Imagine, if you will, Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that states: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and that Harry Potter’s “magic” will soon be realised through advanced technologies that are nearing a “Singularity”, the dawn of a new civilisation.

For over three decades, futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected advocates of the role of technology in defining our intelligence. He presents the concept of technological change in which computers will surpass human intelligence in an inexorable evolutionary transformation, where man and machine will be merged.

Extrapolated exponentially into the 21st century, he foretells of the growth of intelligence that will become “increasingly non-biological” and “trillions of times more powerful” than it is today. This is the essence of the Singularity.

This technological Singularity is a hypothetical event whereby technological progress is due to become exponential due to positive feedback. In this brave new world, the distinction between reality and virtual reality, or human and machine, by means of nanotechnology, will be indistinguishable. Kurzweil argues that human ageing and illness will be reversed, pollution will be stopped and world hunger and poverty will be solved.

Vernor Vinge proposes that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence would represent a breakdown in humans’ ability to model their future, while IJ Good’s “intelligence explosion”, talks of the increasing power of computers’ nano- and bio-technologies, through the amplification of artificial intelligence, that will one day re-write our source code so that we become far more intelligent than we are today.

Novelist William Gibson opined on Google’s role in this process: “In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national superstate, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.”

To back up these hypotheses, without being too Timothy Learyesque, scientists have created the first two-terminal memory chips using silicon to generate nanocrystal wires far smaller than circuitry in even the most advanced computers, which extends the limits of miniaturisation subject to Moore’s Law which describes the long-term trend in the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubling approximately every eighteen months.

In a review of “The Singularity Is Near”: “We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterised by technologically-driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.”

To further Google’s cause, William Gibson maintains: “We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.”

Much of the discussions on Google centre on young people who expose their private lives via social networking. Apparently, Google is: “letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace and that those who are indiscreet on the web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.”

Kurzweil’s book envisions the world of the Singularity — a fusion of symbiotic advances in genetics, robotics and nanotechnology — where mankind’s technological knowledge is snowballing at an exponential rate in which a zero-energy-consuming computer with a memory of about a thousand trillion trillion bits and a processing capacity about ten trillion times more powerful than all human brains on Earth.

In 2009 the LA Times published a report that Ray Kurzweil and Google, as sponsor, were behind the move to form the Singularity University, which brought together the world’s top graduate and postgraduate students in ten diverse disciplines, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, medicine and law, designed to provide future leaders with an understanding of what is possible today as well as an understanding of where the real opportunities exist for innovation that might spring from converging technologies.

Earlier, published in 2005, The New York Times wrote: “We are fast approaching a time when humankind melds with technology to produce mind-boggling advances in intelligence. We will be able to play quidditch as Harry Potter does; we will control the ageing process; and we will be smarter by a factor of trillions.”

Maybe one day we will be so smart that we can actually understand what Ray Kurzweil is telling us.

The advance of social media discourse could be harshly described as a continual distraction, containing noisy encumbrances of rapidly-sampled psychotic diatribes from multiple silos. This, it is said, is one of the profound questions about the narcissism of the modern psyche.

In Nick Carr’s recent book, “The Shallows”, he explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, “promoting deep and creative thought”, while the ethic of the internet is a post-industrialist mentality of “speed and efficiency” and “optimised production and consumption”. He argues we have become ever more adept at “scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection”.

The cultural criticism of this book sparkles with vignettes about how Friedrich Nietzsche wrestled with a typewriter and how Sigmund Freud dissected the brains of sea creatures. But in “The Stuff of Thought”, Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology, believes human beings are more than capable of adapting to the current flow of constant digital information and stimulus, just as they adapted to other forms of media.

So, which is it? Do we control the amount of information that we absorb and, if so, what benefits do we actually derive from social media discourse?

This is taken at random on a Saturday afternoon from The Nation’s website, one of Thailand’s English-based national newspapers. And we find the following: veen_NT: @lickmymango your typo is terrible but LMAO. veen_NT: @babyfishie I hope not but will be on alert;-) veen_NT: @qandrew lol- me bad. need more chillax;-) babyfishie: @veen_NT Are you going to be a designated driver again tonight?

Breaking news at its most profound. And contemplative and reflective? Take this from Stephen Fry: “V touching article about what it means to play football with your father. Not that I ever did!”

New forms of media, Pinker says, “have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fibre”. And he takes issue with Carr that Twitter and the internet are making people dumber by literally rewiring their brains, so that we can no longer think deep thoughts.”

