Monthly Archives: March 2009

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Nuclear in China

chinese_workerContracts have been signed for the building of the first batch of Sanmen AP1000 nuclear reactors in China:

An engineering contract was signed last week towards building the Sanmen AP1000s. Real construction work should begin within one month on the nuclear power reactors.

…

The result will be the first Westinghouse-designed AP1000 pressurized water reactors in the world, ahead of the others at Haiyang in Shandong province and more expected in the UK and the USA.

The Chinese government is also helpfully developing pebble bed nuclear reactors as well.

[via Next Big Future][image from Saad.Akhtar on flickr]

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Author decides to copy Radiohead’s business model

Here’s an experiment to keep a close eye on, if you’re curious about new business models for publishing books in the digital age. Publishers Faber and historian Ben Wilson are taking a page from Radiohead’s playbook and releasing Wilson’s latest book in digital form on a pay-what-you-like basis:

Wilson’s examination of the value and meaning of liberty will be available to download on 27 April, six weeks before it is published on paper at £14.99, with readers given the freedom to set their own price, or even download it for free.

It’s a strategy Wilson, whose two previous books were published conventionally by Faber as hardbacks, admits is “a gamble”. When he first heard about the “frightening idea of giving the book away”, his reaction was surprise. “I’ve published before,” he explains, “and you have that excitement of a book in physical form, so that’s what you expect”. But after a while “it clicked together so well with what I wanted to do with the book – the campaigning edge – that it made a lot of sense.”

It’s good to see that Wilson and Faber haven’t made the usual mistake with the Radiohead experiment, in that they’re plainly seeing it as being a publicity play as opposed to the main income stream. However, I think it fair to say that Wilson isn’t quite a household name like Radiohead (hence there’s nowhere near the same level of expectation around the launch) and that the books business is still very different to the music business (although they’re getting closer), so while the model is similar we’d all be foolish to expect a similar pattern of results.

But it’s very interesting to see Faber taking this step, not just grappling with the new technology of ebooks as a format but with the new economics of electronic media, where free is – for better or for worse – the best way of getting your product into people’s minds (and memory sticks). It also makes Harpercollins’ claims about ebook pricing look even more ropey… [via GalleyCat]

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Bruce Sterling sideswipes AI evangelism

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Bruce Sterling’s keynote speech at the Webstock conference in New Zealand last month contained the usual high concentration of non-fic eyeball kicks, and is well worth a read if you’re at all interested in the culture of the web, modern economics and the near future.

As usual, there are loads of provocative little asides nestled in the narrative, and I was particularly taken by this backhander to the face of artificial intelligence advocates:

I really think it’s the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is “intelligence.” That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It’s code being executed. It’s a powerful thing, it’s a beautiful thing, but to call that “intelligence” is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.

There’s something sad and pathetic about it, like a lonely old woman whose only friends are her cats. “I had to leave my 14 million dollars to Fluffy because he loves me more than all those poor kids down at the hospital.”

This stuff we call “collective intelligence” has tremendous potential, but it’s not our friend — any more than the invisible hand of the narcotics market is our friend.

Zing! I think we can be certain that Sterling doesn’t subscribe to any of the three schools of Singularitarianism.

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Brain control with light: neuroengineering at MIT

Just a nod to a must-read article at Wired on the new1 technology of neuroengineering:

Boyden directs MIT’s Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, part of the MIT Media Lab. He explains the mission of neuroengineering this way: “If we take seriously the idea that our minds are implemented in the circuits of our brains, then it becomes a top priority to understand how to engineer brains for the better.”

Here, neuroscience is not merely studied, it is applied. Which is why we’re off again, to see the molecular engineer’s microscope, the viral growing area, and the machine where they cut micron-thin slices of mouse brains in order to evaluate what changes they’ve made using the rest of the equipment.

This video illustrates one of the most potentially disruptive technologies ever:

1:Although the article points out that, depending on how far you expand the definition, human beings have been “neuroengineering” for all history.

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Why we blog

geeseResearchers at the University of Missouri have discovered that writing about emotional trauma increases your sense of well being:

Researchers asked 49 college students to take two minutes on two consecutive days and write about something they found to be emotionally important. The student saw immediate rise in mood and performed better on standardized measures of physiological well-being.

One of the key points of the study was that the length of time spent writing required to achieve beneficial effects was lower than previously thought.

As with keeping a diary, getting your thoughts down in text can be an aid to happiness as well as helping with your writing ability.

[via Jon Taplin][image from zenera on flickr]