Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

The Fembots are coming… see the photo

In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people’s brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we [...]

Researchers in Europe have completed the first phase of what may be the largest computational physics experiment in history: They built and ran a simulated universe through 14 billion years of development. The experiment used up 25 million megabytes of memory, and the biggest supercomputer in Europe for a month. The result was a “Cube [...]

An experimental driving interface enables a user to control the performance of a composition by driving through a landscape using a game-controller. This system is similar in some respects to my idea for driving through soundscapes of last year.

NASA’s research on subvocalization technology is moving forward. Their system intercepts nerve signals to the vocal cords before the speaker makes a sound and then figures out what words they signify. This technology will enable people to speak silently on the phone or to their computers, without moving their lips or making a sound. It’s [...]

A number of readers sent me links this week about the new Sony patent for ultrasonic neural stimulation.  It is definitely interesting and could represent a useful new approach to non-invasive brainstate manipulation. However, it is by no means anywhere near being useful for entertainment, virtual reality, or mind control. Our understanding of how the [...]

I just read this really cool idea about how to design a programming language for the global brain — think of it as grid computing, but where some of the agents in the grid are humans and others are computers, working together to solve problems. I’ve had similar ideas to this over the years, for [...]

Here is an interesting article, written by a chess grandmaster, on how to trade information with alien civilizations, assuming they are ever contacted. The article proposes that at interstellar distances, the only realistic form of trade would be a trade in information — such as technology and scientific knowledge. He suggests that the best way [...]

After 30 years of research, a very interesting new theory of cognition has been announced. The theory posits that all human cognition and behavior is based on just one simple, non-algorithmic procedure that has been named confabulation. If the theory is correct it could offer a radical new approach to artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, and [...]

Big news coming — a radical high-performance, ultra-miniaturized parallel processing chip is about to go mainstream in a variety of consumer devices, giving Intel some serious competition… Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia [...]

First of all I know Clay Shirky, and he’s a good fellow. But he’s simply wrong about his claim that "tagging" (of the flavor that is appearing on del.icio.us — what I call "social tagging") is inherently better than the use of formal ontologies. Clay favors the tagging approach because it is bottom-up and emergent [...]

This interesting new brain study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains. Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that is so. On the Web we don’t really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet… but we’re working on it!

Researchers at Cornell have come up with a clever new way to determine the sentiment expressed in textual data. Their method relies of separating objective statements from subjective statements, and then just measuring the subjective ones. This results in more accurate measures of sentiment.

This article proposes a design pattern for ontologies and the Semantic Web based on the concept of formally defined Roles as a means to richly express the semantics of relationships among entities in ontologies. Roles are special types of n-ary relations, and thus the use of Roles is a subset of the Semantic Web best-practices [...]

The Ontology Problem is a fundamental challenge of the emerging Semantic Web. This problem is comprised of three key sub-problems, the Upper Ontology Problem, the Domain Ontology Problem, and the Ontology Integration Problem, described in detail below:

Watch the thought process of an AI as it struggles to cope with the onslaught of your genius (or ineptitude, as the case may be). Check out the “spheres of influence” too. Very nice.

This is pretty cool stuff — growing brains using live tissue and then teaching them to control software: from an article in Slashdot: “Scientists at the University of Florida made a living ‘brain’ by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat’s brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines [...]

Researchers from U. Chicago and Microsoft Asia have developed a new Web indexing algorithm called BlockRank that ranks pages according to which sections (“blocks”) of content on other pages contain links to them. The results are said to be similar to Google’s PageRank algorithm.

This animated visualizer lets you enter a word (in the little search box on the bottom left) and then shows the word situated next to other words that are used with similar frequency in English. It’s cool — you can discover some interesting things. Read the about page for more on that. This system would [...]

by Nova Spivack, http://www.novaspivack.com Original: July 8, 2004 Revised: February 5, 2005; February 28, 2010 (Permission to reprint or share this article is granted, with a citation to this Web Page: http://www.novaspivack.com/science/a-physics-of-ideas-measuring-the-physical-properties-of-memes) This paper provides an overview of a new approach to measuring the physical properties of ideas as they move in real-time through information [...]

Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers) Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net) INTRODUCTION This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater. DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE The Semantic [...]

Here is a book that readers who are interested in multi-agent systems will find useful. The author, Andrew Ilachinski is also a reader of this blog, by the way — it’s called “Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat” and provides an examination of the thesis that what happens on a battlefield (though the arena can [...]

A new technique has been proposed that appears to be able to determine a shortlist of possible words that can occupy sections of declassified documents that have been “blacked out.” The attack makes use of some clever analytical tactics. Using this method the researchers were able to determine the identity of an intelligence agency in [...]

The Memecodes Project starts with randomly generated Web pages and evolves them to get more search results from Google. Brilliant idea. The only problem is that Google indexing isn’t frequent enough, making this process take a bit of time. Still, I think this is a very interesting new approach that could even be a useful [...]

A new approach to computing called

Notes: Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to [...]

Today I found a very cool project at AT&T Research, a search engine for number sequences.. Just enter a series of integers and it will return any formulas or theorems related to them. I tried a whole slew of exotic sequences — like the prime gaps, series of prime gaps of different sizes, results of [...]

Amazon has opened up a beta of their A9 “Google Killer” search engine. It’s pretty cool. Has several nice innovations in the UI and seems to be making use of some Alexa data as well. It’s still basically just a Web search engine, with more personalization, but well-executed, and may even provide a better search [...]

New software can figure out where you are positioned based on analyzing a photo in near real time. Simply send it a photo from your camera-phone and the software will match the image to a database of locations — such as buildings in a city — and give you back your coordinates. The software is [...]

I have been using Earthlink’s built-in spam filter on my personal email — it works really well. It is basically a whitelist system: Any messages from pre-approved parties get through to me while anything else goes into a “suspect email” folder for me to look at and potentially approve or delete. This doesn’t really eliminate [...]