The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
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| Alzheimer's Disease (Photo credit: AJC1) |
Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States; 35 million people are estimated to have the disease today, a figure that is expected to balloon in the coming decades.One of the things people look forward to is getting old with vigor. Perhaps advances will catch up with expectations.
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| Cover of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly |
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 assistantOne 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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| Human brain - midsagittal cut (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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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| English: Logo of Saks Fifth Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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 warehouseThis is like FoxConn wanting robots.
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| Image via CrunchBase |
$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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| HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT will be open to the public from March 2 through March 6. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
new technology is driving a U.S. industrial comeback...... Seduced by government subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, U.S. industry has rushed to China in recent decades, with millions of American jobs lost...... Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. ..... The factory assembly that China is currently performing is child's play compared to the next generation of robots -- which will soon become cheaper than human labor. ..... artificial intelligence (AI) -- software that makes computers, if not intelligent in the human sense, at least good enough to fake it..... AI is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as the iPhone's Siri, and Face.com, the face-recognition software Facebook recently acquired..... a "creator economy" in which mass production is replaced by personalized production, with people customizing designs they download from the Internet or develop themselves. ..... Three-D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. ..... in the next decade, manufacturing will again become a local industry and it will be possible to 3D print electronics and use giant 3D printing scaffolds to print entire buildings. Why would we ship raw materials all the way to China and then ship completed products back to the United States when they can be manufactured more cheaply locally, on demand? .... advances in nanotechnology that change the equation further. .... carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers .... stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable ..... "Over the next two decades," Jacobstein says, "molecular manufacturing will do for our relationship with molecules and matter what the computer did for our relationship with bits and information -- make the precise control of molecules and matter inexpensive and ubiquitous." .... America's ability to innovate, demolish old industries, and continually reinvent itself. The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven't cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.....Google just announced that it will produce its highly-acclaimed Nexus 7 tablet in the United States.Robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, nanotechnology -- and boom, the American jobs are back.
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| robots (Photo credit: milky.way) |
an eventual labor shift similar to "the decline of seamstresses or the secretarial pool in America." .... some experts believe the company may be developing its own robots in house..... Most spend their days seated beside a conveyer belt, wearing white gowns, face masks, and hairnets so that stray hairs and specks of dust won't interfere as they perform simple but precise tasks, again and again. Each worker focuses on a single action, like putting stickers on the front of an iPhone or packing a finished product into a box. ..... it takes five days and 325 steps to assemble an iPad..... A robot can be operated 160 hours a week. Even assuming competition from nimble-fingered humans putting in 12-hour shifts, a single robot might replace two workers, and possibly as many as four. ..... industrial robotics "is about to get very hot in China."Have you heard the line? "I trained my replacement." Looks like FoxConn workers are being asked to build their replacements. I guess this is not exactly Gandhi's khadi movement.
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| Image via CrunchBase |
"Twitter created as fundamental a technical innovation as e-mail and HTML itself, and they totally blew it," says Caldwell. He draws an analogy with the early days of the Web, when Netscape got the medium started by releasing the first mass-market Web browser. "If Netscape had decided to build a proprietary ecosystem and become a media company supported by advertising, we wouldn't have the Web we do today," Caldwell says.Forget social networks. I want even ISPs to be ad supported. The funny thing is at higher speeds better ads are possible and so ad supported ISP makes the most sense at gigabit speeds.
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| Image via CrunchBase |
