Monthly Archives: October 2007

Artery Clearing Micro-bot Demonstrated

South Korean researchers at Chonnam National University have created a tiny robot that is capable of traveling through the bloodstream to clear arteries.

This is not a nanobot. It operates at a much larger scale – it is slightly less than a millimeter in size.

Perhaps it should be called a micro-cyborg. The bot’s locomotion is powered by heart tissue cultivated from the patient. This means that there is no need for a cumbersome battery pack. It runs on the same ATP -> ADP chemical reaction that the rest of the body relies on.

Phil and I discussed how practical it would be to power in-body bots this way in our last FastForward Radio show.

This bot can move 55 yards a week and dispense artery clearing meds where they are most needed.

Faster, please.

$1000 to Find a Job

So how do you look for a job on the Internet? There are many different approaches, of course, but most folks end up doing one or the other of the following (or both):

1. Register with an employment site such as Monster, where you input an electronic version of your resume and then search the database of job listings looking for a match.

2. Network via a social networking site such as LinkedIn or FaceBook to uncover (via connections) the unpublished job market where a position specific to your skills and experience is just waiting to be discovered / developed.

Well, meet Zapoint — a newly launched startup that takes a somewhat different approach to seeking employment on the Web. Like Monster, Zapoint allows you to post your resume online:

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One of the differences with a site such as Monster becomes immediately apparent, but since the image above is shrunken rather excessively, let me magnify the relevant part:

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So before we even begin to learn about this individual’s education or job experience, we get some contextual information on him. The mentors, mentees, and peers that are linked below his name are nodes in his budding professional network. Members of the network allow the job-seeker to demonstrate how well-connected he is; they also act to confirm the accomplishments listed on the resume (something that’s difficult to do with other electronic resume sites.) Mentors help define the direction that the job-seeker might like to go; mentees allow him to provide that kind of direction to others.

Below the professional network information, we see personal tags related to the job-seeker’s resume. Zapoint is very much a tag-driven, Web 2.0-type environment:

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Although we’re still not yet to the resume — which is actually a pretty standard thing; I’m not even going to reproduce it here — we now come to what I consider to be one of the two big differentiators for Zapoint: the Life Chart:

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Every Zapoint member has a Life Chart. The website describes it as a kind of a stock chart for your life. By providing a numerical (and graphic) assessment of each job-seekers’ professional and educational history, as well as personal accomplishments, Zapoint is creating what they call a “common currency” for the employment market. Even if that description turns out to be a bit of an overreach, this certainly is an innovative idea which should — at the very least — allow for apples-to-apples employer comparisons between job candidates. And that is no small thing.

Plus, the idea of a neat, visual summary of the information presented in a resume seems like exactly the sort of thing the Web was designed to provide. It’s surprising that no one has implemented something like this before. I hope that Zapoint expands the background explanation of the Life Chart and provides some specific examples of how the chart might be used.

Zapoint’s other major differentiator also has to do with currency: a thousand dollars worth of the stuff. They are offering $1000 hiring bonus to every job-seeker who gets signed on to their new position via the Zapoint service. I have to say that I love this idea! Get a job; get $1000. It’s so straightforward. Again, you have to wonder why no one has thought of it before.

For any of it to work — the networking, the viability of the Life Chart as a basis for comparison, the cash hiring bonus — Zapoint will have to attract a large number of users and show some real success in helping people to find a job via the Internet. But anybody who wants to help you build your network, find a new job, AND throw some money your way…well, you pretty much have to root for them. Go get ‘em, Zapoint!

FULL DISCLOSURE: Chris Twyman, the founder of Zapoint (whose public resume I showed above), is a friend and former colleague. Plus, he listens to FastForward Radio. Need I say more?

FastForward Radio

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In this show we covered some of the latest developments in Nanotech.

Click “Continue reading” for the show and the show notes.

Nano-Radio

This is cool:

Researchers in California today report development of the world’s first working radio system that receives radio waves wirelessly and converts them to sound signals through a nano-sized detector made of carbon nanotubes.

Our cellphones, MP3 players, and radios are already integrating into one device. We’ll still have that device – or its equivalent – in twenty years. It’ll just be hard to see.

Redemption for Playstation

The seventh generation of the video game console wars has been rough on Sony’s Playstation division. Nintendo’s Wii has dominated and the XBox 360 now has a Halo title.

The Playstation 3 is a machine ahead of its time. Sony felt obliged to include components that essentially priced the console out of the reach of the Playstation market. But during development Sony did a remarkable thing that may yet save the Playstation 3. Sony made it an open platform. You can install Linux on it and use it as a general purpose computer.

It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time.

I’ve written before about how the Playstation 3 – and its components – have been used for research purposes. But what would it cost to replace research supercomputers with Playstations?

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[Astrophysicist Dr. Gaurav Khanna once] relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States “Typically I’d use a couple hundred processors — going up to 500 — to do these same types of things.”

However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast…

Khanna says that his [Playstation 3 cluster - "Gravity Grid" - ] has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.

“Basically, it’s almost like a replacement,” he says. “I don’t have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing.”

“For the same amount of money — well, I didn’t pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s — for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely.”

