Len Yabloko's List: Information technology

• The third, semantic, program is what is generally known as “the intellect”. It is imprinted throughout the educational process. It handles artefacts and makes a “map” (reality-tunnel) that can be passed on to others, even across generations. These “maps” may be illustrations, symbols, words, concepts, tools (with instructions on use transmitted verbally), theories, musical notation, etc.
• Whatever threatens to remove a person’s status is not processed by the semantic mind but through the emotional-territorial program, and is rejected as an attack on one’s ego, social role or feeling of superiority. This is simple mammalian herd-behavior, typical of perhaps a majority of the human race who have not developed their semantic mind to a useful degree.

• Now, the really great thing for users of the Gnip platform is that how Gnip collects data is mostly abstracted away.   Every end user developer or company has the option to tell Gnip where to push data that you have set up filters or have a subscription.   We also realize not everyone has an IT setup to handle push so we have always provided the option for HTTP GET support that lets people grab data from a Gnip generated URL for your filters.
• Current polled services on the platform include:   Clipmarks, Dailymotion, deviantART, diigo, Flickr, Flixster, Fotolog, Friendfeed, Gamespot, Hulu, iLike, Multiply, Photobucket, Plurk, reddit, SlideShare, Smugmug, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Vimeo, Webshots, Xanga, and YouTube

• They have made us the leader in this industry, with the most customers, the most sought-after thinkers, and the most forward-looking products.

   
   
  • API Key and Credential Management
   
  • Throttling and Quota Management
   
  • Security
   
  • Protocol Translation and Versioning
   
  • API Performance Optimization
   
  • Community Tools (Developer Portal, Documentation Management)
   
  • And much more…

• the Emotiv Epoch has already been tested as a thought-based remote-control for a spy robot, and the MindFlex has been hacked by Harcos Labs into the worst toy ever, a meditation/torture device that rewards you for keeping your mind still and shocks you for thinking.
• A non-invasive alternative to embedded electrodes is being explored by Ambient Technology in a device called the AudeoSensor. The Audeo was developed to measure energy conduction around the laryngeal muscles for controlling speech production, and uses stainless steel electrodes to read differential voltage across the skin in the front of the throat.
• Most embedded electrode research has focused on correcting behavioral and motivational problems (such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, and lack of libido) by stimulating glands in the brainstem or basal forebrain to promote fine-tuned transmitter release, typically focusing on the dopamine pathways.
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• As one might expect, when the subjects vocalized a word, the data indicated activity in the areas of the motor cortex associated with the muscles that produce speech. The auditory cortex and an area in its vicinity long believed to be associated with speech, called Wernicke’s area, were also active.
• The first team, directed by Schalk, was pursuing the more invasive ECOG approach, attaching electrodes beneath the skull. The second group, led by Mike D’Zmura, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, planned to use electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive brain-scanning technique that was far better suited for an actual thought helmet. Like ECOG, EEG relies on brain signals picked up by an array of electrodes that are sensitive to the subtle voltage oscillations caused by the firing of groups of neurons. Unlike ECOG, EEG requires no surgery; the electrodes attach painlessly to the scalp.

• In other words, the luxury of the large US market means that a startup has a reasonable chance of success by treating the symptoms of a problem rather than attempting to treat the root causes. In Europe, a startup has no choice. It must address a root cause in order to succeed.

• There will be a semantic culture if you will, that will develop from the interpretation of billions of tiny bits of information that users input into the web connecting everything, without even knowing it. And this semantic culture will not only be invisible, but will continue to evolve until what began as ‘recommendations’ will become automatic ‘decisions’ that are made for us.

• Wolfram believes that computation, rather than semantic understanding, may be the key to better search, With the computational power of Mathematica and the "paradigm for understanding" of NKS, he writee, "I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."
• What does that mean? I have to admit I have no idea. But Wolfram is far too original and important a thinker to discard it as mere argle-bargle.

• Fortuantely, UIMA is designed for parallel processing. You need to install UIMA-AS for Asynchronous Scale-out processing, an add-on to the base UIMA Java framework, supporting a very flexible scale-out capability based on JMS (Java Messaging Services) and ActiveMQ. We will also need Apache Hadoop, an open source implementation used by Yahoo Search engine. Hadoop has a "MapReduce" engine that allows you to divide the work, dispatch pieces to different "task engines", and the combine the results afterwards.