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Technology Quarterly

Posted by michael on from the three-months-of-excitement-compressed-into-one-day dept.

LarsWestergren writes "There is an unusually interesting Technology Quarterly available for free from The Economist where they discuss some of the more interesting new areas in the area of science and technology. Of most interest to Slashdot might be Open source's local heroes, or perhaps playing Pac-Man on thought-controlled computers. Among the other articles this month: Predicting microweather, transparent magnetic memories, smart robotic transplants, how to bake the perfect chip, and Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Measuring data by Isopropyl · · Score: 4, Interesting
    AROUND five exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of information was created in 2002, up from around two exabytes in 1999, according to the latest "How Much Information?" survey produced by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley.

    How does one go about measuring this? It seems wildly inaccurate; either they're using a complex algorithm to model data creation, or they're taking a shot in the dark.

    Because of the difficulty of estimating such figures, however, all of their numbers have wide margins of error.

    I'll say! Give or take, say, five exabytes or so...

  2. what about the learning curve? by whovian · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Did you know that your brain was preparing for that movement a full half-second before it actually took place? Even more spookily, your mind knew which hand it was going to lift before you made the conscious decision to lift it.

    This sounds rather interesting, but it seems it would apply to people who have already learned a task. Therefore, the neural connections would already be "connected" and trained.

    But what about teaching somebody a new task using an EEG hat or such? You'd then use this device to find out how the brain learns. I mean, originally....the first bootstrap, so to speak.

    I don't think it would be entriely useless to apply to learning new experiences either. Although your brain would draw on that which was previously learned, it would still be trying to absorb a wealth of new information.
    --
    To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
  3. Thought-controlled Pacman by attonitus · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This seems like more fun:

    Human Pacman