Finishing off the week on a fun note, we see that robotic firm Willow Garage — of special interest to Foresight due to their emphasis on open source — has achieved an important milestone in robotics: namely, the ability for a robot to fetch a beer from the fridge and deliver it. It’s worth seeing… Continue reading Willow Garage reaches robotic milestone involving beer (video)
Not able to attend the Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley, California? We’ll miss you, but you can watch the conference live at: http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010 Put it on your calendar now! Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at… Continue reading Open Science Summit to be streamed live
Those of you with a background in organic chemistry will recognize the venerable name of Beilstein, originally a handbook of organic chemistry which evolved into a database, later combined with Gmelin inorganic data to form the Crossfire database. So the Beilstein brand is a powerful one in chemistry. Nanowerk brings to our attention that Beilstein… Continue reading New open-access nanotechnology journal from Beilstein
I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for… Continue reading Open Science Summit 2010, July 29-31, w/ Foresight discount
From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools… Continue reading Keeping computers from ending science's reproducibility
The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law. My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot. The amusing, if you can call it… Continue reading Civilization, B.S.O.D.
As I pointed out in Nanotechnology Without Engines, nanotechnology’s promise of being a revolutionary rather than evolutionary technology was based on two key ideas: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. This was clearly the case both in Drexler’s conception and in Feynman’s: …… Continue reading The other half of nanotech
From the February 2009 issue of the “science is culture” publication Seed magazine, not yet online: Hypothesis: Civil Nanotechnology Starting in 2009, nanotech-based sensing will enable a level of environmental monitoring that could help reduce pollution tremendously. Such devices could be of immense benefit to the environment, but unfortunately, without careful attention they will trigger… Continue reading Civil nanotechnology: Open source sensing in Seed magazine
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Prof. Arthur Kantrowitz, a founding Advisor of Foresight Institute and an early supporter of molecular nanotechnology concepts when they were first developed at MIT in the late 1970s by then-student K. Eric Drexler. Arthur was an amazingly innovative scientist and technologist, as described in… Continue reading Arthur Kantrowitz, 1913-2008, Foresight Advisor
A “Call for Participation” for the first post-US election Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Conference of 2009 has been announced.
