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Foxconn To Replace Human Workers With One Million Robots - IEEE Spectrum - 0 views

spectrum.ieee.org/...orkers-with-one-million-robots Foxconn To Replace Human Workers With One Million Robots - IEEE Spectrum
shared by thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11
     
    Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer from Taiwan with huge factories in China, generates about 40 percent of the global consumer electronics revenue by creating things like iPhones and computer components on giant assembly lines staffed by humans. Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings), but by all accounts, the core of the problem (the work) remains "repetitive, exhausting, and alienating." Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.
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SAO/NASA ADS: ADS Home Page - 0 views

www.adsabs.harvard.edu astronomy astrophysics catalog library reference research sts
shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 6.9 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records, which are searchable through highly customizable query forms, and full-text scans of much of the astronomical literature which can be browsed or searched via our full-text search interface. Integrated in its databases, the ADS provides access and pointers to a wealth of external resources, including electronic articles, data catalogs and archives. We currently have links to over 7.6 million records maintained by our collaborators.
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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.
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5 Things That Internet Porn Reveals About Our Brains | Sex & the Brain | DISCOVER Magazine - 0 views

discovermagazine.com/...article_view 5 Things That Internet Porn Reveals About Our Brains | Sex & the Brain DISCOVER Magazine
shared by thinkahol * on 21 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Sep 11
     
    With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, (the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world's largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa-a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world-Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.
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$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
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Ocean changes may have dire impact on people - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100618103558.htm ocean changes impact
shared by thinkahol * on 21 Jun 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Jun 10
     
    "Scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet. "
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US approves world's biggest solar energy project in California | KurzweilAI - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/s-biggest-solar-energy-project US approves world's biggest solar energy project in California | KurzweilAI
shared by thinkahol * on 30 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 30 Oct 10
     
    The U.S. Department of Interior approved on Monday a permit for Solar Millennium, LLC to build the largest solar energy project in the world - four  plants at the cost of one billion dollars each - in southern California. The project is expected to generate up to 1,000 Megawatts of energy, enough electricity to annually power more than 300,000 single-family homes, more than doubling the solar electricity production capacity of the U.S. Once constructed, the Blythe facility will reduce CO2 emissions by nearly one million short tons per year, or the equivalent of removing more than 145,000 cars from the road. Additionally, because the facility is "dry-cooled," it will use 90 percent less water than a traditional "wet-cooled" solar facility of this size. The Blythe facility will also help California take a major step toward achieving its goal of having one third of the state's power come from renewable sources by the year 2020. The entire Blythe Solar Power Project will generate a total of more than 7,500 jobs, including 1,000 direct jobs during the construction period, and thousands of additional indirect jobs in the community and throughout the supply chain. When the 1,000 MW facility is fully operational it will create more than 220 permanent jobs. Adapted from materials provided by Solar Millennium, LLC.
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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.
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Sony network breach shows Amazon Cloud's appeal for hackers | KurzweilAI - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/azon-clouds-appeal-for-hackers Sony network breach shows Amazon Cloud's appeal for hackers | KurzweilAI
shared by thinkahol * on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 May 11
     
    The hackers that brought down Sony's Playstation Network for more than a month used stolen credit cards to rent computing power from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to carry out their attack. Personal information, credit cards, and passwords from millions of customers were seized by hackers during the attack. Because computing power can be rented from EC2 anonymously, hacking using the service can be hard to trace. Tracing the attack may require the FBI seeking a search warrant to access Amazon's detailed records of which IP addresses accessed the service at which time, and tracing those IP addresses to homes or businesses. The Playstation Network remains down in Japan due to government concerns over its security.
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New TV Season, and Fewer Viewers - BusinessWeek - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...nd-fewer-viewers-09152011.html New TV Season and Fewer Viewers - BusinessWeek
shared by thinkahol * on 23 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 23 Sep 11
     
    U.S. TV households have fallen this year by 1 percent, to 114.7 million. That's the first drop since 1990 and a bad augur for cable providers.
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Ultimate energy efficiency: Magnetic microprocessors could use million times less energ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...110701101737.htm Ultimate energy efficiency: Magnetic microprocessors could use million times less than today's silicon chips
shared by thinkahol * on 11 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 11 Jul 11
     
    ScienceDaily (July 5, 2011) - Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.
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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.
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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.
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