I don’t want to continue moaning about bonuses given to CEO’s, but this is too good a summary of the role of money as a motivator: I like the cartoons, because they contrast so well with the gravity of the message, but if you want the more serious and longer version: there’s a TEDTalk by [...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
CEO, Politician, Boss: Are You Listening?
Posted in Science, Society on 21/05/2012 | Leave a Comment »
Science Plus Fiction Equals Reality
Posted in Science, Technology on 19/05/2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a fan of SF literature, so I can affirm that there are many stories where a (human) brain is directly coupled to a machine. I’m sure there were some people around, even 50 years ago, who believed that such a coupling was possible. To me, it was fiction, until proven otherwise. During the last [...]
Robots That Fly And Cooperate
Posted in Science, Technology on 07/03/2012 |
The small and autonomous flying robots – quadrotors – of the University of Pennsylvania have already scored hits on Youtube. During a recent TED2012 talk, professor Vijay Kumar neatly summarizes the state of the art achieved by his robots and his students (of course). To top off his presentation he shows 9 quadrotors playing a [...]
Fantastic News For Science Lovers
Posted in Science, Society, Technology on 01/11/2011 |
On October 26th, 2011, the Royal Society announced “that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes thefirst ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online“. What that means is that you will be able to read the orginal publication of papers by Charles Darwin, Bejamin Franklin, James Maxwell, and many others. Just [...]
Wanna See A Chickenosaurus?
Posted in Science on 14/10/2011 |
Well, if you do want to see a chickenosaurus (I do, yes!) you’ll have to wait. Chickenosauri don’t exist – yet. But Jack Horner is going to try and make one (or more ;-) – read all about in Wired’s article ‘How to Hatch a Dinosaur‘. Jack Horner is a well-known paleontologist, working at Montana State [...]
Here’s an extract from an interesting economics study: Therefore, it is not the competition but profit maximisation that drives the iPhone’ s assembly to China. An interesting hypothetical scenario is one where Apple had all iPhones assembled in the US. Assuming that the wage of American workers is ten times as high as those of [...]
Pretty Impressive For A Bunch Of Plastic Blocks
Posted in Science, Technology on 13/12/2010 |
I wrote about the (impressive) Antikythera mechanism in August. Now here is the Lego version ;-)
Let’s call it the “word of the period since the previous word of the week”: whiffletree. What’s that? Rather than point you to the Wikipedia I present a video from “the Engineer Guy”: I still remember the IBM Selectric that my mother and I used to type my masters thesis in 1980-1981: such a typewriter [...]
In the course of September the output from our solar panels passed the mark of 2000 KWh – I have a separate page with detailed numbers on our solar energy production. The installation was supposed to deliver around 2,500 KWh per year. I’m not convinced we’ll make that number, but it’s too soon for conclusions. [...]
No Miracle, Just Physics!
Posted in Science on 12/09/2010 |
Say you’re watching a soccer game, and one of the players scores a goal in a way that seems to defy the rules of flight as applied to a ball. A miracle? No, just physics – even if it can be the kind of physics that hadn’t been discovered yet. The BBC News site explains [...]
The BBC has launched a website that allows us to compare the size of (big) events, places or things with a geographical region of your choice: BBC Dimensions. It is indeed quite impressive to see how big the Chernobyl radiation cloud really was, or how small the ancient city of Rome. I hope the BBC [...]
Understatement Of The Week
Posted in Science on 17/08/2010 |
Says Matt Ford, on Ars Technica: “Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, is odd even by quantum mechanical standards” (that’s the understatement, of course). I hardly understand quantum mechanics, let alone QCD – but his article on “Reexamining nothing: is the vacuum of space really empty?” is clear enough and [...]
I’m still shaking after reading this statistical analysis of Boobquake… But I think the conclusion says it all: “… perhaps to take the Booquake (sic) seriously at all is to take it too seriously. Maybe instead of refreshing the United States Geological Survey’s website, we should have been enjoying the view, or participating, as the [...]
Here’s a little gem: The surprising science of motivation: Dan Pink on TED.com. If you don’t want to spend 18 minutes listening to a good speaker, just remember the essence of his message: “Financial incentives are a bad motivator for anything other than bandwork – autonomy, mastery and purpose work a lot better!” And don’t let [...]
Will There Be A Global Culture?
Posted in Science, Society, Software Development on 26/01/2010 |
Now here’s an interesting discussion: The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail. In the words of the author: “it’s arguable that PDI (ie. the Power Distance Index) differential is the one, single, leading cause that relates to how providers and buyers have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye during the outsourcing process“. It is well known that cultural [...]
