Motormen working the Brooklyn-Manhattan line will remain on board as a token gesture to humanity’s fading relevance, and as way of placating Luddites worried about some sinister runaway HAL train making a break for New Jersey. The “Communications Based Train Control” [CBTC] will kick in tomorrow, (theoretically) enabling NYC Transit to relieve overcrowding by running trains closer together than the current signal system allows.
the first step to destroy the MTA unions. watch service improve overnight. the rest of the nyc subway still runs on a control system that is 100 years old.
Maybe we should let banks fail. Clearly they are not any good at this money thing either.
But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country of $27m. The man worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in 24 transactions to accounts that he controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. The conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.
If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25m a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.
That banking involves constant reminders of money also may weaken “the pull of morality,” perhaps making some bankers more inclined to be unethical. Banker identity itself encourages dishonesty. In an experiment involving employees of a large international bank, the experimenters found evidence that when “their professional identities as bank employees [was] rendered salient to them” (they were asked questions about their professional background in the banking industry), more of them [became] dishonest, cheating in reporting the results of coin tosses so as to increase their monetary payoffs than was the case with people from various other professions — making those other professional identities salient did not increase dishonesty. The experimenters also found that bankers whose banker identity had been made salient to them — and bankers most likely to have cheated — were more apt to agree that social status was “primarily determined by financial success.”
2015-08-15: 4 ka Banksters
Not sure whether I should feel ecstatic how much we knew 4 ka ago, or depressed that we haven’t moved past: banksters are still a thing.
“But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 BC — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few 100 traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. 10Ks of these records remain. One economist would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4000-year-old community.
“The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.
“It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods — silver, tin, textiles — transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than 10 years. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.”
It took Navinder Singh Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50M. Stuck in London’s Wandsworth prison, wracked with anxiety and unable to sleep, the realization dawned on the man dubbed the “Flash Crash Trader” as slowly as spring turned to summer outside the barred window of his jail cell.
The trauma of the past few weeks had been difficult to process. On April 20, 2015, the slight, doe-eyed 36-year-old had dozed off peacefully in the same suburban bedroom he’d slept in since he was a boy. The next day he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was charged with 22 counts of fraud and market manipulation carrying a maximum sentence of 380 years.
Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.
We don’t have sense organs for data. Thanks to efforts such as Tim Berner-Lee’s all of this knowledge has become available online. Could we evolve a 6th sense that would give us access to meta-information that may help us make the right decisions? When you go to supermarket and you look at all the different kinds of toilet papers, you don’t pull out your cell phone to look for which brand is the most eco-friendly. Pattie is wearing web-camera, a battery-powered projection system with mirror. It lets you walk up to any surface (including your hand) and interact with the projected interface. It responds to his gestures. If you hold your hands like you are taking a photo, the camera takes a photo, and then when you go back to the office, you can project all your photos and sort through them using natural gestures. She showed a projection of a phone keypad on her palm and dialed a number to make a call. She shows a video of a guy looking at products in a supermarket. It projects a green, yellow, or red dot on a product, telling you whether or not it’s eco-friendly (or whatever criteria you set up). If you look at a book, it’ll project the Amazon rating on the book.
i ignored this when i read about the 6th sense bla bla, but it is genuinely interesting. could we overlay our perception of the world with a sense for data?
Researchers have produced a ground-breaking new material, graphane, which has been derived from graphene. What is huge: 1. Graphene has already has a lot of great properties. Strongest material. Very conductive. 2. Now graphene can be chemically modified to tune the properties even more. Making something highly conductive and highly insulating means all kinds of electrical devices are possible 3. This is opening the door to even more chemical modification. 4. Graphene has already been turned into proof of concept liquid crystal display devices (single pixel) and quantum dots and transistors
Materials science rarely gets the respect it deserves. We really should all bow before these people. They make modern civilization. 2013-03-25: Graphene is nearly here.
