A look inside mice brains

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A team of researchers at the Stanford University, lead by Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of biology and applied physics, planted tiny probes inside mice brains to detect what were essentially mouse memories. The study was published February 10, 2013, in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

inside mice brains

Read a mouse’s mind

The experiment involved the insertion of a needlelike microscope into the hippocampus of the mice brains. The microscope detected cellular activity and broadcast digital images through a cell phone camera sensor that fit like a hat over the heads of the critters as they were running around. Over the course of a month, the scientists were able to document patterns of activity in about 1000 neurons of the mice brains where they store long-term information. To get the results, an engineered gene was injected into the mice brains so that their proteins were sensitive to calcium ions. That caused the magnified cells to light up on the computer screen in flashes of green fluorescence when the neurons were activated.

Three students, who worked on the project, have formed a startup company called Inscopix, and they plan to sell the technology to neuroscience researchers.

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More informations are available at the news website of Stanford University.

Synthetic Biology

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Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. It combines biology and engineering with a focus on Biotechnology.

Synthetic biologists focus on finding how life works (the origin of life) or how to use it to benefit society, including the approach of biology by inserting man-made DNA into a living cell and the approach of chemistry by working on gene synthesis as an extension of synthetic chemistry.

The website syntheticbiology.org, originally started by a group of students, faculty and staff from MIT and Harvard, now regroups all individuals, groups and labs from various institutions who are committed to engineering biology in an open and ethical manner. The site is hosted on OpenWetWare and can be edited by all members of the Synthetic Biology community.

An exciting synthetic biology project was recently funded succesfully on Kickstarter : Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity. A few days ago, without explanation, Kickstarter quietly altered its guidelines for project creators, introducing a new term that bans creators from giving away genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) as rewards to their online backers (see the post Kickstarter bans project creators from giving away genetically-modified organisms edited by Duncan Geere at The Verge website).

More informations about synthetic biology are available at the following links :

Kickstarter projects

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Last update : October 6, 2018

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects. It’s a crowdfunding platform for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Since the launch in 2009, more than 12 million people have pledged over 2.8 Billion dollars, funding more than 118.000 creative projects. Project creators set a funding goal and a deadline. If people like a project, they can pledge money to make it happen. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing : projects must reach their funding goals to receive any money. To date, 36% of projects have reached their funding goals. Backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to profit financially. Instead, project creators offer rewards to thank backers for their support.

A Kickstarter app for mobiles is available at the AppStore.

I am a backer for the following projects :

Kickstarter Account Page

Kickstarter Account Page with backed projects

Here is a list of further projects which I consider very interesting :

Links

Supertoy Teddy and Huggable

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Supertoy Teddy

Supertoy Teddy

Supertoy Teddy is the world’s first talking teddy with a mind of its own and the ability to hold real conversations with those who speak to it. It has been developed by Ashley Conlan (CEO of Supertoy Robotics) and Kartsen Fluegge (CEO of Pannous GmbH), the creators of the successful app Jeannie, the Siri style chatbot that has been downloaded over 3 million times on mobile devices.

Supertoy Teddy uses artificial intelligence (AI). A smartphone acts as its brawn and the internet server as its brain. Supertoy Teddy’s robotic mouth moves in synchronization to what it says and inbuilt speakers enhance the volume of its voice. Role play will be added to the Supertoy Teddy and several costumes and dresses will be sold at the online shop.

The robot’s hardware is simple: just an audio in/out interface and a motor for mouth animation. Supertoy Teddy connects via standard audio plug to an iOS or Android device. Asley Conlan suggests putting the phone inside the Supertoy for realism. The magic is in the software, which has evolved from the popular Jeannie chatbot app.

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The creators of Supertoy Teddy have started a Kickstarter campaign for crowdfunding during the funding period July 24, 2013 – August 23, 2013. I am one of the bakers of the project.

