An economist has announced that the purchase of eco-friendly products may in fact be bad for the environment. While most of the products in question are actually beneficial to the sphere of endeavour in which they are created, evidence seems to indicate that people who buy such products are less likely to donate or contribute directly to environmental causes. I wonder if there is a similar effect whereby people feel that they can cancel out ecologically unsound habits by buying eco-friendly products – people driving to the organic market in their SUV, for example.

This concept may be no news to a fair few readers of this blog, but it bears mentioning for the fact that it has become accepted enough to garner laudatory reports from ‘serious’ technology magazines. ‘Personal infoclouds’ is just a fancy name for the growing multitude of webservices that enable you to sychronise data from your computers and portable devices with a remote storage location, but silly names aside, it would appear to be a paradigmatic idea that is gaining in popularity. Personally, I couldn’t live without Mobical.

The Japanese are crazy for barcodes, and not just in shops – there’s a real market for user-created codes that can be scanned by mobile phones with suitable software, and the trend looks set to move westward. Of course, being one step ahead the Japanese are already looking at the stealth-deployment options, despite a lack of obvious commercial purpose – Fujitsu have invented a way to invisibly conceal barcodes in printed pictures and graphics. So how do you know you’re supposed to scan it?

Well, who’d have thought? I for one was completely unaware that the Russians once had a close equivalent to the space shuttle, which may in fact have been superior in some respects. Of course, the difference between the two that really cut the mustard was the most important one – the US actually managed to continue funding the development and use of theirs. Looking at these pictures and specs, though, it’s interesting to contemplate what might have been in different circumstances.

Your AI breakthrough meme-of-the-month has arrived. Stephen Thaler, creator of the ‘Creativity Machine’, has been working on autonomous robots for the USAF. In order to enable them to perform complex seek-and-evade tasks without human intervention, he is experimenting with the idea of using neural networks to train other neural networks. Thaler claims his swarms have demonstrated “humanlike capabilities”, but isn’t forthcoming on details at the moment. Let’s hope he’s not been assimilated by his own creations, eh?