The Blog of Record

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From here.

A guy develops artificial-intelligence technology and the only marketable application he’s been able to find for it is a 5-foot-7, 120-pound talking sex robot. Or so he says.

This looks like a big step forward, especially as the inventors say the technology could be commercialized within a short time:

Ordinary paper could one day be used as ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries, according to scientists from Stanford University.

Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of silver and carbon nanomaterials makes an efficient storage device that is 10 times as powerful as lithium-ion batteries used to power laptops.

And things much bigger than laptops, too.

Imagine a hidden online world where people are not afraid of ever being identified, whatever they write, publish or download.

Not surprisingly, the article is somewhat sensationalistic, with its focus on child pornography and practical guides to explosives for terrorists, as Ian Clarke, Freenet’s creator, points out in his response.

Wikipedia’s loss of volunteer contributors has recently accelerated ten-fold:

Research reveals that the volunteers who create the pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning the site in unprecedented numbers.Every month tens of thousands of Wikipedia’s editors are going “dead” — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — without a similar number of new contributors taking their place.

Some argue that Wikipedia’s troubles represent a new phase for the internet. Maybe, as some believe, the website has become part of the establishment that it was supposed to change.

The research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year. Many experts believe that the trend could threaten Wikipedia’s future.

The research was conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He created a computer system that analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

[Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site,]explained that contributors were becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site, which he said was increasingly difficult. “There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules,” he said. “Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.”

Some experts argued that the pioneering ethos of early Wikipedians had faded. “They don’t feel the spirit of the first years,” Mr Ortega said. “The articles are very tightly controlled by others now, and that makes it hard to jump in and contribute.”

Or maybe they just can’t think of many new topics for articles when there are already millions of them.

University of Missouri researchers have demonstrated nuclear batteries as small as regular batteries used in, say, consumer electronics, but holding a million times as much charge. The radioactive isotopes inside, whose decay produces the energy, can last up to hundreds of years or more. A battery that will outlive the flashlight or children’s toy it powers? Sounds good.

How a future laptop computer can look:

Normally, resistance to change kills businesses. For Craigslist, though, it seems to be a big part of its sucsess.

(Via Link Collection.)

If a robot is to interact effectively with humans, it will benefit from having human-like inner structures and mechanisms – bones, joints, muscles, and tendons:

A report describes the current state of Wikipedia’s evolution:

The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia’s first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today while at the same time, the base of highly active editors has remained more or less static. Chi’s team discovered that the way the site operates had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone with the time and energy to dedicate to the project. Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. ‘We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% — and that’s been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,’ says Chi. ‘For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the ‘onesies’ — people who only make one edit a month — their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate.’ While Chi points out that this does not necessarily imply causation, he suggests it is concrete evidence to back up what many people have been saying: that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site’s inner core of editors. Wikipedia’s growth pattern suggests that it is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. ‘As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.’

The end of Wikipedia’s explosive growth phase is understandable, as it is hardly possible to keep adding as many articles per day now as it was in the beginning. The problem is that this phase seems to be followed by a “close inner circle ruling clique” phase, which is probably not the best way to manage something that was founded on a very different set of principles.

Interesting comments on Slashdot (the first link above).

iTunes, too:

Kane Kramer, an inventor by trade, came up with a gadget and music distribution service almost eerily similar to the iPod-iTunes relationship that predates it by three decades. The guy predicted details down to DRM and flash memory’s dominance.

Kramer’s device, the IXI, was flash-based, even though flash memory in 1979 only could have held about three minutes of audio, and featured a screen, four-way controls, and was about the size of a cigarette pack. Even weirder, he envisioned the creation and sale of digital music and foresaw all the good and bad that would come from this: No overhead, no inventory, but a great push for independent artists, with the risk of piracy looming large.

He predicted DRM, though he didn’t go into many specifics, and in his one concession to the time, guessed that music would be bought on coin-operated machines placed in high-traffic areas.

He just couldn’t predict the Internet. No one could predict the Internet.

When Microsoft was founded, its mindset was “Don’t be evil like IBM”. Google’s well-known motto is “Don’t be evil [like Microsoft]“. The way things are going, one day we’ll see an agile, hip startup whose founding mindset will be “Don’t be evil like Google”.

(Illustration by Federico Fieni.)

Update: Google has noticed Anil Dash’s article and seems to be taking the criticism well.

The next Microsoft Office (Office 2010) will come in two varieties: a desktop software version you can buy and install, and a free online service you can access in your browser. But, this being Microsoft, the free Office Web Applications will work better if you purchase the desktop version.

The future, now: Jay Leno describes amazing rapid-prototyping technology he uses to make replacement parts for his old cars.

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Source.

Microsoft must have the patent on lameness. Even though this Internet Explorer 8 ad features a woman vomiting on her husband while looking at Internet porn, it still manages to be lame. But that, of course, is not why they have pulled it.

An article about a proposed framework for a legal system and robot design rules that should prevent next-generation robots from harming humans. You know, their masters, hopefully.

I just hope they have a rule about not building any Skynets. Anything else, we can deal with.

That’s how you do it (comments No. 4 and 5 to this article):

bob – June 9th, 2009 at 9:35 am PDT

you have to be a complete idiot to buy this over the iphone 3gs

Ali – June 9th, 2009 at 9:56 am PDT

Bob,

Thank you for that well thought out, articulated, and thoughtful comment backed by facts and supporting points you specified.

Let me help you out here. Whenever you feel the urge to end a sentence like “OmGz Iph0Ne iz teh L33tzorz”, ask yourself “did I put the word ‘because’ in there?” If not, then you could sound like a bigger idiot than originally anticipated!

Here, I’ll show you a few examples:
Hai Gaiz, Teh N97 PWNZERZ teh Iph0ne(lol) cuz:
1.) Iph0ne(lol) is STILL more xpensive cuz of karrier h|dd3n pheez which yuo dn’t have 2 pay if you dun use a iph0ne(lol)

2.) Iph0ne(lol) laks maj0r feetures laik:
-DVD Qualety kamkorder on teh N97 w/ Karl Zeiss lenz
-QWERTY (I’m drunk) Keyboard to drunk txt ur mom
-32gb + Xpandable memory
-My phone is teh sexier than ur phone

Iphone 3.0 haz MMS SUPPORT YAIIIII!!! YUO KAN SEND MMS MSGS NOW WOOT

See how it’s done? I charge by the hour for internet trolling lessons, look me up and send me a MMS from your new iphone ;)

(Via Game Producer.)

Scientists at Brown University in Rhode Island are testing BrainGate – a prototype device that, when implanted into a person’s brain, enables the user to control external devices, such as a computer, powered wheelchair or prosthetic limb. It still requires a wired connection to the external computers that interpret the thought commands, so the volunteer test subjects have wires sticking out from their brains through a hole in the top of the cranium. It’s only the beginning, though.

What Obama’s new “cyberspace strategy” could mean for anonymity on the Internet. Is another of those public-private partnerships coming, managed by one of those people that are now running much of America – czars?