Technology

Over time, a variety of people have asked me where they should get the word out that they are writing on Science 2.0 and I am happy to tell them - but they are surprised by the answer.   Social media darlings like Twitter and Facebook will accomplish very little beyond being another place to follow comments.  Old technology is what matters in getting eyeballs to read your work, and that means a place like Stumbleupon.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com or Slashdot.org.  They are not social media, they are social news and that is where the science readers are(1), outside your own base and…

You may not know this, but Twitter is actually not that great.   The website itself is clunky. Add-ons are what made it successful.   Sometimes Twitter has acquired them, like with TweetDeck, and sometimes they have created their own once the market has shown them to be popular. The photo sharing website TwitPic started in 2008 as a way to share photos easily on Twitter.  Life was good, Twitter became popular.  Then Twitter announced its own photo-sharing services in June, with the added caveat that creators would own the rights to their photos so they can't be…

   Object: a book         Location: high shelf, exact location unknown   Agent: Swarmanoid, robot swarm consisting out of three types of robot.  Mission: Impossible?      Mission Tactics: flying eye-bots explore environment, attaching themselves to the ceiling, forming a string of communicating robots. Proceed until object is found. After visually locating target, signal is sent through the communication string of flying robots. Signal reaches rolling foot-bots, which will form a communication chain, similar…

Greater virtual realism is always shown in television shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as people who act out an alternate life as a farmer or solve mysteries in the 1800s, and that may happen, but long before that any technology like that will be used by young people to shoot each other. It used to be that being a Disney Imagineer was the coolest job in Mouse Land but these days Research may be the way to go.  They have 13 papers at SIGGRAPH this week and they deal with a lot of interesting stuff like volumetric lighting and the Gaussian quadrature for those photon Beams in "…

Imagine you are living within a bubble.  Your bubble stretches in any direction but you are always contained within it.  Your bubble is adrift in a sea that has no bottom, only a surface.  The surface surrounds your bubble, so the sea itself is only a bubble.  Beyond the surface lies darkness. This is the virtual universe we live in every day.  We call it the Internet.  The bubble around you is the collection of Websites you read and comment on.  The sea through which your bubble drifts is the Searchable Web.  The darkness beyond the Searchable Web is…

Thomas Edison did a lot right but there is one thing he got very, very wrong. Namely, a talking doll that was sure to be an inspiration for generations of future horror movie fans.   It was a bold idea, of course, Edison had a lot of those, but sometimes even a marketing juggernaut can't make something work for the public given technological limitations - we are also talking to you, 3-D movie makers.    The doll was a collaboration between Edison and William Jacques and Lowell Briggs, who started work on miniaturizing the phonograph in 1878.   This doll from 1890 was the…

But...but...you have to love journalists, according to journalists.  Only we hold government accountable and gotcha videos and bloggers rehashing what we come up with or they see in press releases can't be the same thing, they insist. Well, it can, actually.  Journalists stopped being trusted guides long ago and the public caught on.   Journalists can complain about how much more vitriolic the discourse has gotten, but that's really only because the Internet has made it possible for both sides to get coverage.     During the days of Walter Cronkite, everyone in media…

One of the fundamental precepts we laid out in the original Science 2.0® vision was collaboration.  It's tricky stuff, collaboration, it requires scientists who are often competitors to other labs to be more open - and that may never happen, but for smaller groups who want it to happen, there are tools in the works that can help.   One of those, Mendeley, has come out of beta and released Mendeley Desktop v1.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, following two other milestones for the company, 1 million users who have now downloaded the application and a database with its 100…

The Economist has published a highly amusing (at least to me) and informative article about "the new robotics," inspired by the diversity of natural forms: UNTIL recently, most robots could be thought of as belonging to one of two phyla. The Widgetophora, equipped with claws, grabs and wheels, stuck to the essentials and did not try too hard to look like anything other than machines (think R2-D2). The Anthropoidea, by contrast, did their best to look like their creators—sporting arms with proper hands, legs with real feet, and faces (think C-3PO). . . . It has belatedly dawned on robot…

Short post about this URL, a Google Doc spread sheet. Not sure if Google+ will take off and stay off the ground. I used Google Wave which disappeared into the sea.If you are a  Science blogger   Trying out Google+   then you might as well add your name to the spreadsheet. Any PR is good PR. It will help to have a google linke, try http://gplus.to to get a label, then know your column URL from Science20.com. Doug