June 18, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM FREDERIC EMAM-ZADÉ GERARDINO

+Jonathan Zittrain‘s keynote at #roflcon2012 Frederic Emam-Zadé Gerardino originally shared this post:
June 15, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM MATT UEBEL

Matt Uebel originally shared this post: #futurism #singularity #science #circleshare #circle . Realityzealot circle of futurism zealotry. 0_o This is my circle of people that seemed to have expressed an interest in the future, the future of science and technology, and maybe some people that are flat out singlulartarians. If these topics interest you, please add and share this circle. This is the power of g+ folks ^_^
June 14, 2012

THE YEAR’S MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY STORIES…

The year’s most important technology stories? In one week, I will be at Princeton University to teach my yearly Human Nature and Technology course through Johns Hopkins’ Center For Talented Youth program. It’s basically a summer camp for high school nerds, and our HTEC course covers a range of philosophical issues relevant to human life in today’s technological age. This will be my 7th year teaching the course. It’s a lot of fun! The first assignment is to research the top tech stories of the last year, from the summer of 2011 to today. Last year, students covered the following stories: Ecological disasters (Japan tsunami, Deep Water Horizon spill) Wikileaks Arab Spring Climate Change Autonomous Drone attacks Cyberwar (Stuxnet, Anonymous, etc) The Digital Divide Privacy and Freedom (covered Kentuky vs King, the NC Eugenics program) This list formed after some brainstorming with the students, and then they were let loose in a library to prepare some research on these topics for class presentations. This is a new year, with plenty of new stories. What stories belong on this year’s list? Leave your suggestions in the comments! I’ll leave mine there as well. For more information on the CTY program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Talented_Youth
June 14, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM NASA

The luxury of human guidance Competing robots must retrieve samples such as colored tennis balls, blocks of aluminum or rocks spread across a landscape filled with soft soils, rocks, trees and bodies of water — all without human guidance or GPS navigation to simulate the challenges of exploring other planets. The contest is scheduled to take place at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., from today through Sunday (June 15 – 17). “Rovers that might have to do this someday on Mars or another planet don’t have the luxury of operating with human guidance,” said Mason Peck, NASA’s chief technologist. NASA originally shared this post: Robots! “NASA $1.5 Million Contest Unleashes Robots for Humans” — InnovationDailyNews. Jeremy Hsu writes about NASA’s Centennial Challenges prize competition at Worcester Polytechnic Institute taking place Friday and Saturday on the WPI campus in Worcester, Mass. Public invited to attend and catch a glimpse of the future! NASA’s $1.5 Million Contest Unleashes Robots from Humans A $1.5 million contest encourages smarter rovers capable of retrieving samples on Mars without human guidance.
June 14, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM KEITH KOLB

Just to be absolutely clear, these machines will run on the food you eat. They will be as much a part of your body as anything can be. via +Linda Dean Keith Kolb originally shared this post: +Annika O’Brien ‘s goal of becoming a cyborg is a few steps closer http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/13/mit-engineers-develop-glucose-fuel-cell-for-neural-implants/?utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=website MIT engineers develop glucose-based fuel cell to be used in neural implants We’ve seen fuel cells used in a variety of gadgets — from cars to portable chargers — and while medical devices aren’t exactly
June 14, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM PETER SMALLEY

Peter Smalley originally shared this post: #science #biology #seriousbusiness “I am large, I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman There are ten times more non-human cells in your body than there are human cells. Think about that for a moment. Your body is incredibly diverse, a community of cells as populous as the night sky. And though certain cells stand out like constellations, there are multitudes beyond them. You, the individual, are vast beyond comprehension. In this study, 200 scientists from 80 institutions studied 4788 biological samples from 242 healthy adults – and found over ten thousand species represented in what is being called the Human Microbiome Project. “Like 15th century explorers describing the outline of a new continent, HMP researchers employed a new technological strategy to define, for the first time, the normal microbial makeup of the human body,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. This is hardly navel-gazing. The normal complement of microflora that inhabit the human body helps prevent disease, as well as performing many critical cooperative functions for human beings. Understanding of this incredibly varied community may well represent the next major step forward in our understanding of human health. Original paper (full text): http://www.mbl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/microbiome_huse_nature12.pdf First “map” of the bacterial make-up of humans published | R&D MagFirst “map” of the bacterial make-up of humans published The landmark publication this week of a “map” of the bacterial make-up of healthy humans required the work of 200 scientists, who made sense of more than 5,000 samples of human and bacterial DNA and 3…
June 14, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM GIDEON ROSENBLATT

