With input from people around the world -- much of it on this website -- an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century. Now their conclusions are revealed on this website.

Grand Challenges for Engineering

Creating a viable free open source alternative to
Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab

SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software

Francis Fukuyama:

The fiasco of the Olympic torch relay has focused attention on human rights in China. What is the source of human rights abuses in that country today?

China's powerful weakness

The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with Tom Stoppard, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated.

Q.& A. | Dmitri Nabokov

Jacob Seidelin went on a ( crazy :) ) mission to create a pure JavaScript video player that didn't use Flash:

My first thought was to read binary video files using a technique like the Andy Na posted about here, figuring that there must be some really simple to parse video formats around, but I soon changed directions and decided to make up a whole new video format. Enter.. JSONVid. Using a player like mplayer, it is easy to export all frames in a movie clip to individual jpeg files, and using whichever language you prefer it is also fairly trivial to collect these files, base64 encode the bunch of them and throw them all together in a nice JSON file (I used this PHP script).

JSONVid: Pure JavaScript Video Player

Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

Olinda (Schulze & Webb)

As I pointed out in my last post, Directed Sentence Drawings generated from a text make it extremely difficult to see in what order the various topics were discussed and that a simple bar for each sentence in the order they occurred in the text and coloured by topic would be much better in most respects. I've built a graphic to show what I mean. I have also added the most frequent topic words for each set of 10 consecutive sentences.

State of the Union Sentence Bars

The book is available to download under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license: Download PDF.

– The book can be viewed in an experimental html format courtesy of Yale University Press and the futureofthebook.org people. Each paragraph can be annotated.

The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

The news coverage of the Iraq War almost always ignores the daily lives of ordinary Iraqis. Seeking out those personal stories could help us understand the war's human cost.

Listening to Iraq | The American Prospect

Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a groundbreaking book that reveals how to overcome this "depth deficit" and find the universal drivers of human behavior so vital to a firm's success.

Marketing Metaphoria reveals the powerful unconscious viewing lenses--called "deep metaphors"-- that shape what people think, hear, say, and do.

Drawing on thousands of one-on-one interviews in more than thirty countries, Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman describe how some of the world's most successful companies as well as small firms, not-for-profits, and social enterprises have successfully leveraged deep metaphors to solve a wide variety of marketing problems. Marketing Metaphoria should convince you that everything consumers think and do is influenced at unconscious levels--and it will give you access to those deeper levels of thinking.

Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers