Watch 1505: The World's First Watch
54 minutes ago
Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"The seeds of Boyden's career were planted in childhood. Growing up north of Dallas, he wanted to understand something about humanity and why we are here. He liked math better than science at first: "Math was the way of getting to the inner truth of things," he said. But then he wanted to know how our minds are able to understand math. His thoughts gave way to an idea he now calls the "loop of understanding": Math is how we understand things at a deep level, our minds do math, the brain gives rise to our minds, biology governs our brains, chemistry implements biology, the principles of physics rule over chemistry, and physics run on math. It's a loop from math to math, with all the knowledge in between. "I don't think I came up with that eloquent way to describe it until I actually came to MIT, but yeah, I was very interested in these kinds of things as a young teenager."
"Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola’s distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most. You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. [...] ColaLife began collaborating with one of Coca-Cola’s African bottler/distributors, and the beverage giant shared advice and information about how its distribution network operates. [...] The result of their efforts so far is the AidPod, a wedge-shaped container that fits between the necks of bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. For the pilot program, they are using the AidPods to distribute an anti-diarrhea kit, called “Kit Yamoyo” (“Kit of Life”). The AidPod’s are a clever packaging solution, born of a very particular design problem. Because the vision was to physically piggyback on Coke’s distribution system, they needed to work with the crates used to move the popular soda to retailers. Initial designs experimented with pouches on the side and tubes that could be slotted in place of a bottle. Neither option would have worked, as both would have meant less space for Coke. Then, genius struck. “My wife said, ‘Why don’t we make use of the unused space?’” says Berry."Nice!
"...an interactive touch table that supports co-located group meetings by capturing both digital and physical interactions in its memory. Everyone can be a scribe at the MemTable. The goal of the project is to demonstrate hardware and software design principles that integrate recording, recalling, and reflection during the life cycle of a project in one tabletop system. [...] MemTable poses an important question to HCI designers: How can the multi-person interactions we design be integrated with our workpractices into systems which have history and memory? What is the social computing space of the future?"
"...calls on students from universities around the world to form teams and produce a robust project proposal -- consisting of a business plan and creative pitch -- that presents an unexpected and out-of-the-box solution to the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050."
"We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. [...] even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals."Several nice pieces have explored the implications of this work, including the BBC's Science and technology reporter Jason Palmer's Mobile location data 'present anonymity risk' and MIT's own Larry Hardesty asking How hard is it to 'de-anonymize' cellphone data?
"While the record-breaking event is what drives the film’s narrative arc, it is the everyday stories of the young kite makers that will touch audiences through their humor and playful spirit. The film seeks to humanize the conflict through a touching cinematic rendering of the fascinating kite culture among children as a form of creative resistance in Gaza."
"The warning comes from a group called "Stop the Cyborgs" that wants limits put on when headsets can be used. It has produced posters so premises can warn wearers that the glasses are banned or recording is not permitted. [...] The limits that the Stop The Cyborg campaign wants placed on Google Glass and similar devices would involve a clear way to let people know when they are being recorded. "It's important for society and democracy that people can chat and live without fear that they might end up being published or prosecuted," [...] "We are not anti-technology, we just want people to realise that technology is a powerful cultural force which shapes our society and which we can also shape."
"Just how big is the Internet? An anonymous hacker claims to have answered the question via effective but illegal means. The result is a fascinating reflection of online usage around the world."The resulting report Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices by Carna Botnet who, in the end writes...
"I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected. I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time."See here animated GIF showing night-to-day pulse of Internet use, colored red-to-blue, not including mobiles...
"For much of the past decade Argentina has seen a commodities-driven export boom, built largely on genetically-modified soy bean crops and the aggressive use of pesticides. Argentina's leaders say it has turned the country's economy around, while others say the consequences are a dramatic surge in cancer rates, birth defects and land theft. People & Power investigates if Argentina's booming soy industry is a disaster in the making."I'm not sure this is GMO fear-mongering and unscientific sensationalizing of the root-causes of real ailments or something more sinister and deeper. The bullying and fire-starting and land-grabbing I'm afraid is an age-old story in modern guise.
