Category Archives: Technology

Google, Apple and you: intellectual properties

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This got to be the most twisted line of thought in all of this smartphone patent war I have seen up to now in order to get to use some else inventions for free:

Google Says Some Apple Inventions Are So Great They Ought to Be Shared – John Paczkowski – News – AllThingsD.

Who gets to define what is “great” or when something is too “popular”? This is not like a 100m race with precise time measurements. History teaches us that once you set one of these “soft” standard, the standard tends to be lowered with time until it becomes meaningless.

OK, enough of Google and Apple. Every one, researchers and graduate students alike have the potential to come by a worthwhile invention. Protecting it is supposed to provide incentive to the inventors to benefit from their work and the time spawn is usually limited (contrary to the copyright which can now, in certain countries, last for decades even for works that heavily borrow from the public domain – another debate).

Invention protection through patents can be a good approach in certain situations e.g. you’ve developed something new, useful, that can be actually implemented or made, has a market large enough to potentially make money, … I also strongly believe that graduate students should get expose to intellectual property themes early during their graduate studies.

What do you think?

Evolving technology

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke

I certainly love technology. They are enablers for thing we thought impossible to perform in a reasonable amount of time just a decade ago. My children laugh at me when I tell them of my first 20 Mb drive, which was the size of a big, thick pizza box. The comparative for them are the 32 or 64 Gb thumb drive! Similarly, today cellphones are more powerful than supercomputer of the 1980’s.

The growing complexity of technology is remarkable and many technologies “evolve” at a rapid, accelerating pace. Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants constitutes a highly recommended read. The increasing complexity is illustrated for numerous technologies as function of years. Furthermore, there is an interesting discussion about the human-technology interaction and how difficult it is to anticipate the numerous failure modes (what can actually go wrong) when dealing with complex systems and trying to include fail safe measures.

 

I would also like to point out this TED talk entitled how technology evolves.

Is the 21st century class room a virtual one?

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I recently came across this excellent TED talk by Peter Norvig entilted “the 100,000-student classroom”. The popularity of online education should probably not be a big surprise. Instant knowledge, facts through online encyclopedia and so on was certainly a first step. The power of internet clearly bring with it the idea of learning when ready concept. In manufacturing, they would call it “just in time” production. A great example of this can be found in the growing popularity of the Khan Academy (see for example Let’s use video to reinvent education).

This brings numerous questions. Namely:

Will the virtual classroom be limited to tutoring in order to supplement traditional teaching or as a replacement option?

Is there still place for one on one teaching / learning?

If I look at the graduate courses I teach, they tends to be slightly different from one year to the other because of student / teacher interaction. The virtual classroom removes real-time interaction!

Maybe it will force teachers to redefine teaching as to provide a plus-value in order to get students in a dedicated room at a fix time every week for 15-17 weeks in a row (a semester)…

What do you think?

(Note added: While scanning my usual blog lists today, I found that Organizing Creativity also as a post on the virtual classroom)

Digital office part III: mobile software

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Previous installments:

Part I: Introduction and hardware

Part II: Mac Software

Part III: Mobile Software

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Father’s day gadget: from iPhone to tricorder

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If like me you grew up with the original Star-Trek and following suites, you must have some point thought that the coolest gadget of all time was the famous tricorder. Well a MIT group is bridging the gap between the tricorder and an iPhone with some cool image processing algorithms. See this Eulerian Video Magnification and in particular the movie as you scroll down.

 

One day this might be the coolest father’s day gadget (or App) 😉

Digital Office II: Mac Software

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For those who might not have read the first post in this series about the hardware side of things, please have a look: Digital Office I

Here is a list of the main software that I used regularly on the Mac as part of my digital workflow, including links to the most important one:

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