If you have an issue with not playing football with your father in your mid-fifties, Carr seems to have the upper hand at this stage.

But, on the other hand, Pinker sees the internet and social media such as Twitter as digital distractions that are not necessarily making society dumber. In fact, he concludes by saying: “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart”.

A Microsoft tweet alludes to agree with him: “Want to personalize your Win 7 desktop? Make a rotating slide show of your favorite images.”

Slideshow, by the way, is one word and judging from the way teenagers write their tweets, you would think none of them, even university graduates, have spent more than an hour or so on spelling and grammar.

Then there’s an article by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times, “Twitter is changing how we interact with the world”, in which The Guardian writes: “She describes sharing a beautiful moment with her daughter, but how her experience became split between enjoying the moment and the impulse to split off and tweet about it.”

Now you have to admit that’s a sad indictment about the compulsiveness, a psychosis almost, of social media interaction.

Further, it goes on: “Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand.

“Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing.

“Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.”

Shakespeare would be surely moved by the metaphor. And reality shows are an abhorrence tantamount to warbling Thai karaoke at three o’clock in the morning.

So I suspect she’s referring to narcissism when The Guardian continues with: “Each of us chooses what we present to the outside world, crafting a public identity – a identity that we want other people to see. Every tweet, every Facebook posting, every Flickr upload is part of reinforcing the image we want people to see. While she says she can’t give Twitter up, she questions the expense of that compulsion to post: ‘When every thought is externalised, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?’”

And then, into the arena comes the businesss bully. Let’s be honest, the real reason I’m writing about this is not to internally elucidate personal identity or provide members of my own race with any kind of insight and knowledge but, cynically, to keep pace with my competitors on Google. So when I read about the meaningful business merits attributed to its cause I tend to skirm, as some might be doing already.

For my next trick, stage left comes Brian Solis, author of the book “Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web”, in which he states that social media has “democratised influence, forever changing the way businesses communicate with customers and the way customers affect the decisions of their peers.

“With platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, anyone can now find and connect with others who share similar interests, challenges, and beliefs-creating communities that shape and steer the perception of brands. Without engagement in these communities, we miss major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.”

Belief-creating? Sounds alarmingly evangelical.

Personally, I don’t really know what to think. I use Twitter because I understand that Google likes websites that tweet. Because of Facebook I’m meeting an old friend next weekt I haven’t seen in past 30 years. So neither platform can be completely discounted.

And I can still just about digest an Ian McEwan novel during a tropical rainstorm, so my input into the social media scene has not “dumbed me down” as Mr Carr and his peers would like to have us believe.

An article in The Guardian newspaper claims that Rupert Murdoch’s online version of the Times is losing “almost 90% of [its] online readership”. Transposing business models of print media into online deserves an unrighteous kick in the pants

In general, websites are support mechanisms for bricks-and-mortar companies and the attempt to elevate and transpose these business models to online, as many have argued in the past, is ignorant and bordering on the insane.

Does Murdoch not realise that the newsstand of the new media model is Google; and why has he thought it wise to remove all his publications from it? In addition, the media industry has not seen fit to take account of a report by Peter Horrocks of the BBC that news corporations need to specialise. What is the point of putting your news behind a paywall when your competition is reporting the same news that doesn’t?

Google, Twitter and Facebook demand that online dissemination is open and searchable. Murdoch knows better, he thinks, even though it has been reported that he only recently learned how to use email. And where on earth do online news, that is openly copied on to other sites and blogs, resolve into bottom-line economics?

John Gapper of the FT argues that Erich Schmidt’s remarks at the Google Zeitgeist conference on how the company is trying to work with news groups, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on new revenue models, is that “Google itself is agnostic”.

“Its attitude contrasts to the tendency of those such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian and Jeff Jarvis to equate innovation in online news with not charging. As Mr Jarvis wrote of Mr Murdoch’s “pathetic” web strategy, under which The Times and The Sunday Times will charge for online: By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.”

At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last week, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller talked about the company’s efforts to put “paywalls” on more of its content. However, he did acknowledge that you do lose unique users when you put up a paywall, but mostly it’s people who were only reading a single story or video. He said advertising was holding up quite well.

Really, well the Guardian doesn’t seem to think so. “Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

“If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.”

