t h o u g h t s ' n ' e s s a y s
Today I was reading in "The Society of Mind". I browsed through the final chapters, when I tried to imagine, what a simulation of the smallest pieces of our brain would look like. Minsky kept talking about AIs and neurons, and the simulation of each part, when two ideas came to me.The first thing was, to imagine a human brain completely simulated through software or hardware. For the design they would need to have a model, that would be designed. And that model would have to be the brain of a human being, not an...
Thinking about what intelligence actually is, made me firstly think of what it is not: everything that we yell a heartily "stupid!" at. Apparently the boy in the school for the gifted that pushes on the door with the sign "pull" must be stupid. But why do we think so? Because we think that we know what he tries to do. Because when we see a school, a pupil and a door, we assume that the student wants to get inside. Failing that task, even though a sign is there to help him, makes us laugh at him.But could you imagine...
Hello Jeff,I've read your book some time ago, and saw your speech on HTM today. In your speech you said something like "well, hierarchies are out there in the world, everyone knows that". I've learned to look twice, when someone takes something as given or trivial in a scientific speech. Why do we assume they are given? It is my opinion that we take structures like hierarchies or constant motion on the dimension of time as given (as "causes"), because they are a fundamental part of how our brains work. If we'd try...
Apparently this blog and my thinking is stuck on the topic of Abraham Maslows Hierarchy of needs. So I want to examine what is the root behind this hierarchy, and how it can be seen in a more abstract way. I took a close look on the hierarchy, and wondered: What kind of perspective does the creator of this hierarchy had.It is striking that it is developed for human beings, but how does maslow see human beings? The physiological level sees the human as a lifeform. The safety level assures this lifeform is dedicated...
Today I thought once more about my computer(s). They play a very important role, because you can do almost everything with them, yet you don't really need them, because for 99% of what you do, you also have a classic variant of doing it, without need of a computer. But what is it, that the computer means to me, and what do I mean to the computer?I'm the administrator of my computer. I look that it gets energy, that it is cleaned and cooled, and when things break down or are outdated I replace them. I tidy the data...
Change is a basic need for the human brain. It needs changes in its surroundings, to be able to learn. And it needs to learn, in order to adapt to new situations. And adaptation is necessary to survive. Security is good, but boring, and boredom can be only broken by change. Change is possible every year, every day, every minute - in all dimensions. Think of all the moments that changed human history, in less than a second! How vast was the expansion of the universe after the first second of its existence! Remember...
One of the most important things in economy is to make predictions about the future. This does not only hold for speculating at the stock market, but also is day to day business for fiscal politics, company development, trend scouts, entrepreneurship, education plans, research funding, climate observation and hundreds of other fields. Some even state, that making predictions on the basis of experiences is the key factor for higher intelligence and complex cognitive abilities in the human brain.The problem with guessing...
As Brad observed quite nicely in this post, ebay has a problem with its rating system. Well, actually not only does ebay, but all websites who use them do. The root lies in different behaviour of users...
When you talk about wiki, everybody thinks mainly of wikipedia, wikimedia, wikibooks, wikinews and the other projects. They all focus on the article-part itself, and forget the power of the structure a wiki offers. For giving a wiki a more semantic touch, as is proposed for the web 3.0, you don't necessarily need to implement new software features. You can do it with what you have already. But a change in the way of thinking about wikis is needed to do that. I want to outline some ideas for new ideas of realizing...
Ever been on Google Website for Searching something? Have you noticed how 1998ish it looks? Ever wondered why you have to type complicated terms with hyphens in a form field as if there was no 21st century? Are you one of the many who thinks that Google has grown a monopoly that needs some serious competitors? I think the time has come for some new steps in search engine developments. If you can't improve the database and it's indexes anymore, you always can improve the communication between humans and machines...
As it goes for innovation, I want to bring my blog to a new level in the next year, too. So here is what I did: I opened a poll, for you to tell on which fields you want to read more. I'm pretty keen on thinking and developing new ideas, but the more feedback I get, the more productive I am. I also want you to comment on my posts not via e-mail, icq or in person, but right here in this blog, below the entry you just read itself. Don't be shy, I make a lot of mistakes, and only you can help me find them. I can learn...
When you look at any larger city in the western world from above, most of the time you see the same pattern over and over again. You have blocks, streets, sidewalks and train tracks. The most important features are the roads and streets, they divide a city into a lot of blocks. Sidewalks are between the roads and the blocks, sharing space with the street. The wideness of the streets correlates with the size of the blocks it separates. Most of the time they have lines of parking spaces for cars. Blocks are a bunch...
Nowadays everybody has them, small little devices accessible by USB, to store data on. Some have functionality for playing mp3s too, but that's it. So whenever I want to exchange data with a flash drive, I have to lend or exchange it. But who wants to give away a device he paid for, and wants to keep using without pausing?My little idea is a device with two or more USB-Slots, that can transfer files from one to the other. So if you want to exchange files, you can just stick your and your friends usb flash memory...
Ever wondered what is the best way to categorize your music into different folder with no more than 15 artists per category in a strict hierarchy like your harddisk? Let me tell you, it is impossible to find a system that works, unless you go for alphabetic systems. I've tried several approaches. I sorted by genre, by time, by mood, by instruments but nothing ever works, and when i search for something, i always end up searching around not knowing in which folder I put this band in.So what I have in mind is a website...
Itaru Mimura from Hitachi Ltd. presents in this paper the problems that could be solved with introducing the current technologies of IPv6, RFID and sensor networks on a broad scale. And it shows the possibilities that are opened far beyond the problem-solving itself. It talks about our homes, about mobility, logistics, agriculture, industry, security, traffic, convenience and a lot more. But it also tells us, that this is not science-fiction, but could be introduced any day - because, look at the date, it's three...
How often have we tried to search for something, and then stumbled across thousands of search results with the same word but a different meaning. The only chance to get rid off these is by using exclusion terms or more keywords of the same field of interest. But similar to my idea of wikipedia-enhanced translation support software, search engines could also make use of the huge knowledge database in the wikipedia. Not only could searched keywords be tagged with language, but also with a specific lemma or category...
One very amazing thing I have seen as a kid, was when I visited a friend of mine who had a very fancy stereo, and everytime he used the remote to alter volume, the dial button would turn itself. Although...
A few years ago the hype-word on the internet was P2P. Everything that was realised in a one-server-many-clients fashion before, suddenly started to introduce new protocols and applications to distribute the heavy load at the bottlenecks of the internet. So what we have now is distributed downloads and streaming techniques, but most of them still rely on certain servers distributing the basic information to get things going. So what has been distributed with P2P is not the access to the content, but the large data...
Immer auf dem neuesten Stand.
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