Huggable (MIT)

Huggable (MIT)

Huggable is a similar type of robotic companion that has being developed at the MIT Media Lab (Personal Robots Group) for healthcare, education, and social communication applications a few years ago. The early technical development of the Huggable was supported in part by a Microsoft iCampus grant in 2006.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing

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Last update : September 24, 2013

Crowdfunding is the application of the Crowdsourcing concept to the collection of funds through small contributions from many parties in order to finance a particular project or venture. Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

The First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing will be held November 7-9, 2013 in Palm Springs, California, USA.

Crowdfunding is alternately called crowd financing, equity crowdfunding or crowd-sourced fundraising.

An early precursor of the crowdfunding business model was Praenumeration, a common business practice in the 18th century book trade in Germany.

Crowdfunding is not only used to fund a startup company (equity-based crowdfunding), but also to create artworks such as music, theater, dance, films, literature and technology.

Crowdfunding platforms bring together the project initiator and the crowd. They create the necessary organizational systems and conditions for resource integration among all the players to take place. There are over 450 crowdfunding platforms with fundamental differences in the services provided. A comparison of crowd funding services is available at Wikipedia.

Some examples of crowdfunding platforms are listed below :

Since soliciting investments from the general public is often illegal in most countries, unless the opportunity has been filed with an appropriate securities regulatory authority, traditional crowdfunding platforms treat funds as donations. In the U.S. the crowdfunding exemption movement has been successful in 2012 with the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act or JOBS Act,  a law intended to encourage funding of small businesses by easing various securities regulations.

In the past capital for startup companies has mainly been provided by business angels (also known as angel investors), in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. An increasing number of angel investors organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share research and pool their investment capital, as well as to provide advice to their portfolio companies.

Some angel networks in Luxembourg and the Greater Region are listed hereafter :

  • Luxembourg Business Angel Network (LBAN)
  • Seed4Start
  • EBAN (pan-European representative for the early stage investor community)

Here are some links to selected crowdfunding projects :

RoboRoach : control a living insect

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RoboReach image

RoboR0ach image

RoboRoach is is the world’s first commercially available cyborg. Cockroaches use the antennas on their head to navigate the world around them. When these antennas touch a wall, the cockroach turns away from the wall. The antenna of a cockroach contains neurons that are sensitive to touch and smell. These neurons convey information back to the brain using electricity in the form of spikes. To control cockroaches, microstimulation (neurotechnology) can be used by sending small electrical pulses directly to the neurons of the cockroach antennas via a backpack. A learning kit, called RoboReach kit, has been created by neuroscientists, engineers and educators of the University of Michigan. The cockroach undergoes a short surgery in which wires are placed inside the antenna. Once the insect recovers, a backpack is temporarily placed on its back.

RoboRoach

RoboRoach photo

Tim Marzullo and Greg Gage of the University of Michigan founded Backyard Brains, a small company that makes neuroscience educational equipment and experiments for students of all ages. Backyard Brains terminated succesfully in July 2013 a Kickstarter campaign to support the RoboRoach Kit.

Of course, there are underlying ethical questions attached to such experimentation involving living things. People don’t always recognize insects as valuable life forms, but some critics are already speaking out against RoboRoach. Animal rights group PETA has spoken of the project as retrogressive and morally dubious.

In defence of the cockroach: RoboRoach Kickstarter ignores ethics is the title of a contribution posted by Liat Clark in wired.co.uk.

Backyard Brain has responded to criticisms with this statement on its website:
Our experiments are not philosophically perfect and without controversy; however, we believe the benefits outweigh the cost due to the inaccessibility of neuroscience in our current age.

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Backyard Brains sells other products in their online shop : Spikerbox, EMG Spikerbox, Completo, 3D manipulator, RoachScope.

W3C : World Wide Web Consortium

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Last update : June 30, 2014

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.

The W3C Team includes 85 people working from locations across the globe. W3C is hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT/CSAIL) in the United States, at the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) in Sophia-Antipolis in France, at the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) in Japan and at the Beihang University in China.

Most W3C work revolves around the standardization of Web technologies. To accomplish this work, W3C follows processes that promote the development of high-quality standards based on the consensus of the community. The W3C is founding member of OpenStand (The Modern Paradigm for Standards), an open, collective movement to radically improve the way people around the globe develop, deploy and embrace technologies for the benefit of humanity.