According to his biographer Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair, “Murdoch has not used the internet, let alone Google (he only recently discovered email) and so he cannot possibly understand the dynamics, demands and opportunities of our post-industrial, now-digital media economy. I use the internet and teach it and write about it and I still can’t grasp the complete implication of the change. I don’t think even Google can.” That’s maybe because they’re agnostics. But I don’t believe that either as the “content-is-king” cliché is a defining feature of Google’s ethos.

And Jeff Jarvis, of the Guardian, chimed in with: “The hard truth is that news organisations will shrink or die. No longer monopolies or oligopolies, the barrier to entry to their kingdom and business reduced to an inch, they simply cannot maintain their old scale, the size and margins that the City demanded. A new ecosystem of news, made up of countless smaller players operating under varying means, motives and business models, will undercut the big, old institutions. The hard iron that once was their advantage – the presses and trucks – have now become a killing weight around their craggy necks.

“Murdoch is a stranger in a strange land. All he has left to do is build a wall around himself and shrink away, a vestige of his old, bold self. Who would have thought that we’d end up feeling pity for the man? It’s almost enough to make me want to throw him a few quid. On second thoughts…”

As witness to the futility model, Murdoch has just butted out of the newsstand on organics and has now turned to Google AdWords on searches such as “London Newspaper” with: thetimes.co.uk/Subscribe. Trial the first 30 days for £1, and experience exclusive online content.” But the Times doesn’t exclusively report on London. Are we stupid enough to pay him for it when The Evening Standard is free, and does?

Maybe it’s a little but like the music industry, where bands these days make CDs for roadshows but receive scant revenue from them. The focus of the new business model here is to sell everything else but.

Mashable, I thought, might have a take on it and I looked for a survey on the subject. The data was taken from a survey of 27,000 consumers across 52 countries: “…Nielsen also found that nearly eight out of every ten (79%) would no longer use a web site that charges them, presuming they can find the same information at no cost. In other words, unless your organisation breaks lots of exclusive and important stories, charging for content will be a major uphill battle.”

The question is whether the Times is that exclusive, or is it just the case of an imprudent, anachronistic business model that relies on the vagaries of an old man?

Google said it was “very pleased” that the Chinese government has renewed its ICP licence, thereby resolving a six-month stand-off. Had it not done so, it would not have had the platform to develop and market Android on the mainland.

Google’s ICP licence now runs to 2012, subject to annual renewals. On the strength of this agreement, Google rose in Nasdaq trading as the company avoided being expelled from the world’s largest internet market. “We look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China,” the company said on its blog last Friday.

Google’s stance has been rigid since January this year, when it announced it was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn. The company previously announced: “We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google.”

Now, they have changed their tune and this time it not solely because of its entry into China’s search market. This time its decisions seem more to be based on the mobile market. As Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung said, he expected Android to become the most popular mobile operating system in China, beating out Apple’s popular iPhone. From evidence uncovered by Reuters, it seems mobile was its key motivation in its mission statement reversal.

While Google has struggled to build market share in online search in China, its Android device has a real opportunity to capture a significant share of the mobile market. According to a report by Chinaknowledge, there are an estimated 786.5 million mobile users in the country, and the first quarter of 2010 saw 39.12 million new mobile phone users delivered.

Google’s statement goes some way in explaining the decision: “…It is clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable — and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China.”

The dispute began in January this year, when Google said it was no longer willing to comply with Chinese regulations to self-censor content. But the strategic importance Google places on its involvement in China — from the candlelight vigils outside of its headquarters to the sheer number of users in China — Google is deemed important enough to the Chinese people that the government went back to the negotiating table.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said last Thursday that he expected China to renew the company’s revised application to deliver web services in the country after defying the government in March by ending self-censorship of the Chinese search engine and redirecting users to their Hong Kong site.

Following the announcement, Reuters chimed in with: “Google’s current search business in China accounts for a tiny slice of its $24 billion in annual revenue, with analysts putting its annual China revenue at $300-$400 million. But the long-term growth prospects are key. For one, Google is keen to provide non-search functions on the Google.cn site, such as music search and text translation.”

As China is the world’s largest internet market with nearly 400 million users, the potential is huge. But with an internet penetration rate of 25 percent, China’s online sector is still developing, compared to Japan and South Korea that have penetration rates between 70 to 80 percent.

But it wasn’t just a story about corporate intransigence, cyber attacks on the company’s infrastructure and the data mining of Gmail accounts of China-based activists, together with the attempts to further impede free speech on the web, that led Google to conclude that they would have to review the feasibility of their business operations in China.

