National Geographic has an article about the indonesian island of flores where the 18,000 year old fossilised remains of a pygmy race of 1 meter tall people. I thought I’d keep readers up to date as one of my first posts to this blog was about this very subject. (I can confirm that there are currently around 30 irregular readers of this blog, some of them aren’t even friends of mine!)
Anyway the Flores tourist authority has stated that the number of visitors has increased by 21% in 2005 over this period last year. The main attraction seems to be the site where the remains were unearthed. So if you want to play hunt the hobbit on an Indonesian island here’s a map courtesy of indo.com
Month: February 2005
I got thinking about the implications of IM-Bots when I worked for the TSSG research group in Ireland. IM-Bots are pseudo-intelligent automated IM buddys that responds to queries using greater or lesser degrees of Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and knowledge inference. One of the most famous is the Alice-Bot which uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to associate semantics (like running a program) with parsed syntax. I’ve written a paper about using IM-Bots as virtual shopping assistants which is available here
I doubt if the one of United States’ founding fathers and greatest thinkers would be too impressed with the subtle and blatant curtailing of civil liberties by the enactment of the US Patriot Act. I stumbled across the following quote of Ben Franklin’s earlier today while I was looking for something else. Wise words that the current administration could do with heeding.
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. “
–Benjamin Franklin
More information on Benjamin Franklin can be found here
Just read a great article on wired.com about Microarrays (silicon chips that light up to reveal which genes are active in a DNA sequence). These chips produce huge volumes of information that scientists have found extremely difficult to process and interpret. Enter the helping hand of s/w company Salk Institute. Top code chairman, Jack Hughes, is a paraplegic who also works as director of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation researching cures for ameliorating spinal cord damage. Top coder is making a search tool in the form of the Gene Chip Data Interface available to all researchers in this field This should enable scientists to better understand the genetic effects of spinal chord damage in particular and microarray data in general.