Financial Crisis = an Opportunity to Innovate

Six years ago, Argentina faced its own financial crisis when its traditional banking system was dismantled. Where others saw disaster, Pablo Ordóñez found an opportunity to create jobs for those most vulnerable to financial hard times.

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he’s an inmate and wears the requisite white prisoner jacket, Notarbartolo radiates a sunny Italian charm. A silver Rolex peeks out from under his cuff, and a vertical strip of white soul patch drops down from his lower lip like an exclamation mark.

Kenya Is On Call for Mobile Crowdsourcing

Cellphone entrepreneur Nathan Eagle has most of Kenya on call, waiting for a small job. Millions of them, in fact.

Eagle, an MIT research scientist who has been living and teaching in East Africa since 2006, hopes to enlist cellphone users in developing countries to perform small text-based tasks in return for micro-payments. Think of it as the mobile phone equivalent of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays humans to do such things as transcribe audio and tag photos.

The pursuit of human knowledge has a shape.

Map of Science Looks Like Milky Way

Cheap, Durable Nonsilicon Solar Cells

An advanced dye boosts the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells.

Dye-sensitized solar cells could make solar power more affordable: they are cheaper to make than conventional silicon solar cells and can easily be printed on flexible surfaces. But there’s a catch: creating efficient cells of this type has required dyes made of the precious metal ruthenium and volatile electrolytes. Now researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have replaced both of these materials in a new kind of dye-sensitized solar cell that is not only highly efficient: it also promises to be even cheaper and more durable.

How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed

Some say that Twitter may be as important to real-time search as YouTube is to video.

When Twitter was introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a 140-word answer to the question “What are you doing?,” many criticized the results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has grown to millions, while the content of the many posts–better known as “tweets”–has shifted from banal to informative.

History of the Internet

Social connections, not digital ones, keep your frontal lobe engaged.

Rebalance Your Brain

Yes, we love the way our computers, PDAs, video games, and iPods have revolutionized our lives and let us stay connected and entertained 24/7. But there may be a downside for our health, says Dr Gary Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

Ant algorithms

A review of E.O. Wilson’s latest in The NY Review of Books. Ants seem to get a lot done based on a few simple capabilities: they can lay down odors, detect and differentiate those odors, and count.

In Surely You’re Joking, Feynman recounts some great experiments he did on ants in his Princeton dorm room. See, e.g., here. My wife is totally uninterested when I do these types of things at home, but perhaps my kids will like it when they get a bit older 🙂

3-D Webcam

Online video chat has gone 3-D. A new webcam with two cameras spaced approximately as far apart as human eyes sends two offset images to a computer. In real time, software processes the images according to how they’ll be viewed: the camera comes with five sets of blue-red 3-D glasses for use with ordinary monitors, but the software can also output images in the format used by new 3-D displays. The webcam is compatible with such applications as Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, and YouTube.