Money is a bad organization framework. It worked well enough when society was organized around the presumption of private ownership and trade, which accounts for roughly the last ten thousand years or so; its really a legacy issue from the Agricultural Revolution. Remember, that’s less that a fifth of our existence as behaviorally modern humans. The digital age can do better. Digital societies are organized around the dynamics of collaboration and publicity, and those dynamics are better modeled by economies of attention than economies of financial transaction. We need to understand that the #attentioneconomy provides an overall more productive and stable organizational framework than money will ever provide. Money distorts the way we think, and this distortion is literally killing us. The digital age must do better. Moves like these from Google and Apple are early attempts at playing with money as an organizing framework. It’s smart that they are doing something since it is fairly clear that we will be transitioning to cashless economies soon enough; we’re mostly there already. But if we are going cashless anyway, we should at least explore some attempts to go moneyless and start rethinking our organizational strategies from the ground up. More on why markets are counterproductive in the digital age: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/05/digital-politics.html Reposted comment from OP Gideon Rosenblatt originally shared this post: The Future of Paying for Things is Apple (and Google) The company that controls mobile is also likely to control the future of paying for stuff. Everything that this article says about Apple is also true for Google. The only real difference is the massive iTunes user base, but Google is working hard on that and has advantages of its own because of its stronger online shopping position. What will Amazon’s response be? I don’t know, but they better be working […]
June 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JOHN KELLDEN

Part of the lesson of this story, I take it, is that “your” song isn’t yours alone, but belongs to the community. But of course the song is just a tool for tracking an individual’s identity over their lifetime. So part of the lesson is that your identity isn’t your own. This lesson is so radically contrary to the existing order of things that it might make one uneasy to state it so explicitly, but better uneasiness than perpetuating the existing order. John Kellden originally shared this post: Our Future Society, part 51: Ubuntu Your Unique Story, Your Song When a woman of the African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes to the jungle with other women, and together they pray and meditate until you get to “The song of the child”. When a child is born, the community gets together and they sing the child’s song. When the child begins his education, people get together and he sings his song. When they become an adult, they get together again and sing it. When it comes to your wedding, the person hears his song. Finally, when their soul is going from this world, family and friends are approaching and, like his birth, sing their song to accompany it in the “journey”. In the Ubuntu tribe, there is another occasion when men sing the song. If at some point the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, they take him to the center of town and the people of the community form a circle around her. Then they sing “your song.” The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment, but is the love and memory of his true identity. When we recognize our own song, we have no desire or need to hurt anyone. Your […]
June 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ANIMESH SHARMA

The Philosopher by +Meghan Fitzgerald
June 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ALEX WILD

Leafcutter ants practice the most sophisticated form of ant agriculture, and probably the most sophisticated form of nonhuman agriculture on the planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant-fungus_mutualism “Generalized higher agriculture is practiced by 63 species in two genera and refers to the condition of highly domesticated fungus. The fungi used in higher agriculture cannot survive without its agriculturalists to tend it and has phenotypic changes that allow for increased ease of ant harvesting. Leafcutter agriculture, which is a more highly derived form of higher agriculture, is practiced by 40 species in two genera and has the most recent evolution, originating between 8 and 12 million years ago. Leaf cutters use living biomass as the substrate to feed their fungi, whereas in all other types of agriculture, the fungus requires dead biomass.” Leafcutters have been practicing advanced forms of sustainable agriculture for over 8 million years. Human beings have been doing it for about 10,000 years or so, which is less that .15% of that time. #ants are #awesome Alex Wild originally shared this post: Among the more charming insects I encountered in southern Brazil was Acromyrmex disciger , a furry little leafcutter ant species. Here, a worker carries a cut leaf down a tree trunk. Lighting this shot required a careful balance between fill and back flash. For #wildlifewednesday , curated by +Mike Spinak.
June 12, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ANDREA GRAZIANO

Andrea Graziano originally shared this post: via +Sakis Koukouvis Crouching Data, Hidden Code: Tracking Emotions with Twitter in Realtime with EmotiMeter Social Media Content Analysis Natural Language Processing Data Mining and Machine learning for large-scale social media GPU based processing, distributed and parallel architectures Online Social Inter…
June 12, 2012

MAGNASANTI TAKEN FROM THE COMMENTS OF THIS…

Magnasanti Taken from the comments of this interesting conversation in +Pascal Wallisch‘s thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100279438294886290330/posts/dtoeQH2s73f SIMCITY 3000 – MAGNASANTI – 6 MILLION – ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM.flv
February 27, 2006

