Edison's medicine

#NikolaTesla #ThomasEdison #GeorgeWestinghouse #rock #video #Tesla

From Rasl #5 by Jeff Smith

Until Nikola Tesla's invention of a workable A.C. electrical power system (which was in direct competition with Thomas Edison's D.C. power system), the ability to generate, transmit, and use electricity as we do today was impossible.
George Westinghouse, Westinghouse Corporation

The modular robot

by @ulaulaman about #MIT #robot #technology #modular

Starting from a famous speech by Richard Feynman (pdf), it was born nanotechnology. One day in future we'll probably have nano-chip, nano-computer, nano-bot, but for now we must content ourselves with the robots with wheels and legs that explore the remote corners of the Earth, and also arriving on Mars in the past years.
A possible evolution of robots is described in science fiction: for example in Alan Moore's Tom Strong, one of the enemy of the hero is the Modular Man, an electronic entity consistuted by many memory modules, separated but which together realized one of the most advanced and deadliest artificial intelligence in the world. Using the Modular Man, Moore brings back a classic of the genre: the revolt of the technology against mankind. A variation of this idea is proposed by Frank Schatzing in The Swarm, but in this last case the superintelligent entity is constituted by a lot of single-celled organisms that are separately very simple, but together extremely complex. In some sense also the swarms of insects could be understood like a single entity.
Let us suppose now that every single part of similar entity is electronic, and, for some reason, that the experiment is beyond the control of the toy factory that developed it: the consequence is a catastrofic novel, The Reproductive System (a.k.a. Mechasm)⁽¹⁾, written with a lot of humor by John Sladek, in which the writer describes some mechanism that are just a bit more advanced version of the Molecule, a self-assemble modular robot developed by Keith Kotay and Daniela Rus at MIT:

On impact factor

We recommend that the term "impact factor" be abolished and that this measure be renamed in keeping with its actual role, that merely of a time-specific "citation rate index" and nothing more. What is currently called the "impact factor" should not be misused to evaluate journals or to validate the scientific relevance of a particular researcher or research program, especially in decisions regarding employment, funding, and tenure.

(from The journal "impact factor": a misnamed, misleading, misused measure by Hecht F, et al.)

Impact Factors reflect the journal not the article, vary with time and correlate only poorly with perceived excellence. Simple comparison of impact factors in different specialties may be misleading. Review journals often have higher Impact Factors than those with original data. Both authors and editors can try to manipulate journal Impact Factors

(from Impact factors: uses and abuses by James Neuberger and Christopher Counsell - pdf)

Peter about Higgs

Contrary to the custom at this conference, I want first of all to disclaim priority for some of the concepts to which my name is commonly attached in the literature. For this exaggerated view of my originality I have to thank the late Ben Lee, who at the 1972 High Energy Physics Conference at Fermilab plastered my name over almost everything concerned with spontaneous synlnetry breaking.
"Higgs fields", for example, are just the scalar fields of a linear sigma model, which was discussed in 1960 by Gell-Mann and Lévy but had been introduced three years earlier by Schwinger. And "the Higgs mechanism" was first described by Philip Anderson: perhaps it should be called "the ABEGHHK'tH ....mechanism" after all the people (Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, 't Hooft) who have discovered or rediscovered it! However, I do accept responsibility for the Higgs boson; I believe that I was the first to draw attention to its existence in spontaneously broken gauge theories.

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Higgs P. (1993). SBGT and all that, AIP Conference Proceedings, 300 159-163. DOI: 10.1063/1.45425