A veteran former telecom engineer and analyst, Ed Snyder, argues that the momentum belongs to Google’s Android system, suggesting that music is the application that could provide Google’s open-source Android OS the chance to leap over Apple. He also predicts that the next-generation music platform, which is likely to be cloud-based, will be the major battlefield in the smartphone war.

Google recently revealed that it is activating about 160,000 Android devices a day — more than 14 million a quarter. This statistic demonstrates Android’s power to attract users. And with Apple’s reluctance to upgrade iTunes to a radically different concept, there is a golden opportunity for Google to undercut Apple, offering free premium features to users, like streaming services.

The license renewal allows Google to continue to operate Google.cn in the mainland market, in which the search engine can offer up products and services that do not require censorship, as well as continue to sell advertising on the site in a country with some 400 million Internet users.

It also removes a cloud over other Google business interests, in particular the licensing of its Android mobile phone operating system that in the future could be a strong source of advertising revenue in a nation of nearly 800 million mobile phone subscribers.

A recent report issued by the OECD paints a gloomy picture for the future of newspapers. However, according to The Economist, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt “recently recorded the most profitable first quarter in its history”, with a profit margin showing a startling 27%.

Maybe that’s good news for the German publisher but it is an exception as declining readership, especially amongst the young, can be attributed to gathering news from the internet, especially in the US, the UK, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.

In the US, after disastrous results, the New York Times reported a first-quarter profit of US$83.3 million, up from US16.4 million year-on-year, but total revenues were down 3.2 percent year-on-year, and job losses in the industry have been especially severe in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain.

The Newspaper Association of America reported that print and online advertising has fallen by 35% since the first quarter of 2008 and that circulation had dropped alarmingly, yet almost all newspapers have survived.

Primarily, newspapers have needed to cut costs so as to find a way out of the financial crisis by reducing payroll costs by up to 25%. There have also been adaptations, such as for example a group of New Jersey newspapers jointly producing features and editorials.

After staff pay, the second-biggest expense is paper, the price of which has plummeted by as much as 40% due to a global commodities slump. And with newspapers printing fewer words on smaller pages, most have survived.

But whilst the cost-cutting has been severe, it doesn’t necessarily follow that their balance sheets are particularly healthy. As The Economist points out: “While the bottom line for most papers appears to be stabilising, the top line is continuing to shrink as newspaper corporations continue their cutbacks.

Some of the key findings in the OECD report are:

* After very profitable years, newspaper publishers in most OECD countries face increased competition (free dailies, internet, multiple TV and radio sources) and often declining advertising revenues, titles and circulation as well as declining readership. The economic crisis has amplified this downward development. About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining readership, with significant decreases in some OECD countries.

* The share of advertising going to print newspapers has been declining for the last decade in most OECD countries, and the newspaper advertising market has more recently experienced large falls in offline and online advertising growth. On the cost side, costs unrelated to editorial work such as production, maintenance, administration, promotion and advertising, and distribution dominate newspaper costs. These large fixed costs make newspaper organisations more vulnerable to the downturns and less agile in reacting to the online news environment.

* “Reading news online” is an increasingly important internet activity. In some OECD countries, more than half of the population read newspapers online (up to 77 per cent in Korea) but at the minimum 20 per cent of the population read newspapers online. The willingness to pay for online news is low but increasing. In many OECD countries, TV and newspapers are still the most important sources of news but this is shifting with newspapers losing ground more quickly to the internet than TV. In countries such as Korea, the internet has already overtaken other forms of news.

* In many Western OECD countries the internet web pages of broadcasters and online newspaper sites play a large role in attracting news-related visits. More recently newspaper websites have seen strong growth in their own pages, with large newspapers reporting several million of unique visitors to their pages per month, including increasingly readers from abroad, a radical shift for newspapers.

* The impacts of the changing media landscape on news are pulling in two opposite directions. One extreme is that online and other new forms of more decentralised news will liberate readers from partisan news monopolies which have tended to become more concentrated and to dominate the production and access to news. The other extreme is that the demise of the traditional news media is with us (partially caused by the rise of the Internet), and with it an important foundation for democratic societies is at risk.

Newspaper publishers hope that the emphasis on distinctive content, as recommended last year by the BBC, as the best way forward, whether delivered to smart-phones, tablet computers or the internet.

