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thinkahol *

FORA.tv - Steve Chu: A New Energy Program - 0 views

fora.tv/...Steve_Chu_A_New_Energy_Program

fora tv steve chu energy climate

shared by thinkahol * on 01 Sep 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Sep 10
     
    A New Energy Program with Steve Chu speaking at the Climate Change and Global Politics Conference hosted by the World Affairs Council of Northern California.No one nation can effectively reverse the growing problems caused by our changing climate. Coordinated global efforts - between governments, corporations, and individuals - can help us conserve and develop energy resources, as well as ensure the continued growth of emerging and developed nations.What can political leaders do? What can businesses and investors do? nd what can you do? - World Affairs Council of Northern California
thinkahol *

Humanity Needs to Keep Pace with Technology (cont'd) | The Veracious Blog - 0 views

blog.veraciousentropy.com/...th-technology-cont%e2%80%99d-2

shared by thinkahol * on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 May 10
     
    When we talk about participation, we have to be a bit more specific. On the publishing side, there's clearly more participation than we've ever seen in the past. But in order for this tidal wave of information to be useful, we need to be able to separate fact from fiction. We need to encourage participation on the receiving end. What we need is evaluating participation. With the breadth of niche information and sources we have the ability to get at the best of what is known on a myriad of topics and contexts. Every niche has its experts and its hacks, its enthusiasts and detractors. But for the remaining 95% of us who are not subject matter experts, deriving the accurate or useful information from the sea of what is available can be complicated, time-consuming and simply unverifiable. We need a way to quantify the value of information, or more specifically, the veracity of information.
thinkahol *

Why Big Media Is Going Nuclear Against The DMCA | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...big-media-nuclear-dmca

Why Big Media Is Going Nuclear Against The DMCA | TechCrunch

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11
     
    When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation.  In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs).  Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that. Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills.  The content industry's lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites.  The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will.  This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation. The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines.   What is going on and how exactly did we get here?
thinkahol *

FORA.tv - Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly at the NYPL - 0 views

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FORA.tv - Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly at the NYPL

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Oct 10
     
    In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can't help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.* What forces drive the steady march of innovation?* How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas--ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson look at where technology is taking us. One of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants, makes the argument that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, explains why certain spaces, from 18th-century coffeehouses to the World Wide Web, have an uncanny talent for encouraging innovative thinking.
Todd Suomela

Ether Wave Propaganda: Galison's Questions, #1: What is Context? - 0 views

histsci.blogspot.com/...estions-1-what-is-context.html

sts philosophy science culture context

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Galison's first question is "What is Context?" He observes that the escape from externalist-internalist debates has resulted in an appeal to context. But, to phrase it in a Seinfeldian way: what's the deal with context?
Todd Suomela

What Happens If Science Becomes a Low-Yield Activity? « The Scholarly Kitchen - 1 views

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...e-becomes-a-low-yield-activity

science discovery history sts decline innovation funding research bibliometrics

shared by Todd Suomela on 31 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 31 Jul 11
     
    "And what if science becomes - or has become - lower-yield? Is that a reason to reconsider funding policies? Rationally, looking at the cost-benefit may already have effects on resource and funding allocations. Is it unreasonable to assume that science will continue to produce large, demonstrable advances and insights of the size and importance of the major breakthroughs?"
  • thinkahol * on 03 Aug 11
     
    I think the comments under the linked article sufficiently refute it.
thinkahol *

25% of US car accidents due to using gadgets | KurzweilAI - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/accidents-due-to-using-gadgets

25% of US car accidents due to using gadgets | KurzweilAI

shared by thinkahol * on 16 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 16 Jul 11
     
    Driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices cause as much as 25% of all U.S. car accidents, researchers at the Governors Highway Safety Association have found, WinBETA notes. A major finding was that being distracted was the cause of 15 to 25% of all accidents, ranging from minor property damage to death. Their findings suggest that distracted driving accidents be reported in accident reports to assist in evaluating distracted driving laws and programs. They propose creating low-cost roadway measures that alert motorists when they are drifting out of their driving lane. They also propose that all cell phones be banned on the road, even hands-free versions. In another report by The New York Times, police in Syracuse and Hartford have handed out nearly 20,000 tickets for illegal use of a phone while driving - either for texting or use of a handheld phone. According to the federal government, these efforts have had the desired effect: distracted driving has fallen sharply. Their research shows that drivers talking on a phone are four times as likely to get into a crash as those not on a phone, and that the risks for motorists who text are at least twice as high. In Syracuse, handheld cellphone use and texting have each fallen by one-third. In Hartford, handheld cellphone use by drivers fell 57 percent while texting fell by 75 percent, the Times reports. Ref.: Vicki Harper. et al., Distracted Driving: What Research Shows and What States Can Do, GHSA, 2011
thinkahol *

'World Wide Mind' - Total Connectedness, and Its Consequences - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15scibks.html

'World Wide Mind' - Total Connectedness and Its Consequences NYTimes.com

shared by thinkahol * on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 05 Jul 11
     
    Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den. He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer. Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead. That scene, from his new book, "World Wide Mind," is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as "the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet." The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws.
thinkahol *

News Desk: What Facebook Really Wants : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hat-facebook-really-wants.html

News Desk: What Facebook Really Wants : The New Yorker

shared by thinkahol * on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 24 Sep 11
     
    One way to change something big is to get people really riled up about how you've changed something small. Repaint the boat, and let them to argue about that. By the time they've realized that green is no worse than blue, they won't have the energy to wonder whether it was a smart idea for you to set sail for Australia.
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the_world_witho.php

technology technology-effects history anthropology language evolution culture archaeology

shared by Todd Suomela on 10 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
thinkahol *

What if the revolution that ends 'gun control' is a technological one? - St. Louis gun ... - 0 views

www.examiner.com/...control-is-a-technological-one

What if the revolution that ends 'gun control' is a technological one? - St. Louis gun rights | Examiner.com

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Oct 11
     
    And now, as CNC milling machines and stereolithography (three dimensional printing) devices fall in price to the point of being not out of reach for a hobbyist's workshop, home manufacture of scary "assault weapons" will soon be a few mouse clicks away.
Aman Khani

Deciding On the Right Network Managed Services - 1 views

myvigour.com/right-network-managed-services

network managed services telecom services network wan connection

shared by Aman Khani on 15 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Aman Khani on 15 Jun 16
     
    To completely comprehend a provider's dependability as well as the reputation it would be sensible speaking to some of their customers as well as associates to see what they have to say about the company.
thinkahol *

On "Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience" aka the "hard" problem | Thinkahol's... - 1 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...roscience-aka-the-hard-problem

On "Consciousness: Black Hole of Neuroscience" aka the "hard" problem | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Nov 11
     
    What had been lacking until relatively recently was an overarching framework or theory through which to grasp the nature of consciousness. The lack of a general theory of consciousness, of how it comes to be that there is something that it is like to be, was really the last rational bastion of opposition to the scientific assertion that consciousness emerges from the brain.
Todd Suomela

Thatcher, Scientist - 0 views

rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/...215

politics science experience biography country(GreatBritain) 20c sts history

shared by Todd Suomela on 28 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 28 Feb 12
     
    This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals-associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s-to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity-one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization-Thatcher took a different line.
thinkahol *

Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy - life - 09 August 2010 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...ve-ways-of-making-you-buy.html

reading mind marketers neuromarketing

shared by thinkahol * on 10 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 10 Aug 10
     
    Why ask people what they think of a product when you can just scan their brains instead? New Scientist explores the brave new world of neuromarketing
thinkahol *

New self-assembling photovoltaic technology repairs itself - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100905161908.htm

New self-assembling photovoltaic technology repairs itself

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10
     
    ScienceDaily (Sep. 6, 2010) - Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.
thinkahol *

An illustrated guide to the latest climate science « Climate Progress - 0 views

climateprogress.org/...-to-the-latest-climate-science

illustrated guide to the latest climate science

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Sep 10
     
    "In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."
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