“While American soldiers get in shape stateside– with a slew of aerobic exercises, a soldier of the future could soon be seen on the battlefield. It’s called an exoskeleton and by stepping inside this robotic exterior– a soldier can easily perform feats that years ago could only be seen in science fiction movies.” – Reuters
With a plethora of blogs available on the web these days, one is often left wondering which ones to read.
An algorithm developed at Carnegie Mellon University called Cascades identifies the top 100 blogs at a given time. The algorithm can be seen in action on their project website. (via EurekAlert).
Other services, that follow popular or hottest discussions /stories in the blogosphere include Techmeme and Tailrank. Google news (my favourite) essentially does the same for traditional mainstream news sources.
For more of our favourite blogs, check the links on the sides. Needless to say, the above is not a substitute for the cool stuff you find on WastedMonkeys 🙂
Today Amazon launched an electronic reader to read books, magazines, blogs etc. on the move. 3 years in production, the look and feel gives the impression that it has been in production for 30 years without any recent updates. You can buy books via Amazon’s book store from anywhere using the inbuilt wireless technology used by mobile phones. Amazon must be hoping to replicate the revolution for books as ipod did for music. I very much doubt it due to the fact that it is far from being ‘cool’ and I find it of little use to me. But then I am not an avid reader of books.
IF, it seems impossible to do basic work you know you’re capable of, you find it hard to relax, everything seems gray and pointless, what was once fun and challenging feel stupid and annoying or perhaps the things that used to motivate or move you don’t resonate at all, you might be suffering a ‘creative burnout’. This essay points out how to identify the root cause, how to cure it and/or how to face it. [via LifeHacker]
This year recorded the biggest opening for a movie ever as Spider-Man 3 (~$60 million), biggest opening for a video game as Halo 3 (~$170 million) and now the biggest opening for a stock market IPO as China’s PetroChina with a market capitalization of $1.1 Trillion!
PetroChina Co. almost tripled on its first day of trading in Shanghai, becoming the world’s first company to be valued at $1 trillion, more than Exxon Mobil Corp. and General Electric Co. combined [next two in the rankings].
PetroChina’s Value Tops $1 Trillion, Surpassing Exxon
Related Post: World’s biggest public companies
“Google, owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, today will announce the 30-member Open Handset Alliance, which includes Sprint, T-Mobile and phone makers Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the deal isn’t public yet.” – Bloomberg
(Google stock price has risen 2% on the news today to be at the current price of $725.)
The team from Carnegie Mellon University finished first in the DARPA Urban Challenge where robotic cars were to complete a fully autonomous 60-mile journey including turns, intersections, overtaking and flat out cruising. Stanford came in second with Victor Tango in third place. MIT finished sixth. (via Scobleizer)
“India has emerged the most popular destination for British patients wanting to undergo surgery for ailments that would otherwise take months to treat in the National Health Service (NHS).”
“Several websites based in India and Britain act as a single-window facility to arrange treatment for British nationals. Many of them return home, singing praises to the quality of treatment and post-operative care they received in India.”
If you want to send files bigger than what your email client allows, have a look at the lists of tools mentioned below. From the ones mentioned there, I have tried using DropSend and would recommend it. It is a very easy tool using which you can send upto 5 files upto the size of 1GB each, per month for free.
I had the opportunity to attended the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London 3-5 October ’07. A key talk I eagerly awaited was one by Paul Graham on “The Future of Web Startups“. In his talk, Graham made a point, that to really succeed startups need to move to a hub like, and especially, Silicon Valley.
Ryan Carson, the organiser of the event, was not convinced by Graham’s claim and asserted his opinion on the stage after the talk. According to him, startups needn’t be in Silicon Valley to succeed.
This confutation was catered-to by Paul Graham in his following article/essay “Why to move to a startup hub” which in-turn spawned a debate led by Ryan Carson here and here.
According to