Philosophers and AI researchers may argue the point, but Bruce Donald believes his microscopic invention qualifies as a robot. Donald’s machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair. He likens it to a car, because it’s controllable: “You can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go.” Unlike previous attempts at such a microelectromechanical system, Donald’s robot has no tether, but operates via electrical charges on a silicon grid. It’s a real speed demon, proceeding in nano-sized hops (one billionth of a meter, 20,000 times per second), ultimately achieving two millimeters per second, or the equivalent on a more human scale of 80 kilometers per hour. To the tunes of a Strauss waltz, Donald demonstrates two robots dancing in straight and wavy lines around each other, and then coupling to form a single system.
Donald envisions many possible applications for this work. Since his robots can push and shove things in their path, and can also latch onto each other, they might prove quite useful assisting in techniques involving protein design, manipulation of cells and biomedical engineering. The next five to 10 years, Donald predicts, will see an even smaller generation of robots, which “will be doing useful things in the lab.”
Viewpoints.com, a new ratings and reviews Web site that draws upon personal experiences of its user community to help consumers make smarter more informed purchase decisions, today announced its first board of advisors. The highly accomplished group of media and technology veterans, each an authority in his or her field, together cover the spectrum of technologies and disciplines essential to the Viewpoints.com concept.
Search engines can record which documents were clicked for which query, and use these query-document pairs as ‘soft’ relevance judgments. However, compared to the true judgments, click logs give noisy and sparse relevance information.
We apply a Markov random walk model to a large click log, producing a probabilistic ranking of documents for a given query. A key advantage of the model is its ability to retrieve relevant documents that have not yet been clicked for that query and rank those effectively.
We conduct experiments on click logs from image search, comparing our (‘backward’) random walk model to a different (‘forward’) random walk, varying parameters such as walk length and self-transition probability.
The most effective combination is a long backward walk with high self-transition probability.
The New York Times' subscription-only online service TimesSelect could be nearing its end ... insiders say a growing chorus of people within the paper are lobbying to shut down the two-year-old service ...
In contrast to The New Yorker, The Washington Post seems to like Spook Country.
Like its predecessor, Spook Country depicts a world transformed by globalization, by the threat -- and memory -- of terrorist attacks, and by the presence of proliferating technologies. But though they are set in what is recognizably the same world, these are distinctly different books. ... Spook Country ... takes an unsparing look at a country awash in confusion, fear and pervasive paranoia, a country torn apart by an endless, unpopular war in Iraq.
Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country -- which is a beautifully multi-leveled title -- takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things."
In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present·
What is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life?
Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force — the only lasting force — in culture. If that's so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it?
Sadly we don't even have a good theory about technology.
Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
Topic: Science
12:41 pm EDT, Jul 21, 2007
This book is due out in October.
The bioconservatives are in retreat. Harris has now set the agenda for the future of humankind. This will be the locus classicus for the enhancement debate.
John Harris can be depended on to sharply challenge conventional thinking in bioethics, especially when that thinking takes a conservative cast. He does not disappoint here. Harris shows how deep-seated a part of human history enhancement is and how weak most objections to it are; indeed, he makes a persuasive case that it is not only generally morally permissible, but often morally required.
Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives
Topic: Politics and Law
11:39 pm EDT, Jul 20, 2007
We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. We also combine our network approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.
Lemelson Center: Explore invention at the Lemelson Center
Topic: High Tech Developments
9:35 am EDT, Jul 20, 2007
The Lemelson Center’s mission: • To document, interpret, and disseminate information about invention and innovation • To encourage inventive creativity in young people • To foster an appreciation for the central role invention and innovation play in the history of the United States