The Economist thinks: “So far the few that have persuaded readers to pay for news online tend to have a reputation for distinctive coverage. The Financial Times … and the Wall Street Journal have leading positions in business and financial news, and successful pay-walls.

“Newspapers still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”

The bitter friction between Apple and Google following the release of its Android operating system was one thing, but sour relations between the two companies has reached a new stage of intensity following Google’s announcement of its own Tablet.

Steve Jobs recently accused Google of “stealing features from the iPhone” and that the company had “entered the phone business.” At a company meeting, he remarked: “Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” Apparently, this attack was met with “thunderous applause” from Apple’s employees.

No doubt this corporate squabbling is the result of the success of Apple’s new iPad, which has prompted other tech companies, like Dell and Toshiba, to enter the Tablet computing market.

In a report by the BBC, Appleis said to have sold more than 300,000 units of the iPad Tablet computer on its launch day in the US, which sent Apple’s share price up to a record high of $238.49. Forbes, however, says that Apple has sold its millionth iPad, after the Tablet computers had been on sale just 28 days.

Bob O’Donnell, an industry analyst with International Data Corp opined: “Anybody can make a Tablet. I could go to Taiwan, hire a contract manufacturer and make ‘Bob’s Tablet,” he said. “The hard part is doing the software and getting the applications.”

And with it the cross-partisan competition lines up behind its preferred brand: Dell’s Mini 5 Tablet will use Google’s Android operating system, while H-P is planning to use Microsoft software to power its Slate device. Some smaller companies are also selling their versions of the Tablet, with Fusion Garage, a Singaporean startup, offering the JooJoo, which went on sale in the US in March.

But this doesn’t appear to be a bandwagon-jump ,as H-P is said to have been developing its own Tablet for five years and has released a handful of videos and blog entries about the Slate. But the problem with iPad’s rivals is that Apple has 140,000 apps that you can run, which makes it incredibly difficult for the competition to catch up.

The spat between the two titans of tech was summed up succinctly in a New York Times report as: “Today, such warmth [between Apple and Google] is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape.

“While the discord between Apple and Google is in part philosophical and involves enormous financial stakes, the battle also has deeply personal overtones and echoes the ego-fueled fisticuffs that have long characterised technology industry feuds,” that has exposed “the clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offer[ing] an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.”

At the heart of the dispute is Jobs’ sense of betrayal: that Google has “violated the alliance between the companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone”.

But when you compare Apple’s controlled approach to the development of apps, the Google Android allows an open source approach to the submission of programs and also allow users to download them from third-party sources. The Google Android Tablet is also likely to provide support for Flash and will no doubt provide apps for Google’s services, such as Gmail and Voice, a practice Apple does not permit.

But PC World is urging us all to take a “reality check” in that they say the New York Times really stated: “Google is ‘exploring the idea’ of building a Tablet device. It is ‘experimenting’ with possibilities. Despite some bloggers’ tendencies to fill in the blanks with big words, there’s no indication that this is a done deal, let alone something that’s likely to occur at any moment.”

There seems to be a proliferation of Q&A sites, which assume to offer “answers” to anyone who poses a question. Aardvark, WikiAnswers and Mahalo are three new services that purport to deliver education on demand. But it’s not quite feasible, is it?

If you are of a mind to ask randomly trivial questions, you may be surprised that Aardvark, WikiAnswers and Mahalo have all arrived to assist you in your quest for knowledge. But ask something “esoteric” and these systems fall flat on their faces.

For example, should one be tempted to ask: “How many bones are there in the human body”, within minutes you would be emailed with the answer: 206. But ask whether or not it is right for the pope to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and subjectivity calls.

Aardvark has recently been bought by Google and is said that if you “ask questions” you get immediate “live” answers from your network, as Aardvark “finds the perfect person to answer any question in real-time”.

At the weekend, I decided to test the Aardvark service as I was idly browsing through online tech news and noticed a headline on the TechCrunch website pointing to it. I had earlier in the day been sent a link to a Guardian newspaper article, “Richard Dawkins calls for Pope to be put on trial”.

TechCrunch observed that Google has acquired a “promising social search startup Aardvark for around $50 million” and the short description of this story read that this new service “allows users to ask questions and get responses almost immediately from other users who are knowledgeable about the subject in question”.

On a whim I signed up, as I was intrigued to find out why Google had bought such a resource. It puzzled me how I could receive an “immediate response” to, for instance, the probe Prof. Dawkins was instigating. So, I asked an emotive first question: “Should the pope be prosecuted for crimes against humanity?”

