The Infinite Library

Tech Review on The Infinite Library. I continue to be amazed by my personal use of the web ... I have links now to several libraries, and can quickly determine availability. If I could only get the full text and then also link to it as required. As in Nelson's Xanadu, the ultimate exercise in 'non sequential' writing. The infinite library still appears to have too many holes in it ...

Exploring Supermarket Paths

In the latest Knowledge@Wharton, an article on analyzing shopper paths in grocery by Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow. This provides an overview and study conclusions. I have taken a look at the complete technical paper on this, and its a novel use of statistical clustering techniques that could be quite important in this kind of analysis. This could result in some interesting changes in how a number of retail spaces are designed.

Gershenfeld's FAB

I finally finished Gershenfeld's FAB, enjoyed it, I have posted a longer overview and review over at Future Now.

Autistic Savant

I saw the Discovery program on Daniel Tammet this week A genius explains. Quite remarkable case, certainly an example of pattern recognition vastly different from the way we normally think of intelligence. A case for some sort of neural network as opposed to building rules .... Now if we could only tap this in some way, what we know so far is only maddeningly sketchy.

Major IBM Blogging Initiative

An interesting item to follow IBM is preparing to launch a massive corporate wide blogging initiative as it seeks to extend its expertise online. This could influence other companies in their use of the technology.

Don Tapscott

I am reading Don Tapscott's 2003 book The Naked Corporation in preparation for a meeting next week. Had previously read Growing Up Digital, which I found to be engaging. He has a related blog: Age of Transparency, which I also found to be useful.

Camille Paglia's Break, Blow Burn

Just reading Paglia's book of selected poetry and commentary. I don't appreciate all of her selections, but even the ones I would not have chosen myself did stretch me a bit. I liked her analyses in general, but this is not really a book for the 'ordinary' reader, I doubt if anyone without a quite strong interest in poetry could deal with deal with it. That being said, her book is worth reading, including some familiar, some little known, and some very eclectic examples of poetry. I learned quite a bit from it.

Robots Working as a Team

This item on robot teamwork: Robot Teamwork brought to mind some work we had done on the teaming up of small groups of simple, cheap robotics to perform simple tasks. One suggested task was to take inventory of a warehouse with simple device that could travel about and sense location and stored items with RF tags. More specifically the idea of 'teaming' is more difficult, even the idea of giving a robot an 'agent' status is non-trivial, and adding the team aspect of reasoning takes it to another level.