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Showing posts from June, 2012

!Q, a descriptive relation for emerged cognitive Qualia spaces.

I suppose at some point there will be found to be a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle between scales of "mind" (which I believe are fractal and scale in complexity with more and more integrated sensory information) and integration algorithm which can be either analog or digital or range between. The analog to h-bar being the constant interaction landscape of cognitive possibilities (qualia) emerged by variation across the other two fundamental attributes. So if I define scale of mind as  sM, and integration algorithm by iA and !Q as the invariant qualia landscape. relation will look something like sM = !QiA or sM/iA =!Q Observations: sM , will vary with dimension (orthogonal sensory inputs) as it does in living minds. Some biological minds integrate sensory dimensions humans can't experience...for example the dimension of electrostatic or magnetic field sensation that platypus and birds have respectively in addition to ones we can. This will modulate the pe...

Why Facebook over paid for Instagram by about 995 million dollars.

The announcement by Facebook that it was going to buy Instagram, recent hot startup darling of the tech media for their app. that allows people to take photos and post them to Facebook with applied image filters and chat about the photos was met by accolades showered on Zuckerberg for his wisdom. The logic was that the fast growth of Instagram showed that it was a potential  threat for Facebook, particularly in the mobile space where the app. was growing so quickly. I greeted the announcement with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. The main reasons were summarized in the thesis I put forward in this article from last year that I wrote to explain why Google created Google+ and why they didn't really care about stealing users from Facebook . I also, in a blog post from several years ago, before there was even a Google+ or Google wave... stated this: " The proof of all this consolidation is clear in the numbers, users spend incredible amounts of time on the Facebook n...

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2 ...

Using existing human and non human resources better is imperative.

A recent set of reports by the UN is casting a light on a serious problem that is accelerating with the growth of human population. In this article the problem is put plainly: "warning that the world was already running out of cheap and sources of some essential materials such as oil, copper and gold." Aside mild annoyance at their placing "oil" next to "copper and gold" as natural resources this report only underscores a trend that must attend a growing population that is moving collectively toward greater levels of affluence. Those of you who've read my articles on the need to develop a Self Healing Infrastructure (SHI) are very familiar with my solution to enable us to  decouple economic growth from the resource utilization profile of the planet. I do not believe in the long run of the next 30 years that it comes from providing jobs in a disorganized way. Rather, the efficient routing of work to be done to workers able and willing to do i...