But before we descend into the answers the company responded with, the article in question, published on the Guardian newspaper’s website, stated that Prof. Richard Dawkins, along with Christopher Hitchens, are paying lawyers to investigate the possibility of prosecuting the pope for crimes against humanity after a letter emerged from 1985 in which the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger urged that a paedophilic priest in America not be defrocked for the “good of the universal church”.

In the spirit of coincidental enquiry, I looked much further into the catholic church story and found a BBC World News debate, called Intelligence Squared, aired last year and available on YouTube, that centred on the question, “Is the catholic church a force for good in the world”.

Excuse me while I indulge you for a short while more. Arguing for this statement was the Archbishop of Abuja and Ann Widdecombe, a British MP; arguing against the statement was Christopher Hitchens, an English-American author and journalist, and Stephen Fry, British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director. The result: 268 for; 1,876 against the motion.

The problem seems to be that these services pick up on a keyword, in this case “catholicism”, and then passes it down the line to the “experts” on the subject. The first responses were decidedly defensive and weren’t too far away from a recent BBC headline from an Iranian cleric that read: “Women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes”.

Mary, of Cincinnati, responded to the question thus: “Should the people of Thailand all be punished for the few who abuse children, women and men?  I think the answer to both questions is no. Retribution is never as effective as forgiveness.”

My initial assumption, and forgive me here if I am wrong, was how dare someone living in a country such as Thailand have the gall to pose such a question? Maybe I was wrong to think that, but if so what led her to respond to this question with reference to Thailand, a country in which almost everyone is buddhist?

Okay, forgiveness is one measured approach, but it hardly convenes an educated answer to the question of whether or not the pope should be prosecuted for deliberately appointing a known paedophile to the conclave.

The website network.nationalpost.com commented that Dawkins’ point of view has recently been dealing with certain discomfiting suggestions about relations between religion and the brain. And on absorbing that research, “he must live in dread that one day he will read scientific evidence that religious belief is essential to survival and therefore to, uh, evolution”.

From my point of view, as neutral as I started out, I also received the following from Aardvark. A man in Paris said: “No, it’s not his fault that priests don’t take their mission and vows seriously. He should however, take all the dispositions to prevent these abuses from happening ever again.”

Reasonable enough response, I thought. From Vienna: “I’m not sure if thos [sic] is technically possible for him - chruch [sic] law is quite complex!”. And from Barcelona: “Of course but he won’t do. Lot of money and power and he’ll not lose,” which was annoying, given such a weighty topic should be summarily dismissed on the grounds of winning and losing.

By using Google’s core engine as a reference, it allowed me access to hours of research into pro- and counter-arguments on the subject, but instead I received immediate bias from the human reference library Google thought fit to buy just two months ago.

Following Mary’s many platitudes of love and forgiveness in the vein of: “Buddhism is centered on the love that connects us all.  Jesus has the same message,” just didn’t wash. It was not the question I posed and of all the responses I received, not one was neutral; all of the “experts” fell back on entrenched personal truths. Mary, in particular, was the most unhelpful about the question, stating, “Glad I could provide an outlet for your hatred of catholicism”.

Although religious homilies may often excoriate what is considered the main ills of modern society, primarily it’s hedonist post-modernism, it is not really the point of my question. And maybe Aardvark’s responses says much about the Vatican that in the age of wireless communication and the internet it still uses smoke signals to announce the election of its pope.

But all this doesn’t adequately explain what Google and co are doing buying up these Q&A sites: they should at best answer simple enquiries and leave the eternal where it belongs, as the answer can be called 42 by anyone who wishes it to be so.

With the growth of developing economies and the vast amounts of energy needed for cloud computing, publicity-conscious Greenpeace has criticised the ICT industry’s data centers, where utility power comes primarily from coal.

But by some quirk of fate and timing and imagination, cloud computing, based on an infrastructure whereby data is delivered to devices directly from the internet in real time, has all of a sudden been impacted by the shadowy voice of Greenpeace.

A study, “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age”, highlights the significant and rapidly-growing footprint of the ICT industry and predicts that, because of the rapid economic expansion in places like India and China, demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020.

The report finds that by then PC ownership will quadruple to four billion devices – with laptops becoming the main source of global ICT emissions – and that mobile ownership will almost double to nearly five billion over the same period.

