rhm2k in the 21st century

optionMONSTER Holdings, Inc., the parent of tradeMONSTER, the online brokerage industry’s leader in user experience, has been honored with a 2013 Illinois Technology Association (ITA) CityLIGHTS Award in the “Outstanding Technology Development” category. The venerable award goes to the ”company or organization that utilizes or developed a technology tool, process or service that accelerated growth.”

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011, based on the current exhibition of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York, tells the story of the city’s right angles. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, the map and surveying scheme that set the blocks at 200 by 800 feet all the way up the length of the island, was an audacious gamble on growth. From 1790 to 1810, the population of New York had tripled, and the commissioners predicted that by 1860, New York would have almost the same population as Paris, then home to half a million people. (They were wrong, of course — New York would top nearly 800,000 by then.) The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, by John Randel, Jr. (Courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives)

Building a better bot sometimes means looking outside the shop for inspiration. Borrowing from the characteristics and abilities of insects, birds, fish and mammals, scientists and engineers have designed robots that can swim, jump, snuggle, and steal books.

I am fascinated by the robo-ants!!!

Every year, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, of which Asimov had been a tenacious supporter, hosts the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, inviting some of the greatest minds of our time to discuss monumental unanswered questions at the frontier of science. The 2013 installment explored the existence of nothing in a mind-bending conversation between science journalist Jim Holt, who has previously pondered why the world exists, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has explored the science of “something” and “nothing,” Princeton astrophysics professor J. Richard Gott, NYU journalism professor Charles Seife, and Stanford physicist Eve Silverstein, moderated by none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson. The wide-ranging conversation spans such subjects as quantum mechanics, space-time, black holes, and string theory.

Don Kagan is my hero. 

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his “farewell lecture” here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon’s Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are “individualized, unfocused and scattered.” On campus, he said, “I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness.” Rare are “faculty with atypical views,” he charged. “Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.” He counseled schools to adopt “a common core of studies” in the history, literature and philosophy “of our culture.” By “our” he means Western.

ABOUT WANTS FOR SALE
Wants For Sale was started in July 2007 by Christine & Justin Gignac. All of the paintings on Wants For Sale are the price of the actual item shown in the painting, whether that’s “A Slice of Pepperoni Pizza” for $3.00 or “A Gold Watch” for $287.19. After each painting is sold, the original wanted item is purchased and photographed for this very website you are on right now. Prices of paintings can range anywhere from $0 to $1,000,000 and may be of general wants or part of a series like “A Vegas Vacation” or “As Seen On TV.”

I foresee a run on Tylenol. Now rushing to local pharmacy to stock up.

New research suggests acetaminophen (Tylenol) may help individuals overcome non-specific fear and anxiety brought about by thinking about death or the human condition.

According to lead researcher Daniel Randles and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, the new findings suggest that Tylenol may have more profound psychological effects than previously understood.

Physicists have devised a new experiment to test if the universe is a computer.

A philosophical thought experiment has long held that it is more likely than not that we’re living inside a machine.

…

Professor Martin Savage at the University of Washington says while our own computer simulations can only model a universe on the scale of an atom’s nucleus, there are already “signatures of resource constraints” which could tell us if larger models are possible.

This is where it gets complex.

Essentially, Savage said that computers used to build simulations perform “lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations” - dividing space into a four-dimensional grid. Doing so allows researchers to examine the force which binds subatomic particles together into neutrons and protons - but it also allows things to happen in the simulation, including the development of complex physical “signatures”, that researchers don’t program directly into the computer. In looking for these signatures, such as limitations on the energy held by cosmic rays, they hope to find similarities within our own universe.

And if such signatures do appear in both? Boot up, baby. We’re inside a computer. (Maybe).

cumulations:

From How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements in the MIT Technology Review:

Other companies are starting to add additional layers of information beyond cellular network data. One customer of AirSage is a relatively small San Francisco startup, Streetlight Data which recently raised $3 million in financing backed partly by the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.

Streetlight buys both cellular network and GPS navigation data that can be mined for useful market research. (The cellular data covers a larger number of people, but the GPS data, collected by mapping software providers, can improve accuracy.) Today, many companies already build massive demographic and behavioral databases on top of U.S. Census information about households to help retailers choose where to build new stores and plan marketing budgets. But Streetlight’s software, with interactive, color-coded maps of neighborhoods and roads, offers more practical information. It can be tied to the demographics of people who work nearby, commute through on a particular highway, or are just there for a visit, rather than just supplying information about who lives in the area.

“If you’re a retailer and you are on someone’s commute path, they may pass by you 600 times a year,” says founder and CEO Laura Schewel, a transportation researcher who is also finishing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. “If they never come in, that’s a big missed opportunity.”

Streetlight’s work shows why such data has the potential to improve city planning. One of the company’s first customers is the Oakland Business Development Corporation, which is trying to attract businesses to a city with a reputation for crime and poverty, says Schewel. Streetlight’s data shows the patterns by which droves of wealthier people commute through the city from outlying suburbs on their way to San Francisco, and it also shows that young people visit Oakland for the growing nightlife scene. The group’s goal is to convince national chains that don’t know Oakland well and might look only at household demographics that it makes sense to open up a shop there, and then help them chose ideal locations.

For all you bitcoin nerds predicting the surge of the online currency: Paul Volcker doesn’t care.

