August 23rd, 2007
SciVee is a startup website that is focused on publishing scientist created videos that correlate to published research.
By giving scientists a Web 2.0 framework to demonstrate and discuss their research they can covey key concepts related in a new and powerful ways that the written research alone can not.
While embryonic, this site is of note in that it is sponsored by high powered scientific outposts including PLoS, NSF and SDSC. Of course JoVE - The Journal of Visual Experiments - is the grand-daddy in this space having been in operation since late 2006 
And I’d bet would could dig up some science on YouTube circa 2005 if we really tried…
SciVee: Pioneering New Modes of Scientific Dissemination
No Comments | In: Business, Research, SciVee | | #
June 22nd, 2007
According to researchers at Rice University, gold-coated glass “nanoshells” can reveal the location of tumors and then destroy them minutes later in a burst of heat. Eighty per cent of the mice treated survived for more than seven weeks, while all the control mice, who did not receive the nanoshells, died after three weeks.
Nanospheres leave cancer no place to hide - tech - 21 June 2007 - New Scientist Tech
No Comments | In: Research | | #
May 30th, 2007
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Hawaii have developed an easy way to align nanowires and carbon nanotubes over areas 100 times larger than is possible using existing methods. The researchers are also able to fabricate the nanowires on a number of different surfaces. The advance potentially paves the way to mass production of electronics devices based on these promising nanostructures.
Technology Review: Practical Nanowire Devices
No Comments | In: Ethics, Research | | #
May 15th, 2007
Kwabena Boahen is part of a small but growing community of scientists and engineers using a process they call ‘neuromorphing’ to build complicated electronic circuits meant to model the behavior of neural circuits. Their work takes advantage of anatomical diagrams of different parts of the brain generated through years of painstaking animal studies by neuroscientists around the world. The hope is that hardwired models of the brain will yield insights difficult to glean through existing experimental techniques.
Technology Review: Silicon Brains
No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Research | | #
November 27th, 2006
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is an online journal publishing visualized (video-based) biological research studies. This publication aims to solve some of the most difficult problems in the contemporary life science research: - low transparency and reproducibility of biological experiments - time-consuming learning of experimental techniques.
www.myjove.com
No Comments | In: Research | | #
November 27th, 2006
An interesting link to an upcoming documentary on the world of work inside virtual worlds.
GigaOM » Inside World of Warcraft Gold Farm, Future of Work
No Comments | In: Futurism, Research | | #
September 20th, 2006
How much of what you know is common sense? You can burn yourself if you touch a hot light bulb. A cold shower can wake you up. A mountain is bigger than a mole-hill. Is 50% of knowledge common sense? 90%? 99.99%? According to Push Singh at MIT, several attempts to benchmark the scope of common sense put it in the order of hundreds of millions of rules.
Hard to believe that you could keep several hundred of anything in your brain, let alone several hundred million. Yet, there they are, right behind your eyes. The rules that you live by. So what will it take for a computer to learn those rules? Sure, itÂ?s the stuff of science fiction [think HAL or C-3PO], but it is also the stuff of science fact for a couple of below the radar software companies and research projects.
Cycorp, based in Austin, Texas is a 20-year-old research project turned start up turned government funded technology vendor. Cycorp was started as a research project in 1984 by Doug Lenat, then a Stanford professor. Lenat moved to Austin and his project took up residence at MCC. In 1994, Lenat spun out of MCC and formed Cycorp as a for-profit venture. CycÂ?s original goal was to Â?codify in machine readable formatÂ? the rules that make up common sense. We will give Cyc a report card at the end of this article
Rules, rules, rules
Cyc has three main technology concepts that merit understanding. The first is the knowledge base of rules Â? or assertions - that have been entered into Cyc. The rules that Cyc knows about have generally been hand entered, and are grouped around specific key words. Several hundred thousand keywords each have 10 plus assertions entered about them. For example, the key word dog might have assertions such as dogs are mammals. Dogs can be pets. Dogs are color-blind etc. Assertions are furbundleddeled into related concepts called microtheories.
Twenty years, and a reported $60 million in government and venture backing later, Cyc appears to be making some progress. According to company press releases, Cyc has assembled a knowledge base of over 3 million rules of thumb. While this is only of sliver of human common sense, what is important, is that this knowledge has been successfully pointed at solving business problems.
No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Cycorp, Research | | #
August 3rd, 2006
One of the tenets of The singularity is the cross pollination of research areas. Research in neuroscience will need to merge with nano for example to create the kind of breakthroughts that are necessary.
This means a dramatic acceleration in collaboration between organizations, researchers, and across disciplines. Will new technology spring up to support this collaboration. I hope so. One of the more interesting new services here is PLOS - the Public Library of Science. PLOS’s central theory is that the cost of subscription to research journals in many cases limits the spread of important research knowledge. PLOS publishes 1st tier journals for free, but charges the researchers a nominal fee to be included in publication.
Wired has an excellent introduction to PLOS:
Wired 14.06: Free Radical
No Comments | In: PLoS, Research | | #