As the world’s demand for content is delivered in real time, this growth comes with an increasing demand for energy, with virtual mountains needing to house this swelling data deluge.

Alarming and environmentally damaging according to Greenpeace, individual contributions including five-second snatchments of the banal, need not only to be available for instantaneous access by others and will need infinite data dumps to do so – the home of the data center.

Greenpeace says that data center builders must become “part of the solution to the climate change challenge, rather than part of the problem” and urge operators to “power their data centers using renewable energy”. They are also pressing US Congress to make “renewable energy more readily available”.

The recent salvos should perhaps be put into context because In its new report, “Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change”, shows that data centers and telecommunication networks “will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020, more than triple their current consumption and over half the current electricity consumption of the United States — or more than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil — combined.”

But Greenpeace has been accused of blatant hypocrisy through its glaringly obvious publicity campaign. Digitaltrends reports: “You have to break some eggs to make an omelette, and apparently, you have to burn a couple watts to keep the world tapped into an always-on, instantly available ecosystem of content, ideas and information.”

The article goes on to complain that while “forward-thinking companies like Google and Facebook continue to wring every bit of utility possible from the energy they use, and help their users reduce CO2 footprints in the process, Greenpeace has nothing to do but heckle from the sidelines…”

Greenpeace is said to be targeting data center operators to meet standards it doesn’t itself meet, as some of its servers are  also powered by coal and nuclear. Let’s not forget, headline-catching topics like cloud computing attract publcity to the “good cause”.

Hypocrisy aside, Greenpeace strode on with: “We are calling on IT industry giants to put their might behind government policies that give priority grid access for renewable sources like wind and solar energy…IT companies should also support economy-wide climate and energy policies around the world that peak climate emissions by 2015…The great innovators of the digital age can and should be leaders in promoting an energy revolution.”

It is a bit strange that by announcing what I’ve had for lunch contributes to climate change and even though some may think they are on sturdy ground to dismiss Greepeace for duplicity and manipulating the media, the issue of cloud computing and its environmental impact cannot now remain unaddressed.

This is a new angle for the ICT industry to come to terms with at a time when the long-forgotten Copenhagen climate summit fiasco has been almost universally neglected.

Remember the row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing countries, in which developing nations saw the so-called developed world try and wriggle out of its commitments to climate change?

Many observers at the time blamed the US for arriving at the talks with a paltry offer of emissions cuts on 1990 levels at just 4%. The final text of this farcical agreement made no further obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Does anyone recall at the end of the summit John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, saying: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport”?

Now, perhaps, the ICT industry’s business leaders can lead the way and positively react to concerns about the sustainability of its data centers. If it fails to do so, its shareholders just might.

In TechCrunch’s “The Madness of King Rupert” by Paul Carr he reports, incredulously,  that News International is to install a turnstile on its websites this June and wonders whether Murdoch is simply a barking latter-day George III or visionary.

Newspaper sales have been in decline for quite some time now and companies have been searching for a business model that will make money from their websites. News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks said it was “a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition”. Accepted, but is the Times is specialist enough to make that claim? If not, Paul Carr is right and readers will go elsewhere for content when they reach the turnstiles.

The BBC spent a long time looking at how the newspaper industry could change its model, detailed in a 94-page report by Peter Horrocks on the subject. Subsequently, the Corporation came under fire from the Murdoch clan as being uncompetitive, as television license fees pay for its content.

But at TechCruch, the writer had this to say about it: “Really the only possible reasoning – outside of madness – that’s left for Murdoch’s behaviour is that he’s cleverer than all of us. Perhaps if we just watch quietly we’ll soon see the true genius behind his plan. After all, that’s what happened back in the 1980s and 90s when he launched Sky Television – a British-based satellite TV channel. Back then no one in the UK paid for television (we’d been brought up on free to air TV with little or no demand for cable) and there were no signs that they were ready to start – and yet in less than a decade Sky had become one of the country’s biggest broadcasters. Perhaps that’s his plan with the Times as well – make the content of his new online editions so unbelievably compelling that subscribers will be forced to sign up in their droves?”

Compelling. The Times? James Harding, its editor, recently made comparisons with news and the music industry. “People said the game is up for the music industry because everyone is downloading for free. But now people are buying from download sites.” Who exactly is buying from download sites? Not in my backyard they’re not.