"Half a million people live in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, bordering Israel and the Gaza Strip. For decades, they have been governed by a strong security paradigm [...] Now they are back in the international spotlight because of an increase in militant attacks, arms smuggling and human trafficking. When Egyptians took to the streets against Hosni Mubarak’s police state [...] the insurgency here continued long after his ouster [...] Fault Lines explores the roots of Sinai’s ongoing uprising and, as Egypt’s new leaders vow to crack down on militancy and smuggling, the dangers of following an old script. How did the Sinai Peninsula become a crucible for geopolitical tensions?"At root, it seems to be inequitable development with connected Cairo elites taking and locals languishing, but judge for yourself...
"Many in Lebanon worry that the influx of up to 400,000 Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunni, may disrupt the delicate balance in the country. Lebanon fought its own sectarian civil war from 1975 to 1990."
"It is impossible to determine precisely where the boundaries of control lie in Syria. But an analysis of news reports and videos posted online indicates that rebels are stronger in the north and northeast, while the government holds the center of most of Syria’s largest cities and the west."
"Like so many of Africa’s wilderness areas, the Buffalo Springs and Samburu reserves in Kenya are too cramped -- smaller than the city of Detroit -- for the majestic inhabitants they are supposed to protect. Every savannah elephant that dwells in these reserves also roams far beyond the invisible boundaries, along the well-worn paths of its ancestors in search of food and water. These routines take elephants through unpatrolled regions that are hunting grounds for poachers. Lately, nowhere is safe: killings are rising inside the reserves."
"CcHub delivers a range of programmes that contribute to our mission of accelerating the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity in Nigeria. [...] CcHUB is a membership based community of hackers, designers, tech companies, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, academics, investors and everyone interested in technology innovation."Currently on the 6th floor of their building, they have big ambitions for i-HQ Project which...
"...will leverage the innovation assets within the technology cluster located around Herbert Macaulay Way, Yaba in building an ‘innovation city’ -- a hotspot for creative ventures where all key stakeholders (academics, industry and government) find adequate infrastructure, resources and an enabling environment to thrive while collaborating. i-HQ = Silicon Lagoon"
"...allows apartment renters to visualize where Boston’s most and least expensive apartments are. Kaufman’s heat map displays the cost per bedroom relative to each Boston neighborhood. The map indicates the most expensive apartments in Boston tend to hover between Back Bay and Downtown Boston and on into the Seaport District. The region’s least expensive apartments are found near Mattapan, Dorchester and Revere. Areas of Cambridge along the Red Line also display expensive apartment listings, where the booming tech economy is squeezing commercial rents for startups."
"Japan says it has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast, in a world first. Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are a type of frozen "cage" of molecules of methane and water. [...] Vast deposits are thought to exist, rivaling known reserves of traditional fossil fuels."Here's USGS infopiece showing "burning ice"...
"BrickItUp is an online platform for creation, navigation and sharing of 3D Worlds. As simple as that. It could be defined as an user-generated content sharing platform for 3D environments. Or an online real-time block construction engine. Or a crowdsourcing environment for 3D information. All of them apply. Want to suggest your own definition? We would love to hear it!"
"Mycestro is a 3D mouse that fits on the index finger and allows you to control your computer with hand gestures and mouse functions."
"...Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. Among other things, the Peace Village ward of Tu Du Hospital cares for about 60 children with severe deformities, many of whom were abandoned at birth, Tanaka said. The hospital blames Agent Orange for deformities in this ward. “They just live there,” she said. “They don’t go to school; they can’t leave; they don’t go out.” She also found stillborn babies and fetuses in jars, which are kept for research to find out why the babies were born with abnormalities. The hospital told Tanaka that as children born with deformities skyrocketed, those that didn’t make it were preserved. In the “reference room,” some of the jars were dated back to 2000. According to the Vietnamese Red Cross, babies born near lands heavily sprayed with the herbicide have illnesses and deformities at a higher rate than normal."Isn't this a war-crime or at least a moral obligation to render aid?