Ideatrotter

2 days ago

Do you want to know how that applicant you just interviewed will actually perform on the job? Check out her Facebook profile.

That’s the advice of a new study from the Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University. The researchers recruited a group of four Facebook-savvy human resources professionals and students to evaluate the Facebook profiles of 56 users. The four perused each of the profiles for about 10 minutes each before grading them according to the so-called Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism).

Six months later, the researchers compared the evaluations of the 56 users’ work supervisors and found a strong correlation for traits including intellectual curiosity, agreeability and conscientiousness. The evalauations are, of course, subjective, but job seekers shouldn’t necessarily worry that they need to clean up their Facebook profile.

(Source: infoneer-pulse)

Researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute Develop DNA Nanorobot to Trigger Targeted Therapeutic Responses

Using the DNA origami method, in which complex three-dimensional shapes and objects are constructed by folding strands of DNA, Shawn Douglas, Ph.D., a Wyss Technology Development Fellow, and Ido Bachelet, Ph.D., a former Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow who is now an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Nano-Center at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, created a nanosized robot in the form of an open barrel whose two halves are connected by a hinge. The DNA barrel, which acts as a container, is held shut by special DNA latches that can recognize and seek out combinations of cell-surface proteins, including disease markers. When the latches find their targets, they reconfigure, causing the two halves of the barrel to swing open and expose its contents, or payload. The container can hold various types of payloads, including specific molecules with encoded instructions that can interact with specific cell surface signaling receptors.

Full Story: Harvard

(Source: emergentfutures)

Eyes-free texting app developed.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed an app which allows people to text without looking at the screen. BrailleTouch uses the Braille writing system which would make it familiar for blind people to use, but the researchers hope it could be developed into a system for sighted people looking for an alternative text-entry method.

Early studies with visually impaired participants proficient in Braille typing have demonstrated that users can input at least six times the number of words per minute when compared to other research prototypes for eyes-free texting on a touch screen. Users reach up to 32 words per minute with 92 percent accuracy with the prototype app for the iPhone.

(Source: physorg.com)

Robotic dinosaurs to be made with 3D printers.

Palaeontologists at Drexel University are using 3D printers to reconstruct dinosaur skeletons, which will be animated using robotics to see how the dinosaurs might have moved and behaved.

The team is first using a 3D scanner to analyse existing bones, before using a 3D printer to construct an exact replica of the skeleton. A mechanical engineer is working with the team to develop the robotic side of the project, but the 3D printing will also allow them to create small-scale models for educational use, and to create exact-size replicas for museum display, without the limitation on the number of copies made and materials and storage hassles of traditional casting methods.

The first goal is to have a working robotic dinosaur limb constructed by the end of 2012. A complete robotic dinosaur replica will take one to two years to create.

While 3D printers have been available for a few years, they have been slow to catch on with home users, instead finding niche markets like in medicine, where they have been used to print organs and tailored prosthetics for patients. The Pirate Bay launched a new category for 3D designs last month, predicting a world where “you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”

Who knows, maybe in the zoo of the future we will be wearing downloaded Nike shoes and watching a robotic Tyrannosaurus chase a newly cloned woolly mammoth!

(Source: drexel.edu)

VertiCrop Processes 10,000 Plants Every 3 Days Using Vertical Hydroponic Farming

Vertical farming is one of the most innovative solutions for lowering the amount of energy, space, and water needed to grow food, but Valcent Products has taken the practice to a whole new level with their revolutionary VertiCrop technology. By applying Henry Ford’s super-efficient assembly line concept to vertical hydroponic farming, the Vancouver-based firm can produce the same amount of produce on a standard sized residential lot that most farmers would be able to grow on a 16-acre plot. Their stacked, mechanized, produce-laden plastic trays are already a hot commodity, with orders coming in from every corner of the globe. Step in for a closer look at how this technology is completely changing the way we grow food.

The VertiCrop system consists of a series of mechanical 123 plastic trays stacked 8 high that can be placed on urban rooftops and other tight spaces. They contain vegetables and herbs that are grown hydroponically with just 8% of the water and 5% of the space required by standard farms. Energy efficient LED lights are on standby to supplement waning natural light when necessary.

