Steve Jurvetson speaking at the Singularity Summit

I'm really getting excited about the Singularity Summit, coming up on Sept 8 and 9 in San Francisco. I'll be blogging the event.

Although we are still a few years away from mainstream understanding of the Singularity principles, it is exciting to see the wave of digerati associating themselves with the concepts.

When a high-power VC like Steve Jurvetson commits to a speaking slot, you can tell that tsunami of interest will be building behind him. Here is a link to a podcast previewing his thoughts on ZD Net:

Steve Jurvetson: AI, nanotech and the future of the human species

SciVee: Teach a man to fish...

SciVee is a startup website that is focused on publishing scientist created videos that correlate to published research.

By giving scientists a Web 2.0 framework to demonstrate and discuss their research they can covey key concepts related in a new and powerful ways that the written research alone can not.

While embryonic, this site is of note in that it is sponsored by high powered scientific outposts including PLoS, NSF and SDSC. Of course JoVE - The Journal of Visual Experiments - is the grand-daddy in this space having been in operation since late 2006 :-)

And I'd bet would could dig up some science on YouTube circa 2005 if we really tried...

SciVee: Pioneering New Modes of Scientific Dissemination

Google and large scientific datasets

Addition coverage from BBGM - mndoci.com

� Scifoo: Google and large scientific datasets � business|bytes|genes|molecules

Highlights from SciFoo

"Every hour there was at least one session I wished I could have attended, but the one I will single out here is "Give us your Data! Google's effort to archive and distribute the world's scientific datasets" by Noel Gorelick (formerly of NASA and now at Google). For a conference on the future of biology, technology, and science, meeting at Google's global headquarters, this was a rare session that focused explicitly on how Google is changing the landscape. Rather, Google now is the landscape, and the success of SciFoo offers ample demonstration of that." -- George Dyson in Edge 219

Edge 219

Robotics at MIT

“We’re all machines,” says Rodney Brooks. “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?"

Robots and Robotics - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Artificial Intelligence - Science and Technology - New York Times