In the middle part of the last century a man named Genrich Altshuller, a citizen of the then Soviet Union, developed a series of principles to guide invention. Altshuller had been an inventor all his life; he received his first patent when he was around fourteen. After developing several inventions that were classified state secrets, he spent some time in Stalin's prisons. Later, he was an employee at the Soviet patent office and, during this time, formalized the ideas he had developed over the years into a procedure to guide invention.
Altshuller's incisive breakthrough was to notice that all technical systems ...
For those of us old enough to remember the administration of South Carolina Governor James Burrows Edwards in the late 1970s the notion of massive layoffs of public employees is not new. Thousands of jobs were RIFed (reduction in force) during Edwards' administration. The reductions were due to the simultaneous fall in projected tax and other revenues and the flattening of federal money coming into the state.
The difference between the employee layoffs then and those projected for the coming years is those job losses were primarily due to cyclical economic events and these to come are due primarily to structural ...
The other day I wrote an article about the potential for an emerging three dimensional literature, 3D Lit. I have since begun a novel, Einstein is a Pussy, about a young physics genius, a bisexual graduate history student at the University of South Carolina who financed her and her siblings' educations through a series of homosexual/bisexual clients, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and a theory of everything; i.e., Iunctian Theory.
Making up Iunctian Theory has been a real treat as it allows me to surrender to the fantasy world of theoretical physics. This activity is, of course, entirely useless but it does ...
A number of news reports have been chronicling the verbal odyssey of Roger Ebert, the well known movie and cultural critic. Ebert, having lost his voice during treatment for cancer of the thyroid, had it electronically restored. At first, the voice he was given did not sound like his old voice. A Scottish company, CereProc, through a process called cloning, reconstructed Ebert's old voice, ''training'' the electronic synthesizer using hours of old radio shows and the audio from video recordings of Ebert's critical reviews and other interviews.
CereProc went beyond capturing Ebert's distinct sound. The electronic device was trained to incorporate ...
The primary media used by mankind to display the written word, that is, display abstract symbols used by the creator/writer to convey meaning to the viewer/reader, doesn't change very often. Depending upon how you define "written" symbology, for a period of time, at least 50,000 years, perhaps much further back, even beyond the dawn of the human species, drawings of symbols, erection of markers and what have you were etched upon the face of the earth. Whether cave drawings of animals or stacks of stones used to mark a trail, symbols were placed upon the earth's surface to illustrate some ...
Can Democrats govern? After a full year of the Obama administration this is becoming the essential question. It is no longer a question of what health care reform will look like, whether the stimulus plan is working, whether adoption of the Bush war policy was the right decision, what a jobs bill should look like or any other specific policy question. Now, the central, crucial question is can the Democratic Party govern this nation?
For many, if not most citizens, regardless of how they feel about the issue, the answer will come in a few weeks. It will be determined by ...
Portfolio.com published a very interesting article today by Chip Robinson of Click Markets. I urge you to visit the link to his article and read it. It discusses the effect technology has on eliminating the distinction each of us tries to construct separating our personal life from our business life.
The article points out, as a by product of the major theme of the piece, that the internet is a major force breaking down this barrier. While there is a great deal of truth in that contention, it is also true that the internet, by virtue of its "narrowcasting" ability; that ...
For a long time I have been suggesting to anyone who will listen, or read, that the current world economic situation is due as much to technology impacts on the various industrial sectors as it is on bad bankers and bad banking. As if to prove this, several surveys have recently been published in coincidental proximity to the release of financial performance of companies supplying the infrastructure for technological change.
Companies such as Cisco, IBM, Tanberg, AT&T, to name a few, have recently reported banner results. All have changed future forecasts to reflect the dramatically improved commercial environment they occupy. Other ...
Subscribe to RSS Feed | 