When Lori Walters heard that the future of the iconic TWA Flight Center at JFK airport was up in the air—given that the Eero Saarinen-designed landmark from 1962 was being eyed for redevelopment—she acted quickly. A historian and researcher at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation & Training, Walters and her team at ChronoPoints use three-dimensional terrestrial laser scanning to document historic buildings. The scanning process results in highly detailed digital models that can eventually be incorporated into educational programming about the structures. While the terminal, beloved during its prime and even to this day (even though it sits unused), had long been on Walters’s mind, she said news of the plan to convert it into a hotel caused her to bump it up to the top of her scanning queue.
“Last week, Mapbox, a map development company based in Washington, D.C., announced that it has raised some $52.55 million in Series B funding, a sum CEO Eric Gunderson called the biggest ever for a mapping company. Mapbox doesn’t exactly make maps, though. It builds towers of software that organize sets of geo-spatial data for other kinds of businesses—real estate, transportation, agriculture, government, smartphone apps.” Read more
“It has taken time for neural networks, initially conceived 50 years ago, to become accepted parts of information technology applications. After a flurry of interest in the 1990s, supported in part by the development of highly specialized integrated circuits designed to overcome their poor performance on conventional computers, neural networks were outperformed by other algorithms, such as support vector machines in image processing and Gaussian models in speech recognition.” Read more
A team of bioengineers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), led by Ali Khademhosseini, PhD, and Nasim Annabi, PhD, of the Biomedical Engineering Division, has developed a new protein-based gel that, when exposed to light, mimics many of the properties of elastic tissue, such as skin and blood vessels. …
Posted in space
Posted in futurism, transhumanism
I’m excited to see transhumanism getting this broadly out there in major media. This 4-minute interview is the Financial Times “Video of the Day”, and has also been picked up by AOL, MSN, Nasdaq news, and Toshiba news, among others:http://video.ft.com/4332303826001/The-case-for-transhumanism/world and http://www.ft.com/fastft/353931/firstft-mario-brothers-beats
Google, as a search engine, had built a fine business by “indexing” all of these documents and making them searchable. The company was built on a principle of centralization: If you take the chaotic Web and bestow order upon it, merge it into a single consolidated index, make it make sense, you can make users very, very happy. And upon that index, and that shared happiness, and the willingness of some users to click on targeted advertising, Google could construct a tremendous enterprise. An empire, if you will. Except empires are not traditionally constructed from indexing documents. But maps are.
