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Business & Industrial - Business Finance - Venture Capital

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Science - Engineering & Technology - Robotics

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We infer your age and gender based on the websites you've visited. 

Age: 35-44

Gender: Male

I've checked out my Google ad preferences. Classic. If you like technology then you must be male.

If there weren't so many other examples of gender by design, this would be depressing. But I've seen magazine display racks, toy shops and clothing stores. There are so many fronts to fight this battle on.

What scares me is feeling as though I've been coopted. As Google collects data from more and more places, where will it be ok to be female or middle aged or anything not associated with my work or public persona. I don't wan't to turn in to a stereotype. I'm tweeting #VAGINA more frequently to keep female technophilia alive. Let's encourage alternatives and defeat stereotypes.

Awesome is exhausting for some of us but FAKE GRIMLOCK has tapped the motherlode and is distributing it via twitter, blog, posters and maybe even in person. Although it could be kind of scary seeing a giant metal robot dinosaur with a penchant for eating stupid humans.

FAKE GRIMLOCK is my new favorite reading (along with The Bloggess and xkcd), because what he says makes a lot of sense. It also drips with sarcasm, awesomeness and blood. Many technology luminaries (like Eric Ries, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and CNN) have noticed that FAKE GRIMLOCK carves through all the cream and gets straight to the coffee. I'm still new over here but sometimes I think that America is all froth and foam and eff all coffee. Then I remember stuff like #Occupy and STOP SOPA.

I wish I had some of FAKE GRIMLOCK's gift for awesome communication because the tech world both fascinates and dismays me. We are changing society right here - punching code through the walls of the world. But all too often the vision is just personal or commercial success.

"STARTUP IS MAKE FIST OF CODE, PUT IT THROUGH THE WORLD. VISION IS PUT FIST IN RIGHT PLACE, BREAK WORLD IN HALF."

Roadblocks of gender, race and class are still huge. Sometimes technological advancement is just making bigger roadblocks. Startup philosophy, which emphasizes the individual, is often powerless before huge areas of fail. We aren't all giant robot dinosaurs and sometimes we don't share the same visions. For example, feminism is a great conversation killer, because not a lot has changed in last 50 years. Seriously - this 1991 MIT report by Ellen Spertus is still accurate. That's depressing. It's great to celebrate awesome women engineers and ceos, but important to point out the systematic obstacles women face in the tech and startup worlds.

Fake Grimlock's irresistible awesome is up against some pretty immoveable objects, but at least reading @fakegrimlock makes me feel like a raging fury in a good way.

Andra Keay  -  12:38 PM  -  Public

Great article - describes a huge study showing that weak social ties can insert information into our online 'bubbles', reducing the echo chamber effect. However, as Mahjoo points out, the content of the new information wasn't evaluated, so really whether new information that has radical content (ie. protax if you aren't) is as effective as neutral novelty (ie. cute kitten) is still an unknown.

It's also really cool that this study covered 1.2 billion instances of link sharing from 250 million people! Massive. 

Howard Rheingold originally shared this post:

The End of the Echo Chamber
A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought.

Online echo chambers: A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought.

Today, Facebook is publishing a study that disproves some hoary conventional wisdom about the Web. According to this new research, the online echo chamber doesn’t exist. This is of particular interest...

There's no one better than the Bloggess. She seems to share my interest in many strange geeky things and has no fear of using the word vagina. Frequently. I didn't post much in 2011 due to moving overseas and finishing my thesis... and starting the robot blog(s). So I'm kicking off 2012 with the sort of post I'd like to be posting, if only I'd finished building the dinosaur out of plastic spoons etc.

A dream. The common definition of a robot, as situated and embodied, is incredibly broad.  Robots, or parts of them, are developed constantly and subsumed into other ‘things’ or technical assemblages. Your car is a robot. Increasingly, so is your phone.

I say that a robot is whatever a roboticist is working on. But really, most robotics research is absorbed into other things, and what we call a robot has a lot to do with a vision. A dream of a robot that is personable and a slave to human needs. A robot has an animal or humanoid body that we can relate to socially.

We are on the verge of changes in robot technology and development that will revolutionize what a robot is. It starts as toys, hidden technologies and transparent interfaces. It started with the Kinect, the smart phone and the cloud.