V1

(Click for big) The primary visual cortex is normally understood as being a direct map from the retinal image onto the brain. Apparently we were wrong. From Nature Neuroscience: Perceived size matters Using retinotopic mapping to delineate primary visual cortex, Murray and colleagues examined whether the size of activation patterns in V1 differed when subjects looked at either the front or back spheres. Remarkably, when the sphere that subjects were looking at was perceived to be bigger (due to the contextual cues), activity in V1 spread over a larger area than when it was perceived to be smaller, even though the size of the retinal image produced by the spheres was identical. Activity at the earliest stages of cortical processing does not therefore simply reflect the pattern of light falling on the retina. Somehow the complex three-dimensional cues present in the scene can be integrated to take into account perceived depth in the representation present in V1. There has been work suggesting as much before, but this provides clear evidence. The article goes on: This work is not the first to show that V1 activity can be strongly linked to conscious perception rather than to physical (retinal) stimulation. It is also clear that neural processing in V1 reflects not just feed-forward signals but also feedback influences from higher areas. However, this work not only provides a particularly clear and compelling example of these properties but also, for the first time, clearly links the spatial extent of what we perceive (rather than, for example, contrast or direction of motion) to the spatial extent of activity in V1. More fundamentally, these findings force us to re-evaluate the notion of a ‘hard-wired’ retinotopy in V1. The finding that V1 contains a topographic map of the retinal projection of the visual field has been […]
March 1, 2006

CHINA VS THE WORLD

ICANN is in the news again, this time because China is fragrantly dismissing its authority. From Ars technica: China gives itself its own top-level domains In a move that could have enormous ramifications for how the Internet works, the government of China has decided to bypass ICANN altogether and set up its own set of TLDs and domain name servers. In addition to the .cn TLD, China will have three new Chinese-character TLDs equating to “dot China,” “dot com,” and “dot net.” The Ministry of Information Industry describes the changes this way: Under the new system, besides “CN”, three Chinese TLD names “CN”, “COM” and “NET” are temporarily set. It means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of [ICANN] of the United States. Ah, another nation clawing its ways out from under the icy clutches of American imperialism!
March 2, 2006

CHINA VS THE MACHINE

China is holding a huge artificial intelligence expo in August to commemorate the 50th anniversary of AI. The Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence (which seems to lack any web presence) is sponsoring the event, and kicking it off with a battle royale between Xiangqi masters and ‘robots’.
March 2, 2006

LIFE IMITATES ARTIFICIAL LIFE

From the Lack of Imagination Department: But it seems some expect the perfect person to come in synthetic form as 15% of us in the North East believe robots will be a fully integrated part of our lives within 20 years. They cited the robot from Will Smith’s futuristic film I Robot and Spielberg’s AI (Artificial Intelligence), which stars British actor Jude Law, as the sort of creatures they expect to be sitting in our offices in coming years. Blade Runner characters the Replicants and Robocop were also seen as possible indicators of how our machine helpers may look in the future, but only a handful thought Star Wars robots C3PO and R2-D2 could be brought to life. |link|
March 3, 2006

SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS

From Ars technica: New network neutrality legislation on its way Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) plans to introduce additional legislation this week that would prevent the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from hindering traffic from outside its network and giving its own content preferential treatment. As Sen. Wyden describes it, his legislation would “make sure all information (transmitted over broadband networks) is made available on the same terms so that no bit is better than another one.”
March 3, 2006

SPORE

Yes, its a 35 minute video of what is essentially a really big mmorpg. Yes, its rather old. Yes, it is still worth it to watch the entire thing.
March 4, 2006

DROOOOOL

Watch this.
March 5, 2006

HOLY COW

Watch this (28 meg WMV file) From New Scientist: Robotic ‘pack mule’ displays stunning reflexes A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military. BigDog is described by its developers Boston Dynamics as “the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth”. The company have released a new video of the robot negotiating steep slopes, crossing rocky ground and dealing with the sharp kick. … Roboticist Darwin Caldwell, at the University of Salford, UK, adds: “It certainly looks very impressive – fast moving, highly reactive, autonomous both in power and possible intelligence and looking fairly robust. I have seen none that would be better. But there must always be a certain caution from videos.” From the people that brought you the robot that climbs walls and other goodies.
March 6, 2006

ON TRUTHINESS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness … the term is actually included in the Oxford English Dictionary as a derived form of “truthy.” The entry is marked as “rare or dialectal,” with a single citation of “truthiness” dated to 1824 (though it has been posited that the citation actually dates to 1837, with an earlier citation dating to 1832). As such, Colbert seems to have unknowingly reinvented the word, though he also invented a new, ironic meaning for it, where the original meaning was akin to “truthfulness.” This distinction is consistent with the announcement by the American Dialect Society, in that it credits “truthiness” as “Recently popularized on the Colbert Report” rather than “invented.” I am amused that this article is plagued by vandalism.
March 6, 2006

MSG RCVD

Found in my inbox: From Harpers: Chances that a Japanese person will make eye contact during conversation with another Japanese person: 2 in 5. Chances that a Japanese person will make eye contact during conversation with a robot: Â 3 in 5. That explains it somewhat…
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