A 10000 Farad Supercapacitor is powerful enough to power a Semi Truck while being the size of a paperback novel. Tesla promised to get the price of lithium batteries down to $150 / kWh by 2020, our current cost estimated for this type of graphene based supercapacitor is about $100 / kWh today and we should be able to cut this pricing in half by the end of 2015
2013-07-16: Graphene is one of my bets for most impactful technology of the 21th century.
A new form of Carbon : Grossly warped ‘nanographene’ : The new material consists of multiple identical pieces of “grossly warped graphene,” each containing exactly 80 carbon atoms joined together in a network of 26 rings, with 30 hydrogen atoms decorating the rim. Because they measure slightly more than a nanometer across, these individual molecules are referred to generically as “nanocarbons.”
Odd-membered-ring defects such as these not only distort the sheets of atoms away from planarity, they also alter the physical, optical, and electronic properties of the material.
2015-02-27: A kind of moore’s law for graphene. If you can convince enough of the industry that the roadmap is real, it becomes real due to all the investment it triggers
In an open-access paper published today in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale, more than 60 academics and industrialists lay out a science and technology roadmap for graphene, related 2-dimensional crystals, other 2d materials, and hybrid systems based on a combination of different 2d crystals and other nanomaterials.
The roadmap covers the next 10 years and beyond, intended to guide the research community and industry toward the development of products based on graphene and related materials.
The new roll-to-roll manufacturing process described by his team addresses the fact that for many proposed applications of graphene and other 2-D materials to be practical, “you’re going to need to make km2 of it, repeatedly and in a cost-effective manner.”
50cm / min is starting to get interesting. 2016-01-07:
Researchers found a way to incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene into spider silk. “We measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa and a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa. This is the highest toughness modulus for a fiber, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibres (e.g. Kelvar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers.”
The use of graphene as an additive can give mechanical and electrical benefits to composite materials, making them multifunctional. In a novel fermentation method, Graphene Flagship researchers have developed graphene-containing rubber foams with unusual mechanical and electrical behaviors: when stretched, the composite foams expand and become more conductive. These unexpected properties could be promising for use in smart filters and medical devices.
Alliance Rubber intends to help determine exactly how this super-material could be used in its products. The partnership will explore potential uses for graphene-infused rubber bands for many other characteristics.
Graphene-rubber bands could act as bar codes for produce in grocery stores
Heat-sensitive bands which change color depending on the temperature.
Graphene and carbon nanotubes are undoubtedly the materials of the future. In their perfect form they are the strongest materials that are known to exist, with thermal conductivity among the highest of known materials, and even superconducting electrical properties. However, defects in the lattice structure cause significant decreases in these physical properties; and so quality and purity are of paramount importance. On top of this it is very difficult to make continuous sheets more than a couple of millimeters long, and even harder to wrangle this atomically thin layer into real-world applications. We recommend paying attention to companies that are developing methods to produce graphene and CNTs in larger sizes and for lower costs. And we will be tracking companies that show themselves to be successful at leveraging today’s low-quality graphene flakes to improve existing products, or to develop new capabilities for applying this material in novel ways.
An allotrope is a substance with a defined structure that’s made up of only one element, but differs from another form of the same pure element. Graphite (familiar as pencil “lead”) is a famous allotrope of carbon, and it has the same infinite-stacked-sheets-of-atoms structure. Single isolated sheets, known as graphene, were (famously) isolated a few years ago, and these single-atom-thick are different enough that most people consider them a different allotrope than even graphite, which name is used for the bulk material. So what if you took a structure like graphene, the flat sheet of 6-membered rings, and made a flat sheet of buckyballs instead? That has now been prepared and named “graphullerene”.
The story of a blind blues musician’s journey to Tuva to compete in a national throat singing competition.
awesome
“This was the highlight of my recent trip to Vladivostok, Russia, where the film GENGHIS BLUES won the Governor’s Prize at the Pacific Meridian Film Festival. It features Tuvan throat-singer ONDAR and the voice of [Nobel laureate and physicist] Richard Feynman. I hope you enjoy it.”
awesome! it even pimps the lonely planet transsiberian railways guide book 🙂
Gregor J. Rothfuss 