Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Wiki on Feb 25th, 2008
If you don’t read the comments here, you may have missed the wonderful thing that Mary Beth did last week. After a brief discussion here about how all knowledge is a web search away once you remember to formulate the question, she went out and researched a topic that had mystified her for many years: [...]
Posted in Wiki on Jan 11th, 2008
One of the nice things about Wikipedia is the fact that you can go to it for information about new cultural trends. Want to know what a flash mob is? How about Leetspeak… what’s that? Wikipedia can tell you, with reasonable accuracy and long before more sober references chime in. Still, even Wikipedia has its [...]
Posted in Wiki on Feb 23rd, 2007
If you’ve never edited a Wikipedia article, I recommend the experience. Suppose, while skimming through an article, you notice a misspelled word, stray comma, or grammatical peccadillo. Hop in there and fix it! It gives you a surprisingly warm rush. For a very small effort, you’ve made the world a better place. Here’s the funny [...]
Codon Devices may be the world’s first true synthetic biology company. What is synthetic biology? Is it artificial life? No. The name is misleading, but it really refers to the idea of bringing a design-based engineering approach to biology: take well-understood biological mechanisms (protein synthesis, biochemical pathways) and bend them to create new desired end [...]
Posted in Wiki on Apr 11th, 2005
I find this both astonishing and inevitable: From Corante’s Many2Many blog I learn that Microsoft is stealing a page from Wikipedia. It’s making some of the articles in its Encarta dictionary (which is a very profitable enterprise) open for editing. What’s astonishing is that this happened so fast. Predictably, some people are crying out that [...]