VertiCrops are climate controlled and use absolutely no harmful herbicides or pesticides. What’s more, they are incredibly easy to manage. A staff of just 3 people can handle 4,000 square feet of plants and 2,000 square feet of germinating, harvesting, and packing space, and they can process as many as 10,000 plants every 3 days! Valcent’s COO Christopher Ng told the Global Commodities Report, “this is what farming has to develop into.”

(Source: thedantepath)

Seth Godin (Brilliant Author, Strategist and Philanthropist) posted on his blog on February 18th, 2012:

“Transparent or translucent?

There’s an argument for transparency. If you make it easy for people to see right through you, the thinking goes, you are easier to trust.

The market, though, often seeks out the translucent. Things that glow. We’re drawn to the glow, to the illumination and warm feeling it brings.

We’d like our tools and our replaceable institutions to be transparent. We want the bank and the radiologist and the tax man to be totally clear and invisible, so they can get out of the way and we can focus on what’s true.

But the brands and experiences and legends that lead to stories and affection and connection—it would be better if they glowed instead.”

My rationale is that both concepts, while important, have separate utilities. Transparency eliminates doubt, translucency breeds admiration. Both are central to managing everyday situations and evolving our inner self awareness respectively. Both, due to their different utilities, maybe required in different situations, depending on how much information is available and what is necessary at that very moment.

Ten Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Pricing

Jon Manning, the Founder & Managing Director of http://www.PricingProphets.com, pricing strategies of what already exist and how to build new pricing models to challenge industry norms.

Meeting of the Minds: The Business of Science

Science once led America to glory. Our breakthroughs brought wars to an end and new industries to life. But have we lost our passion to innovate? CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo gathers esteemed leaders to answer tough questions and chart a path forward.

Bank.

Can we have a banking system that provides good services to people at reasonable rates? A banking system that doesn’t bring down the global economy every few decades?

Anat Admati thinks we can. She’s a finance professor at Stanford, but she never paid much attention to banks until the financial crisis. (This is not unusual in the superspecialized world of academia.)

After the crisis hit, Admati started reading up on banks. And, in a basic banking textbook, she came upon a single line that changed her career.

“I sat in my office and I thought, ‘Something is really wrong in banking.’ “

In this podcast (Source: NPR), Admati tells us what she thinks is wrong in banking — and how she thinks we can fix it.

Simon Johnson explores the liquidity versus capital debate issue in further detail on Bloomberg.

Discover life by stepping outside your comfort zone

The Business of Online Dating

Cliff Lerner, CEO of SNAP Interactive, told CNBC, “I think the two big trends we are seeing are mobile and social, when you think about mobile and how users are going online dating, it is a disruptive technology, you can take out your mobile device and immediately find singles who are nearby and when you have disruptive technologies you can find companies that overnight become huge sucesses.”

TechCrunch Interview with John Frankel and David Teten, partners at Founders Fund Venture Capital, discussing the performance of their fund and their strategies when deciding how to invest their venture capital.

Innovation Is Hard

Interview with Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book of Innovation, discussing how pivoting for innovation is important and using Kodak’s example to showcase how a monolithic organization like Kodak, although getting a lot of things right, still got it wrong.

“Small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence,” said K David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow.

“It’s what I like to call the flipside of globalization. We hear a lot about how globalisation exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate. But a positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now through digital technology that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience.”

» via BBC

(Source: infoneer-pulse)

USB stick sized DNA sequencing device announced.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies has said that it’s disposable gene sequencing device will be available by the end of 2012. Priced under US$900, the MinION device plugs into a computer and delivers results via the USB port.

A minaturized version of the company’s larger GridION device, the MinION uses pores made from bacterial proteins. An electric current flows through the pore. The DNA bases interrupt the current in different ways as they go through.

(Source: kurzweilai.net)

Ideatrotter

Fine Folk

Find Me

Facebook Profiles Accurately Predict Job Performance

Analyzing Transperancy and Translucency

Digital tools 'to save languages'