Now, you might say I’m a dreamer…. but here are some really great recent examples of the increasing democratization of robotics technology that indicate the fundamental ways the ground is shifting as we move into SME and consumer robotics.

DragonBot from MIT’s Personal Robotics Group is powered by an Android smart phone. Kombusto, the DragonBot is blended reality, living on your phone as well as in the fur. Being a cloud based robot, Kombusto can learn from other robots/interactions. (Image from IEEE Spectrum article Wed Dec 14)

Parrot AR drones, Romotivs and Sphero, utilising smart phone controllers, also open the door to cloud based robotics and crowd sourced learning for devices. Another approach is Brainlink, using smartphones – or other interfaces – to hack existing infrared controlled devices, via a bluetooth ‘brainlink’ to imbue cheap toys with extra intelligence. Brainlink is only $125, open source and eminently hackable. They also won an educational award at Maker Faire earlier this year.

This article by Julia Hu is spot on the money. It takes money to succeed, not talents that women have proven they have. More women run successful small businesses, but anything that requires asking for funding is harder for women.

It isn't about changing women any more. It's about changing what is effectively a boys club for funding into something more flexible. Something that can see why women are underfunded, undervalued and RIPE FOR ACQUISITION.

We are entering a new space

Posted on December 7, 2011 | Leave a comment | Edit

I am fascinated by the changes in our situated awareness made possible by the merges in gaming and personal technology. Chris Chesher discusses the impact of gaming on sat nav systems in the journal Convergence and how we are entering a new space as we share our control systems with our game environments. I’d like to go further and suggest that our self awareness is shifting as we incorporate visual displays onto mirrored surfaces, ranging from the rapidly becoming pervasive rear view mirror/backup monitor/sat nav, to these newer technologies in R&D.

There is a qualitative shift from the ‘shopping’ style magic mirrors, which show you with different outfits, watches etc. Shopping mirrors function as a ‘paper doll’, you are selecting outfits for yourself much as you would in real life. However, the use of mirrors as channels for other information changes the space that you (in a mirror) are in. The more you switch modes the more you are changed. All the way to the complete carnival mirror changes below!

Via Pop Sci | An Augmented Reality Mirror That Alters Your Appearance

excerpt… Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality “mirror” that morphs your facial features at will.

Unlike existing applications that overlay virtual features onto real-world video, this program doesn’t add any synthetic elements to the video feed. It creates a 3D model of the user’s face, tracks their features, and then subtly warps the video. The user can then see how they would look with a smaller nose, wider mouth, or Powerpuff Girl eyes.

Via Mashable | via Augmented Mirror of the Future Reflects You and Your World.

excerpt… The New York Times‘s R&D Lab has developed a digitally enhanced mirror that allows you to interact with personalized data during your morning routine.

Unfortunately, the mirror won’t be making its way into your local Restoration Hardware any time soon. Rather, it’s a proof of concept designed to explore “how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from the New York Times and others might play a part,” The Lab’s team explained on a page outlining the project.

State of the Art

A snapshot of the rapidly changing world of computing, communications and technology. Related Article »

A GLOBAL INTERNET In just four decades the Internet has spread to much of the world. Now, the shift to high-bandwidth connectivity and the global availability of supercomputing is accelerating. Related article: A High-Stakes Search Continues for Silicon’s Successor Related article: Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing
A MORE CONNECTED WORLD Cellphones are proliferating rapidly in much of the developing world. The use of smartphones and other Internet-connected devices is still low, but should rise quickly in countries like China, which will soon have the world’s largest domestic market for Internet commerce and computing. Related article: Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to Take Root
TOWARD AN INNOVATIVE CHINA China is the dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics, and is readily able to adapt and improve on technology innovations made elsewhere. But innovation within the country has been limited by government controls and the relative lack of intellectual property protection. Related article: China Aims for High-Tech Primacy
RAW MATERIALS FOR INNOVATION The synthesis that made Silicon Valley—the concentration of science and engineering talent and venture capital—is now beginning to proliferate in the developing world. China’s growing venture capital market is now the second largest in the world. Related article: With a Leaner Model, Start-Ups Reach Further Afield

Remember that YouTube only started in 2005. That most businesses only used the internet for email in 2000 (if they used it at all!). That phones used to be just phones, not mobile phones let alone mobile internet devices.

As William Gibson famously said, 'the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.' It's worth considering the distribution of technological advances. It isn't always where you think.