Tagged: Uncategorized
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Mind Wide Open: A Book to Read
Steven Johnson‘s new book: Mind Wide Open, is finally in stock at Amazon so it should be on its way over here very soon. Johnson is the author of one of my favorite books – Emergence – and in the new book he takes a look at the human brain and what brain science can […]
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Do-It-Yourself Dream Machine
Takara co., the same company as brought us the “bowlingual” and “meowlingual” (respectively translating dog and cat “talk” to human language), now claim they have made a “dream machine” allowing you to control your own dreams. I wonder if the science is as solid as that for the other two devices....
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Self-healing Software at MIT
MIT researchers are working on self-healing software. The article gives only hints of how this is done, I am at least not convinced this can work reliably. – Software repairs itself on the go Technology Research News
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CAD System for Modeling Animals
This article talks about a CAD system called Vertebrate Analyzer that is being created at the University of Buffalo. The Vertebrate Analyzer is supposed to be able to simulate the functions of vertebrates’ skeletons and muscles. Casting light upon questions such as: – Why Did Sabertooth Tigers Ne...
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LandGeist: The World According to the Web
Douwe Osinga’s LandGeist project measures the frequency of certain words appearing on web pages together with country names. This is an attempt to see which countries are associated with different words. The generated maps tell their tale. – Land Geist
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Play 20 Questions Against a Computer
This AI implementation of 20 Questions is incredibly good. It can pretty reliably guess what you thought of by asking 20 questions about it. And it is based on the same thinking as my Norm: Let the users have fun while adding value to an AI knowledge base. Most cool! – 20 Questions – Directly […]
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SETI@home Interview: Tapping the Grid
Here is a most interesting interview with David Anderson, Project Leader for the SETI@home distributed computing program. Among the interesting facts: SETI@home now involves 0.1% of the world’s total computing capacity 4.7 million volunteers in 226 countries are chipping in with computing power S...
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MIT’s Picower Center: Brain Sciences with Broad Backgrounds
MIT is opening the Picower Center for Learning and Memory in 2005. It “focuses the talents of a diverse array of brain scientists on a single mission: unraveling the mechanisms that drive the quintessentially human capacity to remember and to learn, as well as related functions like perception, a...
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Breakthrough in Brain-Computer Interfaces
Researchers have developed a promising new way to control computers by thought alone – Computers that read your mind – (The Economist)
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Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg
An article from AP News on Steve Mann – Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg (AP News)
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Squid inspires nanolights
This overview provides a nice insight into reports about optical nanotechnology tools that are based on how an Hawaiian squid that uses reflective plates to confuse predators. – Squid’s Flashlight May Lead to New Nanolights (Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)
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More on Artificial Actors
I wrote a little piece on Wetware the other day about artificial actors in Lord of the Rings. The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article on rendered artificial stunt men. One question though: Do they get paid extra for the more dangerous stunts? – Attack of the Stuntbots – Wired
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Retina implant aims to help blind see
MIT and Harvard Medical School collaborators are producing a sophisticated engineering tool that electrically stimulates the retina to provide vision of a sort for people who are totally blind. – Retina implant aims to help blind see – MIT News
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Drawings by an Artist on LSD
Series of drawings, done by an artist under the influence of LSD as a part of a test conducted by the US government in the late 1950’s. Most curious. – Acid trip 1
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Legged Robots, Mechanical Insects and a Robotrunk!
Wired article on how DARPA and the US Navy are looking at animals as models for building the next generation of war machines and spying gadgets. – Wired News: Mobile Robots Take Baby Steps
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Fish Save Energy By Swimming In Schools
New research explains how schools of fish use the turbulance from each other to minimize the energy needed for them to move around. – ScienceDaily News Release: Scientists Pinpoint How Fish Save Energy By Swimming In Schools
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Beyond Google: Narrow the Search
Wired is noticing search engines’ urge to evolve into something better. This article mentions several interesting products to effectively narrow searches including: Vivisimo, Grokker and TouchGraph. – Beyond Google: Narrow the Search
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The AI of the Mars Rovers
As the world watches the Mars rover Spirit at work on Mars, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the artificial intelligence systems that control its behavior. These two articles from the NASA website scratch the surface of the subject. – NASA – People Are Robots, Too. Almost –
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Popular Science Cover Article on Mind-Machine Interfaces
The January 2004 issue of Popular Science has a cover article named “Linking Mind To Machine: Soon The Human Brain Will Control Robots – Just By Thinking“. I haven’t read it yet (issue has not arrived to Iceland), but it’s one of my favorite Wetware subjects so it should be interesting. – Popular...
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Software Bots Will Take Over the Internet
We’ve had email spam, we’ve had blog comment spam, we’ve had lousy tricks to improve search engine rankings. Douwe Osinga has an interesting but not so pretty sight of what might be a next step in making our online lives harder: Software bots that combine a variety of methods to make a living. – ...
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The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003
Forbes cuts through the nanotechnology hype and lists the best real nanotech products already on the market. – The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003 (via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)
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WebFountain: A Smart Search Engine from IBM
IBM is developing a pretty clever search engine named WebFountain. The engine indexes the web in a similar way as typical search engines do, but additionally uses automatic annotation modules that “makes sense” of the meaning of the indexed documents. Sadly for us nerds, they don’t plan to make t...
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Teaching Kids Media Literacy
A thought provoking article from Technology Review about teaching kids to understand and deal with the media that is involved in their lives on all levels. – Media Literacy Goes to School (subscription required)
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Colors Used to Speed Neural Networks
Researchers from the University of Tokyo are using light with different wavelength to encode information to speed up information transfer in neural networks. – Colors expand neural net
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Robots and Humans Play Soccer Together
A research team from Carnegie Mellon University is exploring man-robot interaction by programming robots to play a special kind of soccer on teams with both human and robot players playing together. – Bots, humans play together
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Vibrating Gel Mimicks Animal Locomotion
A strip of gel on a vibrating plate can be made to mimic three types of animal style locomotion. – Gels Gain Life-Like Motion
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How the Brain Predicts Other People’s Actions
An article in Nature suggests that the brain actually simulates another person’s brain processes when trying to predict their actions. – A system in the human brain for predicting the actions of others
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NASA Helps Biologists in Chameleon Research
NASA teams with biologists to predict the geographic distribution of 11 known chameleon species in Madagascar. The model also helped lead to discovery of 7 previously unknown chameleon species. – NASA Helps Forecast Reptile Distributions In Madagascar
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Robot Does Forest Research
A solar-powered robot helps scientists monitoring environmental changes in forests. – ‘Robot Tarzan’ helps forest work
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When People are Cheaper than Technology
Technologically minded people tend to look for technological solutions to the problems they face. Naturally so, but every technological solution can be improved. There is always another solution, simpler and better than the current one. Most inventors will admit that they know a lot of ways to im...