W3C standards define an Open Web Platform for application development that has the unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, powered by vast data stores, that are available on any device. HTML5 will be the cornerstone for this platform, combined with other technologies including CSS, SVG, WOFF, the Semantic Web stack, XML, Javascript and a variety of APIs.

The W3C standards are grouped as follows :

eGovernment (Better Government Through Better Use of the Web) is also a topic at W3C.

A comprehensive documentation for developers about the Open Web Platform is available at the community-run source Web Platform Docs (currently in alpha version).

W3C standards are written by temporary working groups formed by W3C members and invited experts. Membership in W3C is open to all types of organizations (including commercial, educational and governmental entities) and individuals. For Luxembourg, annual membership fees vary between 1.950 and 68.000 EUR.

Currently there are about 50 working groups listed at the W3C website. There are also special interest groups (forum for the exchange of ideas) and coordination groups (to manage dependencies and facilitates communication with other groups).

W3C has chartered two permanent groups :

  • The Technical Architecture Group (TAG) documents and builds consensus around principles of Web architecture.
  • The Advisory Board (AB) provides ongoing guidance to the Team on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution.

To meet the needs of a growing community of Web stakeholders, W3C has created Community and Business Groups. Community Groups enable anyone to socialize their ideas for the Web at the W3C for possible future standardization. Business Groups provide companies anywhere in the world with access to the expertise and community needed to develop open Web technology. New W3C Working Groups can then build mature Web standards on top of best of the experimental work, and businesses and other organizations can make the most out of W3C’s Open Web Platform in their domain of interest.

Community Groups are designed to promote innovation and to lower barriers to individual participation. Anyone may participate without fees in community groups. Currently there are about 130 community groups. I am mainly interested in the following community groups :


In the past some web communities were created outside of the W3C, with similar goals. One example is the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) which was founded in 2004 by individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software in response to the slow development of W3C web standards and W3C’s decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies. On March 7th, 2007, the W3C publicly announced that they are restarting an HTML specification effort. A W3C HTML working group was created and stated : “The HTML Working Group will actively pursue convergence with WHATWG, encouraging open participation within the bounds of the W3C patent policy and available resources”. (see WHATWG Blog)

Influential People

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Last update : July 23, 2013

Social media are changing at such a pace that attracting vast numbers of likes and followers are no longer enough to stand out from the crowd. The challenge is now to identify key influential people.

Time : 100 Influential People

Time : 100 Influential People

First published in 1999, Time publishes since 2008 each year the 100 most influential people in the world (see Wikipedia). The books that inspired the Tech’s most influential people are listed on the web site Business Insider. 55 Speeches by Influential People of the 21st Century are collected on the Trendhunter web site. The 20 Most Influential People in Social Media are presented on Income Diary. Forbes published the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers in 2013. Tom’s Hardware listed the 10 most influential people in IT of 2011. And there are more and more such lists.

Klout (The standard for Influence) aims to quantify social media presence and makes its own list of influential people. Kred Influence Measurement, or Kred, is a similar tool launched by Jodee Rich (see Wikipedia).

The following list shows links to websites with statistics about the top users of social networks :

More informations about social influence are available at the web sites listed below :

Divide the Web Timeline in nine epochs

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Last update : January 25, 2022

In many domains like cosmic evolution, big history, art history, timelines are segmented in well defined epochs. As changes happen gradually over time, it’s not absolutely necessary to link the dates where one epoch ends and another begins to a precise event.  A Web Timeline should reflect the main trends and have a sufficient granularity to cope with the main changes in Web technology. A Web Timeline should take into account that the evolution of the Web is not linear, but exponential and comply to Ray Kurzweil‘s Law of Accelerating Returns.

I am keen to propose in this contribution a division of the Web Timeline in nine epochs, from Web 0 to Web 4.0. I am not aware that a global and comprehensive timeline division exist already for the Internet or the World Wide Web. If anyone else has already proposed this somewhere, I would be happy to give him credit.