Neither Khanna nor the National Science Foundation paid for the system. Sony covered the cost… this time.

But let’s say a university had to cover the cost for itself. Assume that the Playstations cost $3,200 and setup cost another $5000. That comes to a cost of about $41 per supercomputer node ($8200 / 200 nodes) – to own.

Before the Gravity Grid, Khanna had been renting computer time for $10 a node per run ($5000 / 500 nodes).

So, four runs after buying the cluster a university could break even. In fact, the cluster could become a profit center if they rented time to other universities.

Why isn’t the NSF doing this everywhere?

FastForward Radio

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Phil and Stephen started the show tonight, for the first time, by talking sports. Throughout the show Phil reported happily on the progress of the Colorado Rockies. Stephen was less happy about Saturday’s upset game between LSU and the University of Kentucky.

This led, as it would only with Phil and Stephen, to a discussion of the difficulty predicting the future of anything in a complex system. Whether it be the fall of communism in the late 80′s or technological development in the next twenty years.

Phil and Stephen took calls from Karl Hallowell and Matt Duing. They contributed greatly to the discussion. Thanks guys!

The show included discussion on the parallel universe theory, quantum mechanics, quantum computers, quantum immortality, and quantum suicide. And Phil’s Amazing Exponentials and Stephen’s Spock’s Chessboard make an appearance.

The guys finished by talking about our Sun’s twin.

The music can be found at Magnatune.com. The front bumper was a sampling of Marginal Prophets’ “The Difficult Song” and they exited to “In The Middle” by Beight.

Make sure to catch next week’s show live at the same time Sunday night – 11:00 Eastern/10:00 Central/9:00 Mountain/8:00 Pacific.

Click “Continue reading” to stream or download the show.

Artificial Worlds

As I mentioned on the most recent FastForward Radio, I’ve been at Walt Dinsey World this week working at a conference. I described the Disney complex as an artificial world made up of several smaller artificial worlds. Las Vegas is another good example of this.

Last night after dinner, one of my co-workers (a fellow Coloradan) was excoriating the whole Disney experience, talking about how much happier he would be alone on top of a mountain eating out of can or (better yet) hunting his own game. There was enthusiastic agreement from several of the others present. I challenged him on this, noting that our ancestors who lived on mountain tops and hunted their own game worked long and hard to create a different kind of world. For some reason, though living what my co-worker was offering up as an idyllic existence, they opted for civilization. In fact, if you took our primitive ancestors on a walking tour of the Lake Buena Vista resort complex — just a small part of Walt Disney World — they would probably think they were being given a glimpse of the dwelling place of the gods. If you told them that people staying in that world despise it and would much rather come with them to live the kind of life they lead, they would be rightly dumbfounded.

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Across the lake from the artificial beach: an artificial seaside town.

It occurred to me after the fact that while my friend’s mountain top experience may not be as artificial as the world we were strolling around in last night, there is definitely something fake about it. After all, if he’s going to eschew civilization, then what’s with the canned food? And what’s with the rifle and ammo? Also, how was his cabin constructed, exactly? And if he’s staying in a tent, well it needs to be made of the skin of buffalos that he killed using a spear with a stone tip. Plus, the guy is a pilot and a huge aviation nut. I don’t think he’d really want to live in a world without airplanes.

But then if that’s the case, his natural and primitive lifestyle is an admitted compromise (if not outright hoax.) It’s a pleasurable experience similar to the real thing, but not identical, and made possible by civilization and technological infrastructure. His mountain cabin is — in some ways — as much an artificial world as the Norway Pavilion at Epcot.

In fact, it’s a bit like this, though perhaps not as extreme.

So, sure, he can prefer his mountain cabin and canned beans to a beach resort and yacht club built out of a reclaimed swamp. That’s his choice, and it’s a matter of taste — kind of like preferring the Venetian over Circus Circus, or Worlds of Warcraft over Second Life. There’s a big difference between where he is and where he would like to be, but maybe not as big as he would have us think. The externals are different, of course. But the fundamental distinction between the two places is not so much a difference of kind as a difference of degree.

What About All Those Interviews?

There have been some inquiries about the interviews I did at the Singularity Summit last month — specifically, why has only one been posted to date? Unfortunately, right after getting back from San Francisco, I started having hard drive issues and was only able to resolve the problem to my staisfaction a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been on the road since the third week in September and won’t be home for another week and half — and I don’t have the computer I do my video and audio editing on with me.

So please stay tuned. The interviews are coming, and they will be just as interesting six weeks or two months out from the conference as they were the day they were recorded. That’s my personal guarantee.

FastForward Radio

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Phil and Stephen had a great time catching up with Sci-Fi author Tobias Buckell. The last time we spoke with Tobias he had just published his first novel Crystal Rain. Now he has published his second novel, Ragamuffin, and is completing a third, Sly Mongoose, for publication next summer.

You’ll want to hear all about it – including the surprising inspiration for his latest novel.

Be sure to also check out Tobias’ website where you can read the first 1/3 of both Crystal Rain and Raggamuffin!

Enjoy the show!

Click “Continue reading” to stream or download the show.