Skip to main content

Home/ Science Technology Society/ Group items tagged ideas

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
thinkahol *

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

fora.tv/...on_and_Kevin_Kelly_at_the_NYPL

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.
thinkahol *

Microsoft offers a glimpse into the future of productivity | KurzweilAI - 1 views

www.kurzweilai.net/nto-the-future-of-productivity

Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool interfaces could be here in five to ten years estimates Kurt DelBene President Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. "All of the ideas are based on real technology " he said.

shared by thinkahol * on 30 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 30 Oct 11
     
    Microsoft has posted an awesome new concept video with some ubercool new interfaces that could be here in five to ten years, estimates Kurt DelBene, President, Microsoft Office Division. That sounds a bit conservative. "All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology," he said. "Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration, and data visualization, already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies." "Other companies" … hmm, some of the concepts look a bit like Nokia's visionary Morph concept tech  (see the video at the bottom of this post and our 2010 news item).
thinkahol *

$10 million for Project 10^100 winners | KurzweilAI - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/lion-for-project-10100-winners

$10 million for Project 10^100 winners | KurzweilAI

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10
     
    Google has announced the winners of Project Project 10^100 (ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible). Thousands of people from more
Todd Suomela

Islamic science and the long siesta Robert Irwin TLS - 0 views

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/...article3237245.ece

sts science history islam medieval import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of science. The book is a polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome as such.
Todd Suomela

CBC Radio | Ideas | Features | How To Think About Science - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...index.html

science sts history import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this
Todd Suomela

Uncertain Principles: What's the Matter With Biologists? - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...s_the_matter_with_biologis.php

sts biology physics open preprints history culture

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    And yet, even today, seventeen years after the launch of the arxiv, every attempt to set up a preprint service for biologists has been a dismal failure, as noted by both Ginsparg and Timo Hannay (whose Science21 talk notes are up at Nature Networks. You can also get video and microblogging). Contrary to what a naive outsider's opinion might suggest, biologists appear to be highly resistant to the whole idea of sharing pre-publication results.
thinkahol *

Let's Regulate Facebook! | The Awl - 0 views

www.theawl.com/...lets-regulate-facebook

Let's Regulate Facebook! | The Awl

shared by thinkahol * on 01 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Feb 11
     
    Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt-and next, the world!-it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important.
thinkahol *

It's Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment - 0 views

www.juancole.com/...ia-now-freer-than-the-u-s.html

It's Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11
     
    An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.
thinkahol *

Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sourcing-constitution-facebook

Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution | World news The Guardian

shared by thinkahol * on 10 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 10 Jun 11
     
    Country recovering from collapse of its banks and government is using social media to get citizens to share their ideas
thinkahol *

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...rned_from_5_million_books.html

What we learned from 5 million books | Video on TED.com

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11
     
    Have you played with Google Labs' NGram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
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.
thinkahol *

Algorithms identify and track the most important privately-held technology companies | ... - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/tely-held-technology-companies

Algorithms identify and track the most important privately-held technology companies | KurzweilAI

shared by thinkahol * on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 18 Apr 11
     
    A startup called Quid has developed algorithms that analyze Internet-based data from corporations to make fast-moving technology developments visible, navigable, and understandable. Quid has built a data set combining information about firms that succeeded and sank, patent documents, government grants, help wanted advertisements, and tweets. Its algorithms use the collection of information to analyze the prospects of around 35,000 firms and research groups working on new technologies. By extracting words and phrases from the collected documents, Quid constructs a "technology genome" that describes the primary focus of each of those 35,000 entities. A map of the connections between those genomes can be used by investors to find hints about interesting companies or ideas. Most companies cluster around established sectors, but a few will sit in the white spaces between the clusters and can represent the seeds of new technology sectors.
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

cosmicvariance.com/...ewton-as-the-first-cosmologist

sts science history physics astronomy astrophysics

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
Todd Suomela

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 64, 2003 - Table of Contents - 0 views

muse.jhu.edu/...jhi64.1.html

sts history technology information culture information-overload early-modern import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Articles Early Modern Information Overload
Todd Suomela

Hello, Darkness - 96.03 - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...darkness.htm

night light-pollution darkness metaphor technology-effects

shared by Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09 - Cached
  • But the implication of electricity in the sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made to do--pursue leisure, earn a living--there are simply far more usable hours now in which to do it
  • In the United States at midnight more than five million people are at work at full-time jobs. Supermarkets, gas stations, copy shops--many of these never close.
  • Living with electric lights makes it difficult to retrieve the experience of a non-electrified society. For all but the very wealthy, who could afford exorbitant arrays of expensive artificial lights, nightfall brought the works of daytime to a definitive end. Activities that need good light--where sharp tools are wielded or sharply defined boundaries maintained; purposeful activities designed to achieve specific goals; in short, that which we call work--all this subsided in the dim light of evening. Absent the press of work, people typically took themselves safely to home and were left with time in the evening for less urgent and more sensual matters: storytelling, sex, prayer, sleep, dreaming.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • John Staudenmaier, a historian of technology and a Jesuit priest, for a recent conference at MIT. (The essay will appear in a book called The Idea of Progress Revisited, edited by Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish.) Staudenmaier makes the point--obvious when brought up, though we've mostly lost sight of it--that from the time of the hominid Lucy, in Hadar, Ethiopia, to the time of Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey, the onset of darkness sharply curtailed most kinds of activity for most of our ancestors.
  • Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09
     
    Speculative connections between electric lighting, sleep deficits, and health.
  • Todd Suomela on 09 Mar 09
     
    I wonder if the driving force behind the sleep deficit is in fact more pervasive, and indeed global in nature: the triumph of light.
Todd Suomela

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) by John M. Carroll - Interaction-Design.org: HCI, Usab... - 0 views

www.interaction-design.org/..._computer_interaction_hci.html

hci history technology science computer sts

shared by Todd Suomela on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering. Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.
  • One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.
  • In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.
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.
1 - 19 of 19
Showing 20▼ items per page