From No Telephone to Smart Phones 1900-2011 In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world—and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions. As with many technologies, the explosion began in the world’s most developed countries. From: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40321/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-05-10 h/t +John Verdon

The Most Realistic Robotic Ass Ever Made I tried not to post this. I failed. More here: http://gizmodo.com/5909164/the-most-realistic-robotic-ass-ever-made “The moves and twitches are made possible by a system of inflatable air bags, and the researchers believe that a user may even feel a simulated sense of fear when they trigger its twitch. Which is, obviously, demonstrated by good, firm buttock slap. Thank you, Nobuhiro. Thank you so, so much.” SHIRI

“Humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self. Two additional studies demonstrated that these effects stemmed from the independent value that individuals placed on self-referential thought and on simply sharing information with others. Together, these findings suggest that the human tendency to convey information about personal experience may arise from the intrinsic value associated with self-disclosure.” John Verdon originally shared this post: Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding Abstract Humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individual…

The new Google-commissioned paper, written by well-known UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, argues that such regulations would be preempted by the First Amendment. Google’s search engine, they write, “uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers’ judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries.” _____ This strikes me as a conceptually significant argument. I’m somewhat disappointed that Google is arguing that its software constitutes speech by software engineers (instead of by Google itself as an artificial entity), but I’ll be satisfied with baby steps. But more importantly, the argument that search is a matter of subjective judgment (as opposed to a piece of intellectual property, for instance) seems relevant for understanding software more generally. I don’t know what implications this has, but they seem to be very wide-reaching. Ars Technica originally shared this post: Scholar: regulating Google results would violate First Amendment | Ars Technica A prominent First Amendment scholar has co-authored a white paper arguing that search engines enjoy the same high level of First Amendment protections as traditional media outlets. Google commissioned…

The University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab, with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has modified a Kawada Industries HRP-3L biped robot. The HRP3L-JSK is able to calculate 170 stable postures in 1 millisecond, and uses capacitor-driven electric motors to achieve faster, more powerful movement. It can also jump 44 cm (17 inches). ____ I can’t help but watch this video in comparison to PETMAN: PETMAN Robot Strut (Stayin’ Alive) The fact of biologically inspired movement alone makes PETMAN seem much more hearty and effective. Watching the two videos side by side makes me think of other technology “wars”, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that HRP-3L is a Mac, PETMAN is a PC. HRP3L-JSK: High Power Biped Robot

Education is how we will manage the #attentioneconomy . Chryle Elieff originally shared this post: I Can’t Believe You Don’t Know That!! As someone who has devoted a considerable portion of my life teaching others, I am often surprised when I heard people utter that phrase. I mean, we’re all on this spinning globe to learn. Some people know things already. Others will know those things all in good time. This cartoon explains that so nicely: http://xkcd.com/1053/ xkcd: Ten Thousand XKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can get prints, posters, and t-shirts in the store. Ten Thousand. |< · < Prev · Random; Next >; >|. Ten Thousand. |< · < Prev · …

Any thoughts? More info here: http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/allthis/ _ Allthis is an online marketplace where users can buy and sell — using a virtual currency called “time credits” — 10-minute chunks of anyone’s time. The idea, says cofounder Christopher Poseley in an exclusive interview with Mashable, is to unlock people’s time and make it available to others. “We really want to be the place on the internet where you can, in a trusted way, get in touch with anyone that you want to.” Allthis, a small Angel-backed startup, quietly went live with its product a few weeks ago and has since organically attracted 10,000 users. Here’s how it works: Every individual that joins the site is assigned a single token that others, if they have enough time credits, can buy at the going market rate. The token represents 10 minutes of your time and, as a condition of the registration process, you pledge to honor and give the allotted time to the highest buyer. The price of your token goes up 10% every time it trades hands, meaning your onsite value, and the value of your time, increases. Once another user holds your token for a 24-hour period, then he or she can choose to cash in on the 10 minutes of your time. And once your token has been redeemed, you can donate your purchase price, in actual currency converted from time credits, to a U.S. charity of your choosing. Then, your token goes back on the market and the process starts over. Pamela J. Stubbart originally shared this post: Allthis – where you can “buy” ten minutes of someone’s time with virtual currency. Have you seen this, +Daniel Estrada ? Seems #attentioneconomy related. allthis The ten-minute exchange

#science and the #attentioneconomy “According to Richard Darell’s article on Bit Rebels, a significant amount of Pinterest users (including myself) did not use the site prior to January 2012. Its growth spurt is impressive. Parse the spurt into categories and “home decor” ranks top at 12.8%, according to Repinly. According to the same source, only 25% of Pinterest users have a bachelor degree or higher. nature.com’s reader demographics, by comparison, strongly favor readers with graduate degrees. Most Scientificamerican.com readers also have graduate degrees. This is just slightly lower than the US 2010 census in which 27.9 reported having Bachelor degrees or higher. This might also explain why “Science & Nature,” conveniently lumped together, category is relegated to the subterranean digital dungeon at 1.7%. In other words, the future of space exploration, genetics and geophysics are being sacked by “Hair & Beauty,” “Food & Drink” and “DIY Crafts” in the US. In the UK, where the majority of users are male, according to Googledoubleclick, venture capital, blogging resources, crafts, web analytics, and SEO/marketing are the alpha topics ruling the site.” Joanne Manaster originally shared this post: Loving +Susanna Speier ‘s article at Nature (Really?) about Pinterest Soapbox Science: Tool Tales: Don’t completely write off Pinterest! : Soapbox Science Science Online New York (SoNYC) encourages audience participation in the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online. To celebrate our first birthday, we are handing the mic over …

