April 9, 2009 • 11:48 pm 0
Nathaniel Kahn shares clips from his documentary My Architect about his quest to understand his father, the legendary architect Louis Kahn. It’s a film with meaning to anyone who seeks to understand the relationship between art and love.
Filed under: Architecture, Art , Consciousness, Video
April 8, 2009 • 9:20 am 0
According to a recent study by McPheters & Company comparing the effectiveness of ads on television, in magazines, and on the internet magazines effectively delivered more than twice the number of ad impressions as TV and more than 6 times those delivered online within a half hour time frame spent with the medium.
Furthermore:
Though TV doesn’t deliver as many ads per half hour as do magazines, net recall of TV ads was almost twice that of magazine ads; magazines in turn had ad recall almost three times that of Internet banner ads
85% of Internet ads served appeared on-screen and could be identified by brand
Among web users, 63% of banner ads were not seen. Respondents’ eyes passed over 37% of the Internet ads and stopped on slightly less than a third
For Internet ads, almost all net recall could be attributed to ads that were seen
Internet video ads appeared much less frequently than banner ads, and their exposure skewed heavily towards young men. When they did appear they were twice as likely to be seen as banner ads.
Filed under: Information, Market Research, Marketing , Advertising, Consumers, Online, Research
April 7, 2009 • 12:15 pm 0
From Scienceblogs:
…. he’d have had it watch apples fall and let it figure out what that meant. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm developed by Cornell researchers that can derive natural laws from observed data.
The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that represent natural laws — without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.
The research is described in the April 3 issue of the journal Science (Vol. 323, No. 5924) by Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology.
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science, Technology
• 12:31 am 0
General Motors and Segway will today announce that the companies have teamed up to create a new prototype electric vehicle designed for urban transportation.
Called project P.U.M.A (short for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) the two-wheeled vehicle uses the same dynamic stabilization technology found in the current Segway, but is large enough to carry two people and can reach decidedly non-Segwaylike speeds of up to 35 mph and run an hour on top speed on a single charge.
The 300-lb. experimental vehicle, which will be demonstrated to the press this morning, has a semi-enclosed cockpit with two seats, but according to Larry Burns, GM vice-president of research and development, the idea is to eventually develop a closed-cockpit vehicle that can be driven through adverse weather conditions.
Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Marketing , Automotive, GM, Innovation, PUMA, Segway
April 6, 2009 • 12:47 am 0
From Popsci:
No matter whether you felt that Earth Hour was a terrific conservation tactic or an overhyped PR stunt, energy on our planet is in peril. Our daily juice (be it electric, gasoline combustion, atomic, or carbon-based), has become a precious commodity with at least one guaranteed effect: to elicit an instantaneous hot-button opinion from just about everybody.
What can you do about it? Well, one great proactive demonstration would be to stop your regular consumption of dry-cell batteries. Yes, there are numerous substitutes, ranging from rechargeable varieties to alternative energy replacements, but each of these substitutions has a debit that few of us are willing to pay. You know, “costs” like always hunting for an outlet to power a battery recharging station, or getting rid of a clean, slim-line AA battery for a gargantuan solar-driven bat-winged monstrosity.
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Innovation, Science, Technology
April 5, 2009 • 4:32 am 0
From Sciencemag.org
In recent decades, robots have replaced millions of manual laborers; now they’re moving in on scientists, too. A fully automated robotic laboratory can design its own molecular biology experiments and has even made its first discoveries, a multidisciplinary team reports this week. Meanwhile, a team of computer scientists has developed a robot that can independently come up with the laws of motion for a dynamical system such as interconnected pendulums.
Robots are doing ever more of the physical labor in laboratories–from analyzing DNA samples to handling data tapes from massive particle-physics experiments. And scientists increasingly rely on computers to analyze their data. But the highest-level thinking–the formulation of hypotheses and designing of experiments to test them–has remained the preserve of humans.
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science
April 4, 2009 • 7:48 am 0
From scienceblogs.com
In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way.
Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. He carries them out, records and evaluates the results, and comes up with new questions. All of this is part and parcel of a typical scientist’s life but there is one important difference that sets Adam apart – he’s a robot.
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science
April 3, 2009 • 1:47 am 0
From NYT.com
There’s a theme emerging here in Las Vegas at the CTIA conference: Add mobile data capability to absolutely everything, including video cameras and the human body.
That quasi-science-fiction notion is being tossed around at the show by mainstream companies like Qualcomm and AT&T. At a lunch for the press and industry analysts on Thursday, AT&T discussed its new “emerging devices” division, which is working on wireless applications for consumer electronics devices, including game machines, electronic book readers and video and still cameras.
Filed under: Information, Market Research, Networks, Science , Innovation, Network, Technology
