MSN messenger search

Another step in Microsoft's attempt to get into the search market :). The brute force way ... anywhere they can put a search tool for MSN search they will.

Rise of the Plagiosphere

This is an interesting article about the increase in awareness on the whole human knowledge. The basic statement is that there is an increase in our capabilities of searching through what is already been written and therefore the act of plagiarizing will be more apparent. The author goes on to state that this might increase our sense of futility. Our ideas will be ours no longer because most likely it has been thought of before and it is one click away.

I would say that there is an optimist side to this. More search capabilities also means an increased ability to share our ideas in the global village. I think innovation is very much driven by the ability to share and build on top of preexisting ideas. Therefore an increase in search capabilities for me sounds a lot like a drive for innovation.

Monkeys Brains Alter to Work Robotic Arm

More work from Miguel Nicolelis' lab shows that the concept of self is very plastic. They show the brain adapts by plastically dedicating some "brain structure" for the control of the robot arm.
He talked about this in his seminar in one of my phd courses. It does resonate well with our intuitive feeling about tools. If we move to a different keyboard, and it has a different layout we will be severely slowed down. People that drive a car most likely will describe the experience of driving like the car is somewhat an extension of self. They will probably look at the mirrors without noticing they are doing so, etc.
In this sense, becoming an expert with any tool will mean that we are incorporating this tool into our concept of self. This came into my mind when I realized once that I was using google in the middle of a instant messeger chat with a friend to look for something he wrote down instead of asking him about it. Is web search becoming an extension of our brain ? :) One day we will unconsciously stop storing information in our wet brain because it is there at simple recall distance away in our internet brain.

Modular machine assembles copies of itself in minutes.

Rather simple but elegant self assembly of robots. From the movie we can see a tower replicating by picking up pieces at predetermined places and putting them together to form a copy of itself.
It would look a lot cooler to have something like a "cube dispenser". All cubes should be able to communicate with each other. "dead" creatures should return themselves to the cube dispenser unit. "live" creatures all know were to get the cubes from and how to replicate themselves. Some mutations should be possible in order to make more complex creatures. Add some goals like the machine the moves more or the machine that can move some objects is allowed to replicate more.
With these simple type of rules and some more complex body parts they would start to have some very interesting robots.

Lights on Seattle

The move into city wide wireless coverage continues. This example is a very expensive, business only example, but I'm sure more will follow. In a couple of years we will have the broad band connectivity anywhere. I still feel that the man-machine interfaces are not progressing with the same speed but maybe with the connectivity availability more pressure to build new interfaces will come up.