“*Exascale is also different because unlike previous milestones, it is unlikely that we will face yet another one in the future.* These words may be thrown back in my face, but I think we will never reach zettaflops, at least not by doing discrete floating point operations. We are reaching the anvil of the technology S-curve and will be approaching an asymptote of single program performance due to a combination of factors including atomic granularity at nanoscale. “Of course I anticipate something else will be devised that is beyond my imagination, perhaps something akin to quantum computing, metaphoric computing, or biological computing. But whatever it is, it won’t be what we’ve been doing for the last seven decades. That is another unique aspect of the exascale milestone and activity. For a number, I’m guessing about 64 exaflops to be the limit, depending on the amount of pain we are prepared to tolerate.” John Verdon originally shared this post: HPCwire: Thomas Sterling: ‘I Think We Will Never Reach Zettaflops’ As supercomputing makes its way through the petascale era, the future of the technology has never seemed so uncertain. HPC veteran Thomas Sterling takes us through some of the most critical developmen…

I’ll be leading a series of discussions with the Common Action Free School on organization. It’s going to be a lot of fun! On May 23rd: “Ants and Organization“ On May 24th: “Organization and Consensus“ Both talks will be held at 6pm in the basement of the Coffeehouse in uptown Normal and are completely free and open to the public. Below are some resources and reference materials. I’ll be using these examples to make some conceptual points about organizations, and with some guides for suggestion how we might build our own. Deborah Gordon’s TED talk on ants is probably the most important to watch of the bunch. It is about 15 minutes long. If you are as excited by her talk as I was, you may want to watch her hour long Google Talk. The other significant video is this RSA animate short, at 10 minutes, titled The Power of Networks. This gives an introduction to complexity, network theory, and the importance of organization for the digital paradigm. The rest of these videos and links are short and quick, most less than a minute long. Easy to watch, and full of inspiring ideas! If you were at my last teach in at the Uptown Normal Circle, you might remember some of these videos. Others are new and exciting! To understand is to perceive patterns Ant mill The Wisdom of Mold Pong collective intelligence experiment India traffic Traffic jam propagation Traffic and speed laws Subway maps converge Open Space technologies I’ll be adding to this list of resources and links as I prepare the presentations. Any questions, comments, or suggestions as I prepare are totally welcome! You can read more about the Common Action Free School here: http://www.commonactionfreeschool.org/

Sharing a comment from +Andrea Kuszewski‘s thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108998673146368660257/posts/jUygM2iG7U1 +Andrea Kuszewski Great article! You say: “The brain is actually not like a computer; it doesn’t always follow the rules.”. This is a curious claim. The brain obviously follows some rules, and they are quite clearly going to be rules that follow both electronic (in the sense of synapses firing) and computational in the sense that it can be given a formal (and indeed, a computable) characterization. In other words: the brain is quite literally a computer. Turing deals with this mistake explicitly in his original 1950’s article, under the section entitled “The Informality of Behavior”, and rejects it as an objection to artificial intelligence. http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html What I think you mean in this article, which are otherwise quite good, is that the human brain doesn’t work like “computers”, those manufactured devices we buy for a thousand or so dollars, that comes with a screen and a keyboard and such. Human brains obviously don’t work anything like those things. This is the public perception of a “computer” as a commodity; it is the impression that a computer is a desktop or a laptop, that a smartphone and a tablet are “small computers”, and that there are big scary things called “supercomputers” and who knows what they do. These are what give rise to the the sci fi stereotype that computers only “follow rules”, or who have to “break their programming” (usually with an “emotion chip”) in order to be a real boy. This is the Pinocchio myth of AI, and it plagues the popular discussion. But that’s not what computers are at all. Computers follow rules, but they are the same kind of organizational rules that all computational systems (including human minds) follow. The computers we interact with and use on a daily […]

TERMES Project: Algorithmic Self-Assembly This video shows examples of decentralized algorithms for collective construction, generated by a global-to-local compiler that transforms a desired goal structure into a local robot behavior program. Using local sensing, and implicit coordination, multiple robots can simultaneously construct structures of different classes, while preserving intermediate constraints such as climbability and lock-placement restrictions. See the IROS 2011 workshop paper for more details. Read more on the bots here:; http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/cons/termes.html Via +Evan Ackerman Automaton Blog: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/video-friday-robot-termites-dust-puppies-and-serious-social-issues TERMES Project: Algorithmic Self-Assembly