Week 12
A 3-D printed prosthetic hand has changed the life of a 5-year-old South African boy [..] and may be a model for people seeking a low-cost prosthesis.
The boy, named Liam, benefited from work done by Ivan Owen, a part-time mechanical special effects artist in Washington. He was collaborating online with Rich Van As, a woodworker from South Africa [..] The men decided to make Liam his own “robohand” and the result has been life-changing [..]
The fingers and wrist hinge were made using a 3-D printer — a computerized device that, given the dimensions of an object, can create copies of it by adding layers of resin or other material.
"Edging toward the sweet spot of new-century governance, the info-state represents a growing number of dynamic and entrepreneurial cities, city-states or small nations scattered around the world that govern as much through data as via democracy [..]
Building on this logic of the economic over the political, Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles (2002) traced the advent of the ‘market state’ era, in which the maximization of individual commercial opportunity defines national power and success. Japanese business strategist Kenichi Ohmae then set the stage for the info-state era in The Next Global Stage (2005), which argued that urban agglomerations of city-states resembling the medieval Hanseatic League would become the world’s power centres [..].
[T]he info-state also presents new mutations that were not conceivable in previous technological periods – a peculiar convergence of the Information Age and the devolved authority of city units and clusters. The critical shift lies in the manner of policy-making enabled by new technologies: governance is practiced in ‘real-time’ – through constant consultation, rather than through traditional, staggered democratic deliberation. In a sense, this is a post-modern democracy – or even ‘post-democracy’ [..].
Already there are notable info-states across several continents and cultural zones, underscoring how this is already a worldwide phenomenon set to grow at the intersection of technological spread and pragmatic governance. New York City, for example, [.. has] undertaken to bolster its own security and intelligence capabilities, and then to diversify into IT and bio-sciences research – thereby becoming the US’s second technology hub after Silicon Valley. Switzerland is in effect a ‘cities-state’ – a conglomeration of specialized centres in banking, research, engineering, hospitality and other sectors. Israel has also made economic diversification into technology sectors a national priority, distributing so much funding for small-scale entrepreneurs that it has earned the title ‘start-up nation.’ "
#QueenCountryandFish&Chips
It says "God Save Brit Food" up on top - this is in Berlin, I pass by this place sometimes, and I laugh at this thing every - time. Without exception. Hillarious.
Pfff..
This is a bunch of hot gas. Example: speed-up gains on a single microprocessor stopped some time ago right? Plucked that low-hangin fruit and we are done (well actually reaching the current speed levels was no peach, but we'll leave that aside for the moment). Soo are we stagnating now I guess, in terms of how fast, how much we can process data.
Not so. The moment one avenue closes, another opens. If .. that sounded too New Age, here's another one: necessity is the mother of invention. All of a sudden running things in parallel became necessary, and running algorithms on seperate "cores" on these so-called "multicore" processors or seperate machines came into focus for a lot of engineers and researchers. And innovate they did. Interestingly it was discovered that some analysis algorithms were so easy to run in parallel that they are now classed as "embarrassingly parallel" algorithms. This is the academese way of saying "obnoxiously simple (and mind you, it was invented just the right time, when computing power reached to a certain level)"
There are so many other things happening on different fronts that I dont even know where to start. Cowen and people like him do not know where to look, or they keep looking at the same tired old places.
"[I]t may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an internet payment company, and the first outside investor in Facebook, a social network, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead" [..] Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics"
Oh this is hillarious
"Perhaps the most radical answer to the problem of the 1970s slowdown is that it was due to globalisation. In a somewhat whimsical 1987 paper, Paul Romer, then at the University of Rochester, sketched the possibility that, with more workers available in developing countries, cutting labour costs in rich ones became less important. Investment in productivity was thus sidelined. The idea was heretical among macroeconomists, as it dispensed with much of the careful theoretical machinery then being used to analyse growth. Some economists are considering how Mr Romer’s heresy might apply today. Daron Acemoglu, Gino Gancia, and Fabrizio Zilibotti of MIT, CREi (an economics-research centre in Barcelona) and the University of Zurich, have built a model to study this."
EXACTLY
"Pattern-recognition software is increasingly good at performing the tasks of entry-level lawyers, scanning thousands of legal documents for relevant passages. Algorithms are used to write basic newspaper articles on sporting outcomes and financial reports. In time, they may move to analysis. Manual tasks are also vulnerable. In Japan, where labour to care for an ageing population is scarce, innovation in robotics is proceeding by leaps and bounds. The rising cost of looking after people across the rich world will only encourage further development. Such productivity advances should generate enormous welfare gains. Yet the adjustment period could be difficult.
In the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes—which could be a lot more likely than flying cars"
You got it all wrong foo. Discussed here.
"Putting a Value to ‘Real’ in Medical Research.. When medical researchers report their findings, they need to know whether their result is a real effect of what they are testing, or just a random occurrence. To figure this out, they most commonly use the p-value"