The Disabled And Computing

Cover of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Controlling a Computer with Your Eyes

the French author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly dictated his memoirs solely through eye-movements--one letter at a time, and with the help of an assistant

One of the things about computing has been the help it has provided to the disabled, or rather the physically challenged. At one level we are all physically challenged. Or we would not need computers, right? Computers compute when we can't. Like Steve Jobs said, the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. We are all disabled, we all need bicycles.

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Cyrstal Clear

Human brain - midsagittal cut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Crystals, Information And The Origin of Life

Crystals are among the most beautiful objects in the natural word. They are well understood, ubiquitously used and much admired.... the convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology is opening up a new approach to the study of structure, form and function. ... the energy landscape in which they exist and the flow of information to and from the environment..... the information a mollusc uses to make mother of pearl; and that is determined by its genome, proteome and so on, which together they call a conchome. .... this information is a kind of algorithm or formula for producing mother of pearl, analogous to an algorithm that produces the digits of pi. ..... a similar change in thinking about form and function is also emerging in the entirely different field of robotics and artificial intelligence. .... turns out that humans perform many actions that are so quick that the human brain cannot possibly be involved .... the brain outsources the control of this movement to materials themselves.... morphological computing.

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Kiva's Robots

English: Logo of Saks Fifth Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Warehouses, Kiva's Robots Do the Heavy Liftings

Sixty of the automated dollies crisscross the floor carrying shelves to humans, who pick, pack, and ship items without ever taking more than a couple of steps..... as Web retailers look for an edge in a business with low margins and sharp competition.... In addition to Amazon, Kiva's customers include Office Depot, Staples, Crate & Barrel, Toys "R" Us, and Saks Fifth Avenue. .... With the help of robots, workers at Gilt are able to process items three times faster.... After an order comes in to Gilt's website, a robot automatically wheels into a grid of 1,600 shelves arranged in tight rows. The robot locates the right shelf, lifts it onto its back, and carries it to a picking station, where human workers take what is needed. .... From above, the scene looks a little like robot rush hour as dozens of shelves zoom around the warehouse floor.....using them on inventory that gathers dust isn't cost-effective, and larger items also pose problems for the automated shelves. .... the relatively small area where robots operate accounts for 65 percent of all items shipped from the warehouse

This is like FoxConn wanting robots.

This Is Going To Be A Boom Decade

Image via CrunchBase

Early Stage Companies Raise Most Funds in a Decade

$2.1 billion went into 410 early-stage deals. Overall, $7 billion went into 898 deals..... The companies that did the best were in the less capital-intensive software and Internet sector. The biotech industry, with $697 million going into 90 deals overall.... More than a third of the total money invested in cleantech companies went into $100 million-plus bets on later-stage funding rounds for Fisker Automotive, Harvest Power, and Bloom Energy—the largest three deals across all industries in the last few months. .... Higher-risk investments in life sciences and clean-tech are still difficult for VCs to touch.

The finance folks solved the problem of too much money ("Oh, so, let's shove it into real estate!") by throwing it to wreck the entire financial system. And the world is not fully out of the doldrums yet. But a rebirth is on the way. Things are going to be bigger and better than ever before.

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