. The Redmond giant will undercut their hardware OEMs by building a Microsoft PC.

2. The Google Web Accelerator will double all our surfing speeds for free.

3. Apple's launching of its hi-def movie download service and Yahoo's US$6.99 music subscription service will remake the movie/music biz.

MORE.

iPod food and SlideShowPro

Mike Davidson, Media Product Development Manager for The Walt Disney Internet Group, held a contest to "Make a Meatspace Shuffle" and the entries were creative, if somewhat unappetizing. And they have a winner.

Cooler still was the Flash-based SlideShowPro that Mike used. Here are some examples.