According to the BBC, the latest figures show that The Times and Sunday Times have 1.22m daily users but Media research company Enders Analysis told the BBC that anyone who believes the Times papers will get the usual 5% conversion after the paywall is installed is in “dreamland”. She also doesn’t believe Mr Murdoch’s strategy represents the endgame for his loss-making papers. “If it fails, Murdoch will think of something else. He has been supporting his loss-makers for years.”

Paul Carr believes that “moving its content behind a paywall will be the death of the Times; one of the world’s most respected newspapers and a British national treasure. Even with a relatively modest subscription cost of £1…it has been shown time and time again that the hassle factor of making even a small payment to access a website will result in a haemorrhaging of readers.”

Another source, Emily Bell, writing for The Guardian, says that: “The paywall, the value gate, the towering edifice of unharvested cash, call it what you will, the debate about paid-for content on the web is increasingly about anything but the actual sagacity of putting a turnstile on your website,” arguing that quality journalism is the real issue at stake.

Specialist publications, like the Economist, Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times already have audiences who are charged for digital content but I would not place the Times in this category.

Philosophically, Ms Bell continued: “The paywall debate at heart is partly pragmatic, as the risk of implementing the strategy is high and the rewards are unknown; but also philosophical, about whether journalism is viewed as a commodity or a democratic necessity.”

However, one comment by “Ariel Bender” on TechCrunch’s “Howling Mad Murdoch” article said: “It won’t be long before the New York Times joins the WSJ on the iPad as a paid app. Before too long everyone will take a stand against Google’s vampiristic business model, leaving them to choke on their own hubris and die. That will be a happy day, indeed.”

Harsh, but if Bender has it right, then maybe Howling Messiah may be a more fitting epitaph when micropayments find a common platform.

World Cup Accommodation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, due to be held from June 2010 in South Africa, is expensive. But 3 Lions Football Village provide no-frills, basic accommodation in simple dormitory-style units, from just £39 per person a night!

3 Lions Football Village Accommodation is targeting England supporters and, according to the company’s website, is “the place to experience the 2010 FIFA World Cup”, as it is offering “much more than just a place to stay” and claims to offer the “best vibe in town”, catering for 18+ers who want to party.

The site will cater for a 24-hour party atmosphere, with no neighbours, no closing times and no last call at the bar, which is to be stocked with cheap drinks in their massive beer tent with a big screen television.

The accommodation is located in Randburg, not far from Johannesburg and Rustenburg to the north, where some of the matches will be played. On 12th June, England start their World Cup campaign against the USA in Rustenburg, The World Cup is to be staged at ten venues across South Africa: Johannesburg, Rustenburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Bloemfontein and Pretoria.

At the site, not only is it going to be one huge party but there are subtleties to it too, like English being spoken by all staff members and a full maid service and regular shuttle services to local destinations with free airport collection and drop-off. And to make the English fans feel more at home, they will be providing full English breakfasts, an internet cafe, an international phone service and will arrange trips to local hotspots such as nightclubs, casinos, shopping centres and other local attractions.

Of concern to some is safety, but 3 Lions have this covered too: they will be providing 24-hour security patrols, lockable personal cabinets and a central office safe to store valuables.

All World Cup games will be shown on big screens and there’s also no need to go off-site to change money as they have our own exchange bureau for both credit cards and cash.

As far as the accommodation is concerned, all rooms are the same size (3 metres x 3 metres), and can be furnished in any one of five different configurations with natural and electric lighting, a heater/aircon unit and a daily maid service including bedding and towels.

The following extras are available from 3 Lions Village Accommodation:

ONSITE
» 24 Hour security patrols, a lockable cabinet per person and a Central office safe for your valuables
» Big screens showing all the games
» Round-the-clock facilities including a first-aid office
» Massive beer tent
» Exchange Bureau: credit cards and cash accepted (pounds and euros)
» Full English breakfast served
» Internet cafe and phone service
» Entertainment provided (pool tables, dart boards, golf driving range, paintball)
» DJ and music
» Poker competitions and football pools for small betting

OFFSITE
» Regular shuttle services to local destinations
» Trips to nightlife hotspots, casinos, shopping centres and local attractions
» Safaris organised from 1 day to 1 week in duration
» Golf days
» Shuttles to local soccer games and pick up points
» Arrangements for travel to further destinations
» Trips to Sun City, Soweto and the Cradle of Humankind

V9 Design and Build has designed and built the website for 3 Lions Football Village on Three Lions Village.