Silicon Alley
The latest re-hash of the old "Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley" thing? "Analysts believe New York is ripe for the high-tech revolution since it already has key ingredients to thrive: Top academic institutions such as the University of Rochester and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and existing high-tech companies including IBM and Corning." USA Today: Can high-tech […]
Math Rocks
After my earlier post about art and design, here's maths. The UK Government is concerned about the teaching of maths in school, and is likely to take steps to make maths "more useful once pupils enter the world of work". That's a seemingly harmless phrase, but what that boils down to is more teaching of […]
Now That’s What I Call Emergence
Ant Supercolony Dominates Europe "Scientists are not entirely sure why the supercolony has emerged. They think the initial success of the alien invaders would have led to high nest densities, which in turn would have favoured co-operative behaviour over aggression. And evolution would then have reinforced this superiority because nests devoid of internal strife would […]
Sony develop human (nearly)
Crikey. "Sony Develops Small Biped Entertainment Robot With Ability to Adopt Its Movement to a Variety of Situations and Offering Rich Communication." Including: 3. Conversation, performance control technology based on its short-term and long-term memory. In addition to short-term memory functions to temporary memorize individuals and objects, SDR-4X is equipped with long-term memory functions to […]
Chicago going straight to Internet5
"Chicago — once hog butcher for the world, the nation’s freight handler, city of the big shoulders — is becoming a city of futuristic networks. Academic researchers, politicians, and telecommunications executives have ambitions for making Chicago a major international hub for advanced laser-light networks … "This technology is more like Internet5," says Joe Mambretti, director […]
The Secret Life of Numbers
"The Secret Life of Numbers" is about the popularity of numbers. With the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques the artists conducted an exhaustive empirical study to determine the relative popularity of every integer between one and one million. The resulting popularity profile exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns and […]