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Bitcoin has been an interesting project to follow — and...

alexanderpf — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:22:00 -0400

Bitcoin has been an interesting project to follow — and the other cryptocurrencies floating around the internet (Litecoin, Namecoin, Terracoin, … the list goes on) are going to get a lot more interesting once bitcoin exchanges face more and more regulation.

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

alexanderpf — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:19 -0400

Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

Why Google and the Pentagon want ‘quantum computers’

alexanderpf — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:00 -0400

Why Google and the Pentagon want ‘quantum computers’

Machine Learning with Python

alexanderpf — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:02:22 -0400

Machine Learning with Python

BBC Horizion: Nanotopia (1995)

alexanderpf — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:23:27 -0400

BBC Horizion: Nanotopia (1995)

Welcome Arduino Yún – the first member of a series of wifi...

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:31:30 -0400

Welcome Arduino Yún – the first member of a series of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux - Arduino Blog

Arduino now has an embedded wifi/linux version! While this will cost more than a raspberry pi, it should be much better for projects that do not need the computing power that a pi provides. This also seems like it will be much easier to setup than a pi for people that are experienced with arduinos. Its a nice touch that it creates its own hotspot at first to set it up. Ars does a great comparison though.

Also they have teamed up with Temboo, a really cool api service that is combining api’s to allow easy access to all of them.

via whisperoftheshot

Uncertainty fading from quantum computer?

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:26:24 -0400

Uncertainty fading from quantum computer?

Berlin and Bitcoin

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:24:17 -0400

Berlin and Bitcoin

I really miss working on this project … oh wait, I still...

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:24:59 -0400

I really miss working on this project … oh wait, I still need to replace the batteries before I leave Auburn!

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the..."

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 11:31:35 -0400

“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”

- Alan Watts via revofthought

Clock One: Winder & Main Differential from The Long Now...

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 10:41:17 -0400

Clock One: Winder & Main Differential from The Long Now Foundation

"More broadly, OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is..."

alexanderpf — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:20:52 -0400

“More broadly, OpenWorm raises fascinating questions about what we mean when we say something is alive. If and when this project succeeds in modeling the worm successfully, we’ll be faced with a new and fascinating concept to think with: a virtual organism. Imagine downloading the worm and running it in a virtual petri dish on your computer. What, exactly, will you be looking at? Will you consider it to be alive? What would convince you?”

- Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic (via wildcat2030)

The future of Google Glass? Digital creative agency Playground...

alexanderpf — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:04:36 -0400

The future of Google Glass?

Digital creative agency Playground knows that Glass is in its early days, but they imagine a future in which Glass helps with navigation, shopping, hobbies and much more. And according to Playground, “All of our examples are actually possible right now. Smartphones (batteries not included) have enough raw processing power to run this software today. If only current batteries were ten times more efficient and there was a robust native hardware API for Glass. Well, it’s coming. Sooner than we think.”

via the content brief [more @playgroundinc] futurescope:futuretechreport

Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely...

alexanderpf — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:58:58 -0400

Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think. Read Kevin Drum’s latest, from the magazine.

via motherjones Illustration by Roberto Parada

The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the...

alexanderpf — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:35:04 -0400

The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”

In the early days of artificial intelligence, Ng says, the prevailing opinion was that human intelligence derived from thousands of simple agents working in concert, what MIT’s Marvin Minsky called “The Society of Mind.” To achieve AI, engineers believed, they would have to build and combine thousands of individual computing modules. One agent, or algorithm, would mimic language. Another would handle speech. And so on. It seemed an insurmountable feat.

When he was a kid, Andrew Ng dreamed of building machines that could think like people, but when he got to college and came face-to-face with the AI research of the day, he gave up. Later, as a professor, he would actively discourage his students from pursuing the same dream. But then he ran into the “one algorithm” hypothesis, popularized by Jeff Hawkins, an AI entrepreneur who’d dabbled in neuroscience research. And the dream returned.

It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.

This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence. “I’ve seen a surprisingly large gulf between the engineers and the scientists,” Ng says. Engineers wanted to build AI systems that just worked, he says, but scientists were still struggling to understand the intricacies of the brain. For a long time, neuroscience just didn’t have the information needed to help improve the intelligent machines engineers wanted to build.

What’s more, scientists often felt they “owned” the brain, so there was little collaboration with researchers in other fields, says Bruno Olshausen, a computational neuroscientist and the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

The end result is that engineers started building AI systems that didn’t necessarily mimic the way the brain operated. They focused on building pseudo-smart systems that turned out to be more like a Roomba vacuum cleaner than Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons.

But, now, thanks to Ng and others, this is starting to change. “There is a sense from many places that whoever figures out how the brain computes will come up with the next generation of computers,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Read more via neurosciencestuff

muaj:bulbJ

alexanderpf — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:23:18 -0400

muaj:bulbJ

Thermal invisibility cloak in first demonstration Researchers...

alexanderpf — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:22:28 -0400

Thermal invisibility cloak in first demonstration

Researchers have built and tested a form of invisibility cloak that can hide objects from heat.Similar cloaking efforts are underway to make objects invisible to light and even sound waves, but this is the first device to work with heat.The prototype, to be outlined in Physical Review Letters, contained a 5cm-wide flat region impervious to heat flowing around it.The technology could be put to use in thermal management in electronics.

via futurescope [read more @bbc] [via @livingarchitect] [paper]

A short essay on 3D Printing

alexanderpf — Sun, 12 May 2013 14:05:45 -0400

A short essay on 3D Printing:

In order to produce anything, you need three elements: an idea, the means to make the idea, and the money to pay all concerned. For these reasons it comes as no surprise that the entrepreneurial explosion of the early 2000′s has focussed on software. Once the idea is solidified, the manufacturing and shipping of a software product, whilst not exactly simple is at least attainable by a small number of people with basic equipment and minimal outlay. In the world of object production the idea is the least of your worries. Atoms, as it has been said many times before, are difficult to wrangle, the engineering infrastructure, commitment level and financial outlay is significant. Even for a tiny plastic widget the initial tooling can run into many thousands of dollars. There’s a change afoot in the world of atom wrangling however, and it’s name is 3D printing.

I feel the same way. The de-industrialization of America is...

alexanderpf — Sun, 05 May 2013 16:42:37 -0400

I feel the same way. The de-industrialization of America is killing me.

Will my sons end up with a bunch lathes, English wheels, mills and welders when I shuffle off this mortal coil? Yep. Will they have any idea how to use that ephemera? If I do my job correctly they will. It beats the hell out of leaving them my dated electronic devices.

via mymentalrepository

I can’t wait until these features are integrated into...

alexanderpf — Sat, 04 May 2013 02:06:41 -0400

I can’t wait until these features are integrated into Google Glas..