TheMachine

"His team of doctors and engineers triggered headlines around the world last week by successfully operating to replace an elderly patient's diseased jawbone with a prosthetic generated by 3D printing. Now Prof. Jules Poukens says that could be just the start of a bionic revolution."

"But the even greater danger -- the greater danger facing us in cyberspace goes beyond crime and it goes beyond harassment.  A cyber attack perpetrated by nation states are violent extremists groups could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11.  Such a destructive cyber-terrorist attack could virtually paralyze the nation. "

"Of all the battles I fought over 28 years, the fight to prove cyber warfare was not hype within the military and government circles was one of the hardest.  "

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

"Apple's stock dropped 2.21 percent on Monday. A few analysts blamed the drop - worth more than $12 billion - on a strike of 4,000 Chinese workers at Apple's manufacturer. But how do we know that strike really happened? Bloomberg's Adam Minter makes the case that the entire narrative is based on messages posted to China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from a single anonymous user." The journalists as DJs - but they have to know and respect their sources.

"Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people's lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. " Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating projects here, often making me think 'why isn't this ubiquitous right now already?' One of the reasons might be 'the economy, stupid' - like the idea of being able to swipe a file from one mobile app to another, seamlessly.  But eventually we'll get there. The future is fluid. 

"Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is." Of course, it's all about AI and augmented reality, leading right up to our having an augmented brain. Which, in a sense, we have for so long already - at least since we invented writing. But okay, in many ways we're re-inventing writing.  You'll find the video at Computerworld. 

"Not all those young companies will survive, but the habit of hiring online seems baked in; 64 percent of respondents said at least half of their work force would be online by 2015, and 94 percent predicted that in 10 years most businesses would consist of online temps and physical full-time workers." One more thing: it seems that the educational degree is not considered as being 'very important' when hiring online help. Quentin Hardy (Bits, The New York Times) concludes 'In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.' Taking this one step further, rating systems such as Klout (not necessarily Klout itself) could become a very important part of your social capital. Of course, such reputation measures could be organized by the major online staffing companies -  like eBay for instance uses its famous reputation system.  Reputation as social capital will translate this way into financial capital - and could be a crucial data point for financial companies which could use these data to decide about your creditworthiness...

" Since 1800, technological advance has been associated with economic growth. The new stuff being built saved labor input, which was then put into the construction of other things. However, the most recent technological advances may not be growth-inducing. As Samuelson puts it, "Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets as tilted toward entertainment, not labor-saving."" Professor Edward Castronova, who once wrote a book about the exodus to virtual worlds, sees some more evidence of an exodus recession.  He's not just talking about virtual worlds however, but also about your average digital stuff such as tablets and smartphones. It makes us want less 'real' things and so it makes it harder for the economy to grow. One might say, let's measure growth in a different way, taking into account this digital shift. But then again, our social security for instance depends on the economy and the money which is actually earned there.  So will we all hide into virtual worlds to forget the misery of the recession-ridden 'real world'? Or is this speculation very wrong, as the digital evolution is now affecting the 'world of the atoms' in a radical way (think 3D printers, hardware and bio-hacking). 

"'If it's not talking to each other, it's not a market.' Europe, despite being a political union (of sorts), does not yet feel like a real market. Part of the solution would be to know more about each other, and to talk to each other more often. That's what 'Whiteboard' wants to offer: a place to find information about interesting businesses and innovation, and to talk about it." So yet another DJ journalist, as professor Mark Deuze would say. Raf Weverbergh left the Flemish magazine Humo and started his own venture, Whiteboard.  He won't be the one who is on stage all the time creating his very own content, but rather he invites contributors to talk about entrepreneurship in Europe. Which seems like a great idea, as Europe is not just that doom and gloom continent - but it needs media ventures to talk about its entrepreneurs and to facilitate the conversation between entrepreneurs. So I cannot wait to hear a thousand (or more) entrepreneurial voices on Whiteboard reporting about exciting new things in Europe! 

"Bloomfield is working on a platform, called the Synthetic Economy Research Environment, that could enable economists to produce games that simulate large-scale economic phenomenon like a central bank." I often wondered whether professor Robert Bloomfield (Johnson School of Management at Cornell University) was still involved in virtual worlds research. He was the charismatic host of the rather high-brow Metanomics talk-show in Second Life. Now I got my answer, via Brad Plumer who published a post about the economics of video games on Wonkblog at The Washington Post. 

"You Can Be Active with the Activists or Sleeping with the Sleepers: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow" Another book by Cory Doctorow - and I'm still busy reading Makers! Stefan Raets discusses the Doctorow's Youthful Techno-Defiance Trilogy: 'From Little Brother (tech-savvy teenagers take on a government-run surveillance system) to For the Win (tech-savvy teenagers take on unfair working conditions for MMORPG gold farmers) to now Pirate Cinema (tech-savvy teenagers take on draconian copyright laws).'

"What do self-piloting helicopters have to do with the growing movement to transform education online? A day spent with Mr. Ng here at Coursera's offices, with the aim of getting a sense of the company's culture and the ideas that make up its DNA, helped answer that question. It turns out that the links between artificial-intelligence researchers and MOOC's run deep. "

" Baxter, however, moves with less determination because it compensates for changes in its environment. This means it can work safely alongside people."

" "Commons-Based Peer Production". It's a revolution in how things are made, by whom, and in what quantities. In some ways, the future looks a lot like the past. These blacksmiths are making a local solution to a local problem. And we're going to be seeing a lot more of that." And this was a presentation for the World Economic Forum, in China.  Just imagine how we can use the web and virtual spaces to work with global teams, in order to produce on a very local level... 

"Project aims to let anyone print a gun in their own home, raising new concerns about the legality of homemade firearms" There really was no reason to believe people would only use this technology to print cute toys and cool components for race bikes. 

"Everyone there was a "Quant." No one cared what the underlying company represented by a given stock actually did. Apple or General Motors, CAT or IBM… Everything boiled down to a set of statistical observations that, when assembled into the proper algorithm, delivered a portfolio that beats the market." I just love the title of that conference: Alpha Generation - Using News Sentiment Data

"While MOOCs are incorporating adaptive learning routines into their software, their ambitions for data mining go well beyond tutoring. Thrun says that we've only seen "the tip of the iceberg." What particularly excites him and other computer scientists about free online classes is that thanks to their unprecedented scale, they can generate the immense quantities of data required for effective machine learning. "

"The upshot of all this is that it's not going to take much to procure a drone and do anything you want with it. And if you try to outlaw them, then, well, only the outlaws (and government) will have drones." Exactly. 

"The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner." Okay, the bots are not 'really' intelligent and language is much harder to crack. But still, it's a nice result, this  human thinks.