Categories
Innovation Productivity

And you thought printed books were not cool?

A fascinating and well priced service to create your own professional books!

Blurb

Categories
Education

MIT’s OpenCourseWare

Personally I think MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a great idea, but I’m not sure of one thing – has it made a real difference? What do you think?

MIT OpenCourseWare

Categories
Productivity

Google launches Patent search

Nice! Would the next step be to convert “mumbo jumbo” in a patent text to a simple summary?

IMHO, the quality of patents awarded by USPTO has raised serious questions and greatly undermined real novel ideas, for example, see Method of swinging on swing and Method of exercising a cat. Many more at PatentlySilly. However, there is still some hope, as the patent quality problem is well recognised and efforts are underway to address this problem, for example, see Patent review goes Wiki and Community Patent Review.

For new patents see FreshPatents.

Google Patent Search

Categories
Science Technology

Plastic Solar Cells: Cheaper ‘green’ electricity?

A new analytical technique for the generation of electricity through plastic solar cells, developed by a team led by Penn State University, was published as the cover story in this week’s issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

How Plastic Solar Cells Turn Sunlight into Electricity

Categories
Productivity Technology

Cool way to test your bandwidth

“The site allows you to select servers to ping from around the country on an interactive map and graphically displays connections as they travel with varying speeds along the way. It also lets you store results of tests for your computer and sort them by date, time, speed and distance.” Original link from Digg.

speedtest.net

Categories
Innovation Science

Wireless electricity in near future?

Finally, things are getting exciting with the possibility of wireless electricity in near future, thanks to folks at the MIT. “Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries”

Physics promises wireless power

Categories
Innovation Productivity Technology

Convert anything to anything

“Convert pretty much any format of anything to any other format. Online. Free. Without downloading anything.” Digg comments. LifeHacker mention. Update: Alternatively, Media Convert or for videos Hey!Watch, via Crunchie.

Zamzar

Categories
History India Science

NASA on Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence

I came across this interesting article on Sanskrit and its application in Artificial Intelligence. I managed to understand some aspects of author’s arguments, in part due to my basic understanding of the Sanskrit language. However, significant part of the paper requires academic investigation. Some of the figures have clearly been added to the original text and are out-of-place, for example, the figure that illustrates application of XSL transformations to XML data to generate C header and source files!

Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence

Categories
Science

0/0 = NaN!

A professor from University of Reading has received lot of skepticism for inventing ‘nullity’ – a value that defines zero divided by zero. An excerpt from a harsh but interesting critic’s blog: “Basically, he’s defined a non-solution to a non-problem.”

Nullity – the Nonsense Number

Categories
Business Science

Ten Laws of the Modern World

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes has collected a fascinating list of 10 laws of the modern world. The usual suspect (Moore’s Law) is at the top of the list, but there are several new and insightful ones. My favourite in that list is Ogilvy’s Law! What’s yours?

Ten Laws of the Modern World