Roberts that stand in for you and attend your meetings in the office. I've speculated about these in the past, and if we have sufficient wireless access, these can't be too far in the future. "Meet the Anybots QB, a telepresence robot that can represent you in the office by sitting in conference rooms, going to meetings and rolling about through the cubicle farm. The whole time it does so, it displays a live webcam video of your face, while transmitting to you a live video and audio stream of whatever it's looking at." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Video, Wireless, Audio]

If we can put wireless speakers into LED lightbulbs, why not wireless access points? This way you could create a mesh of perfect wireless connectivity throughout a house, powered from a single access point. And we could take this further - everywhere in public there is a light today, there could be a wireless internet access point in the future. Why not? [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Wireless]

The reason why diversity is important is that it helps us see the same problem from different angles. A novice, or a person working outside the field, will not be led by the prevailing assumptions of the field. "If Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo." Daniel Lemire remarks, in an email, describing the same phenomenon, "I think that we all found that we learn through teaching... and we teach to people who are different from us... otherwise we could not teach them anything." Note that the Wired magazine article needs to come with a language warning, which is inappropriate and disappointing in what is supposed to be a professional publication. Via Sebastien Paquet. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: none]