Web 1.0

There is a common agreement that the Web (Web 1.0) started on December 25, 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server via the Internet. This was the start of the World Wide Web (www). I like the term read-only web for this early Web, starting in 1990.

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in late 2004. Web 2.0 describes web sites that use technology beyond the static pages with minimal linking and search capabilities of earlier web sites. Wikipedia defines the Web 2.0 as web sites that allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. Other names for the Web 2.0 are social web, participative web, personalized web. I prefer the term collaborative web for the epoch starting early 2005 until end 2009 (5 years), even if Tim Berners-Lee argues that the Web was supposed to be all along a collaborative medium and that the Web 2.0 is nothing else as jargon.

Web 1.5

In my opinion something is missing between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The evolution from the read-only web to the collaborative web was smooth, gradually and rich in events. I suggest to introduce an intermediate epoch, the read-write web or interactive web, for the period 2000 to 2004 (5 years). Let’s call it Web 1.5 as it was coined by Ardell DellaLoggia in her post WEB 2.0 vs. WEB 1.5 and Blogwars, published in February 2008.

Web 3.0

John Markoff, senior writer for The New York Times, popularized the term Web 3.0 in late 2006. Web 3.0 is where we found ourselves in 2013. Definitions of Web 3.0 vary greatly. I join the numerous authors considering that semantic standards are the outstanding features of the current Web 3.0. Nova Spivack is a renowned expert of the semantic web and the founder or investor of several ventures related to semantic web applications. He promotes the concept of the stream – the next phase of the Web. He compares streams as something new emerging on top of the Web, just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet. Nova Spivack claims that influence becomes more important than relevance in the future. Daniel Burrus thinks that Web 3.0 is the 3D Web. I am a great fan of 3D Web and virtual worlds, but I don’t agree with this view.

Web 2.5

As for Web 1.5, I think we need an intermediate epoch between the milestones 2.0 and 3.0. Jeff Sayre came up with Web 2.5 in his post What is Web 2.5?. He said it is somewhere between the pathetically overused Web 2.0 and the mystical, yet-to-be-realized Web 3.0 realm. In my opinion Web 2.5 should refer to the emergence of tablets and mobile devices. It’s the beginning of the ubiquitous web with responsive design. My proposal is to call it the mobile web and to cover the period from early 2010 to mid 2012.

Web 0.5

Internet began evolving a few decades before the Web emerged. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure. To include the Internet network history in the Web timeline, I suggest to use the term of Web 0.5 to designate this epoch. A few people have already used Web 0.5 by back-construction from Web 2.0. As in software versioning, the number 0.5 indicates that the product has not yet the full features. It’s a sort of precursor of the Web. There is no doubt that the start of the Internet (network) epoch was on October 29, 1969. At this date, Leonard Kleinrock supervised graduate students, among them Vint Cerf, who transferred the first message on ARPANET from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Stanford Research Institute.

Web 0

Internet has a pre-history before the first message was transmitted on the Arpanet. I call it the Web 0. The network epoch took 20 years (1970 – 1989), the Web 1.0 has a duration of 10 years (1990 – 1999). The Web 1.5 and Web 2.0 both lasted 5 years (2000 – 2004, 2005 – 2009). Taking into account that the web is changing faster and faster and that it’s evolution is exponential, the time period of the Internet pre-history can be set equal to 40 years (1930 -1969). This way the Big Bang of the Internet is  back-dated to 1930. At this time, Vannevar Bush developed the differential analyzer at MIT. It was the most powerful computing machine prior to the electronic digital computer. Later, Vannevar Bush became one of the pioneers of the Internet. The pre-history of the Internet ends in late 1969 when the first computers exchanged messages through the Arpanet.

Beyond Web 3.0

The Web is moving towards voice driven applications, natural language search, location awareness and help engines. Virtual assistants and Global Brain are key concepts for the upcoming epochs of the Web. I know that forecasting the future of the Web is very speculative. Internet evolution is a topic at various panels organized by the Internet Society and other institutions.

