The Best Business Model in the World - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
That's what everyone who sees my BRITE presentation asks me. It's a new service called Prezi. And it's insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software.
Humanity Close to Passing the Hofstadter-Turing Test?
- A version of the Turing Test now running in Second Life could one day prove that humanity is truly intelligent.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Various versions of the Turing test have been put forward over the years but only one is so tough that even humans haven't yet passed it. That will change if Florentin Neumann at the University of Paderborn in Germany and a couple of pals have their way.
Can internal 'brain music' be used in therapy? - science-in-society - 24 April 2009 - New Scientist
Does the brain naturally compose melodies to rival those by Mozart or Chopin? Researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) think so. What's more, they suggest that piano renditions of an individual's cerebral music can help in dealing with insomnia and fatigue in the aftermath of a stressful experience. Psychologists, however, are sceptical of their claims.
Gallery - Flickr users make accidental maps - Image 1 - New Scientist
Many digital photos are now geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates for the location where they were taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have analysed this data, using 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website.
Using geotag data attached to 35 million photos uploaded to Flickr, David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, created accurate global and city maps and identified popular snapping sites.
- Many digital photos are now geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates for the location where they were taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have analysed this data, using 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website.
Using geotag data attached to 35 million photos uploaded to Flickr, David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, created accurate global and city maps and identified popular snapping sites.
When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights.
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: A Neural Net That Diagnoses Epilepsy
Around 50 million people suffer from epilepsy--about 1 percent of the world's population, say Forrest Sheng Bao at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, and a few pals.
The team developed the system by training a neural network to recognize the characteristic patterns in interictal data that indicate that the patient is epileptic. And the researchers claim an accuracy rate of 94 percent--about the same as experienced human operators, who usually have to strip various kinds of noise and artifacts out of the data before they can do their job.
Unifying The Animate And The Inanimate Designs Of Nature
maybe it helps me solving the dilemma as well
What they believe connects the two worlds is a theory that flow systems - from animal locomotion to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time to balance and minimize imperfections. Flows evolve to reduce friction or other forms of resistance, so that they flow more easily with time. This view has been termed the constructal law, which Bejan first stated 13 years ago.
The story began with the two scientists trying to determine if the same laws applied to two very different forms of locomotion -- the swimming of fish and the running or flying of animals. The commonly held belief among biologists was that fish locomotion was different than other animal locomotion. Since they live in water, the conventional wisdom held, fish were different because they would not be subject to gravity.
Companies mine Web clues for signs of pandemics
Veratect Inc., a 2-year-old company with fewer than 50 employees, combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and off-line sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. It tracks thousands of "events" each month - an odd case of respiratory illness, or a run on over-the-counter medicines, for example - then ranks them for severity and posts them on a subscription-only Web portal for clients who want early warnings.
Veratect says it posted a report to clients on April 6 describing an unusual number of respiratory illnesses in the Mexican state of Veracruz, then sent an e-mail on April 16 to the Centers for Disease Control pointing to an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Oaxaca state, after officials there issued an alert.
Unknown internet 2: Could the net become self-aware? - tech - 30 April 2009 - New Scientist
In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".
The internet's network structure is similar to that of the human brain (Image: ImageSource / Getty)
Beware surfers: cyberspace is filling up - Times Online
It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for
several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to
operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading
cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals
to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibreoptic wires
would cost at least £5 billion.Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A
recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was
growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into
account plans for greater internet access in China and India.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