In fact, it would seem that the eminent former chairman of the Federal Reserve—known for bringing US inflation under control in the early 1980s—doesn’t even know what bitcoin is.

We asked him today at a conference put on by NYU’s Stern School of Business what his thoughts were about the electronic currency—a currency which (some believe) challenges the modern system of central banking.

Volcker replied, “Bitcoin? What’s that?”

StreetLight Data today announced that it has secured a seven-figure Euro funding in Series A financing. StreetLight is an innovator in next generation geospatial business intelligence for the in-store retail ecosystem. StreetLight repurposes and recombines data from traffic and transportation management systems (such as traffic jam alerts and navigation) to help retailers better understand the context in which their stores operate. This intelligence can lead to improved site selection, as well as other applications.

Mobile devices accompany us in our movements, manage our communications and their use allows us the fruition of various services such as banking, payments and social networking; this consideration raises a series of questions under security perspective:

• Is the wealth of information managed by mobile really secure? 
• Does the user know cyber threats and how to mitigate them? 
• Are the communication channels secure? 
• Does the user know the behavior of the app installed on the mobile and how they managed their data? 
• Mobile and workplace, how to combine business needs and private use of the devices? 

This article provides the answers to the questions introduced.

From James Altucher’s ‘resume’:

I’m scared to death of having a job. But you never know what opportunities could come my way. There’s a lot of money out there willing to pay anyone. So I figured I’d dust off my resume, finally accept every LinkedIn request and just put it out there. You know, to see what was up.

I really do hope that these claims hold up.  The notion that recognizable forms of (plant) life exist elsewhere in the ‘neighborhood’ pleases me no end.

From the MIT Technology Review:

In total, Jamie Wallis at Cardiff University and a few buddies received 628 stone fragments collected from rice fields in the region. However, they were able to clearly identify only three as possible meteorites.

The general properties of these three stones immediately mark them out as unusual. One stone, for example, had a density of less than 1 gram per cubic centimetre, less than all known carbonaceous meteorites. It had a partially fused crust, good evidence of atmospheric heating, a carbon content of up to 4 per cent and contained an abundance of organic compounds with a high molecular weight, which is not unknown in meteorites. On this evidence, Wallis and co think the fireball was probably a small comet.

The most startling claims, however, are based on electron microscope images of structures within the stones (see above). Wallis and co. say that one image shows a complex, thick-walled, carbon-rich microfossil about 100 micrometres across that bares similarities with a group of largely extinct marine dinoflagellate algae.

The belief that the internet and modern communication technology is an unreservedly progressive and democratizing influence DOES need to be examined.  

Any form of interpersonal, small group or mass media (… and the ‘net embodies ALL of them) can be managed and manipulated to the purposes of organized despotism (pick your state-sponsored cyber-villain of choice) as well as to the service of chaotic miscreants (such as the hacktivists who feel it their obligation to take down internet services just because they can).

Morozov seems to have taken up the mantle of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish America political scientist, geostrategis and statesman who has advised many US leaders and service as the US National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter.  Like Brzezinski, Morozov has advocated a much less optimistic and, some would say, alarmist view of today’s information and computer technology as it relates to political socialization and political control.  With the new book, he takes on what he calls Solutionism, and does a pretty good job pointing out the downside of self-tracking, while also bringing the ‘internet is making us dumb…or at least lazy’ argument into this as well.  

I don’t begin to buy all of his arguments. But, I DO hold that the ‘magical thinking’ that would have us all believe in the uniformly beneficent value of the internet, social media and ‘the crowd’ is misplaced.  I like reading Morozov if only to figure out what other vectors impinge on this issue and to consider appropriate and self-preserving controls on the technologies.

From the article in the Guardian:

Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the US. His first book, The Net Delusion, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the internet]… entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder – not easier –to promote democracy”. It was described as “brilliant and courageous” by the New York Times. In his second book To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” – the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and trouble-free. Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.

An excellent piece with the data to back it up.

Here are two things that are true about the economy today.

(1) The Dow Jones industrial average is poised to set a new record as corporate profits stretch to all-time highs.

(2) There are still fewer working Americans today than there were before the start of the Great Recession.

The fact that these two things can be true at the same time might outrage you. But it shouldn’t surprise you. In the last 30 years, there has been a great divergence between growth and workers’ incomes, as the New York Times reminds us today. Corporate profits have soared, in the last decade especially, particularly because of three things: Globalization has pushed down the cost of labor available to multinational corporations; technology has allowed companies to make more with fewer workers, in general; and Big Finance has gobbled up the economy, as the banks’ share of total corporate profits has tripled to about one-third since the middle of the last century, according to Evan Soltas.

Here’s the short story of corporate profits, GDP, and workers’ income since the Great Recession. As you can see, corporations rode a wild roller coaster, but they quickly found their way back on top. GDP has been sluggish and overall labor income has struggled to keep up with even that sluggish pace. …

smartercities:

That’s what Paul Romer thinks. His idea of charter cities—autonomous, technocratic economic hubs based on the model of Hong Kong—that would be founded in developing nations is revolutionary. But would it work?

This past spring, Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief of MIT Technology Review, conducted a wide-ranging but informal conversation with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson about his craft, preoccupations, influences, and inspirations. Enjoy a six-part weekly series of video shorts based on their conversation.

This ought to be good.