I would like to share my own views about the evolution of the Web by extending the Web Timeline with the two additional epochs Web 3.5 (early 2015 – mid 2017) and Web 4.0 (mid 2017 – end 2019).

Web 3.5

In my opinion the term intelligent web is the best common denominator to group the features of the next epoch of the web, following the semantic web. Servers with weak Artifical Intelligence (AI) will be able to think and make decisions with regard to user searches and content. They will be able to give suggestions based on educated studies of how we live and what we want or need.

Web 4.0

According to Daniel Burrus, Web 4.0 is about the ultra-intelligent electronic agent. I go a step further. The next level of intelligence is awareness. Nova Spivack argues that machines will never be conscious and he set a long bet on the arena for accountable predictions : By 2050 no synthetic computer nor machine intelligence will have become truly self-aware (ie. will become conscious). I think awareness is an information process and I predict that Web 4.0 will be the conscious web.

Resulting web timeline with nine epochs

It’s now time to put the different epochs together in a chronological order. The following table shows the result :

No Version Time period Duration Epoch
1 Web 0 1930 – 1969 40 years Internet pre-history
2 Web 0.5 1970 – 1989 20 years Internet (network) history
3 Web 1.0 1990 – 1999 10 years read-only web
4 Web 1.5 2000 – 2004 5 years interactive web
5 Web 2.0 2005 – 2009 5 years collaborative web
6 Web 2.5 2010 – mid 2012 2.5 years mobile web
7 Web 3.0 mid 2012 – 2014 2.5 years semantic web
8 Web 3.5 2015 – mid 2017 2.5 years intelligent web
9 Web 4.0 mid 2017 – 2019 2.5 years conscious web

You may ask what happens in 2020? Are we close to the singularity at that date? I think it’s too speculative today to give an answer!

Conclusions

The analyser of my WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast tells me that my contribution scores 67.9 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered OK to read. Thats fine! Another advise of the plugin is to add an appropriate image. Well, here it is.

Divide the Web Timeline in nine epochs

Web Timeline segmented in nine epochs

The next proposal of the plugin is to specify the meta description and to increase the keyword density. Done! The plugin seems struggling to become my personal assistent!

I will continue to work on this Web Timeline Project which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Luxembourg License. In a next post I would like to propose one innovator which I consider the most influential for each epoch. In the meantime, your comments are welcome.

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

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L’artiste lyonnais Lionel Stocard a invité au vernissage de son exposition “Les téléphones Importables” au PostMusée à Luxembourg le vendredi 12 juillet 2013. Parmi ses 90 ‘téléphones importables’ (importables car trop volumineux et/ou trop lourds) créés par l’artiste, Post Luxembourg montre une sélection de 10 sculptures et 10 tableaux.

Claude Strasser CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Claude Strasser, CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Après ses études d’architecture intérieure et d’arts plastiques, Lionel Stocard se consacre entièrement à la création plastique et sonore autour de son sujet de prédilection, le rêve. Très inspiré par la musique méditative, c’est au travers de ses toiles, ses sculptures, sa musique et ses installations sonores qu’il s’exprime. Sonorités mouvantes, notes défilantes, les installations de Lionel Stocard visent à bouleverser le mode d’écoute d’une pièce musicale par le déplacement physique des sources sonores dans l’espace.

Vernissage de l'exposition "les téléphones importables " de Lionel Stocard

Vernissage de l’exposition “les téléphones importables ” de Lionel Stocard

À l’heure de la communication à outrance, de l’invasion planétaire du téléphone portable, Lionel Stocard invite à repenser notre rapport à l’objet et sa fonction en créant des téléphones “importables”. Ces machines à communiquer, peintes ou sculptées, lourdes, encombrantes et peu pratiques fonctionnent réellement. Les Importables sont des objets rares dans un monde envahi par la technologie. Du téléphone fixe ils gardent l’électronique, pour le reste ils nous obligent à ne pas quitter l’imaginaire qui nous aide à anticiper et à réfléchir en dehors du prêt à penser.

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard