Is it only Wednesday? It feels like a whole week already! I’ve been in back-to-back VC meetings, board discussions and strategy meetings since last week. I think this must be related to the heating-up of the "Web 3.0" meme and the semantic sector in general.… Read More “Is it Only Wednesday?”
I’ve been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call “The Collective IQ Barrier.” Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks.… Read More “Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier — Making Groups Smarter”
Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC’s, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search.… Read More “Diagram: Beyond Keyword (and Natural Language) Search”
Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:
… Read More “Envisioning the Whole Digital Person”Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we
communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce
transactions, to our online research.
Nice article in Scientific American about Gordon Bell’s work at Microsoft Research on the MyLifeBits project. MyLifeBits provides one perspective on the not-too-far-off future in which all our information, and even some of our memories and experiences, are recorded and made available to us (and possibly to others) for posterity.… Read More “Capturing Your Digital Life”
Check out this very impressive user-interface prototype for a desktop that works more like a real desk — a messy desk in fact. Very delightful design work that makes want to use it now!
… Read More “Playing Proteins as Songs Helps Researchers Hear Patterns”All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of
amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can
consist of dozens to thousands of them.Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of
text letters.
This online video preview of the upcoming Web-based organizer, Scrybe. The app has an unusually elegant and innovative AJAX interface. It’s beautifully designed. Watch the video.
This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness — providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers.
This is an extremely cool video of a beautifully designed interface that connects physical objects and digital objects in a new way. You can drag things off of your computer, right onto your table, and then from there connect them to physical objects, like a book, which can then be moved around causing the digital objects they are linked with to also move.… Read More “Extremely Cool — Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical World”
The co-founder of the Wikipedia has decided to fork the project, creating a new alternative compendium called the Citizendium. The idea is that it will be comprised of community content that is moderated by "expert" editors. There seems to be some consternation about this among Wikipedians, while others think it may produce much more reliable content.
Well if you are into libraries I guess these photos are sexy. Personally I’ve always loved libraries and used to spend hours just exploring in my college library. The Web is similarly fascinating to wander in, but there’s still something special about physical, tangible books that’s missing from the digital revolution.… Read More “Sexy Photos of Libraries?”
The recent negative hype about the lack of privacy in search results got me thinking about the needs of online services versus those of individuals. Is there a way to satisfy both constraints?
AOL’s accidental data release was one thing that worried me.… Read More “Privacy and Search”
A new mathematical technique provides a dramatically better way to
analyze data, such as audio data, radar, sonar, or any other form of
time-frequency data.
… Read More “Breakthrough in Finding Patterns in Complex Data Such as Sound”Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes,
10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated
to sound.
Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization around the best ideas that the organization generates.… Read More “Harnessing The Collective Mind”
I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary here.
This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for using biofeedback to guide brainstates, in order to improve memory.… Read More “A New Kind of Memory Aid”