Group items tagged

There it goes :)

"So a new tablet will never be exciting the way that a new, luxury gel ink pen will be exciting" Man, I immediately felt like ordering some new luxury gel ink pens!

like also this one: "Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial "wow" factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there's already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc.. I invariably end up closing the app in a fit of guilt, and picking up one of the truly fantastic dead tree or Kindle books that I'm working my way through at the moment, so that I can actually exercise my brain (as opposed to simply wearing it out)."

breakthroughs vs. accelerated deployment in climate change mitigation technologies.

indeed. puts me in mind of the often reinvented private ACT idea. actually there's a bunch of interesting looking articles on his website. http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/papers.html . No sps in the solar one as far as i can tell :) found this bit intriguing too in that, albeit presumably out of context, it doesn't make sense ""The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says," declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. "Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough."" found this seemingly not very well considered piece (to be fair a blog post) by the guy http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/02/is-anyone-more-incoherent-than-vinod-khosla/ . maybe he's written some more convincing stuff in this vein somewhere.

"Mr Khosla (...) is investing over $1 billion of his clients' money in black swans" Well, with his own money his approach might be a little different :-)

Unexplained annual variations in nuclear decay rates have been reported in recent years by a number of groups. We show that data from these experiments exhibit not only variations in time related to Earth-Sun distance, but also periodicities attributable to solar rotation. Additionally, anomalous decay rates coincident in time with a series of solar flares in December 2006 also point to a solar influence on nuclear decay rates....

can we use space to make a smart experiment to solve this riddle? e.g. sending a decay detecter on a close solar orbit and one to Pluto and then compare decay rates? or a highly elliptical trajectory and compare during peri and apoapsis?

I think it could be possible. I need to look into the details. In fact it could probably be done already with the nuclear generators on the Voyager and Pioneer and other nuclear powered probes. That is if the data are precise enough...

interesting list!

anybody interested in joining?

nice link from Andrés ...

electric grid modelling .... Nikolaos could you have a look at this?

interview with the head of the "big greed innovations" - nothing spectacularly new though ...

Cool blog

this is also good http://www.worldchanging.com/

Spot the ACT friends...

interesting that Google is getting involved into this. The article describes well the situation though, lots of ideas, existing technology but no framework and solid products yet

KI tool that automatically organizes files, emails, etc.

this looks like a good one to try ...

still only a few percent of conversion efficiency but very promising since working at reasonably focussing and unpolarised light; they announce the publication of a first design of such a system .... to be followed!! Duncan: you wanna have a closer look at it?

99% house advertising, 1% scientific results. I think this is still a conservative guess... And I'm sure this "completely new" effect that you don't see when "staring at the equations of motion" (doggone, how I love this USish "I-am-better-than-the-rest-of-the-world" jargon) certainly has been predicted at least 50 years ago by some smart USSR researcher!!

what to think about that? spoiling important ressources, smart idea?, and is it really cheap?

smart!

Very quick and accurate gesture interface. A bit like Kinect, but better. Watch the video, its neat!

Aww... new toy coming! Great Leo! :)

they also have a developer program, the ACT should apply :)

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

Software that roughly mimics the way the brain works could give smartphones new smarts-leading to more accurate and sophisticated apps for tracking everything from workouts to emotions. The software exploits an artificial-intelligence technique known as deep learning, which uses simulated neurons and synapses to process data.