September 6, 2007 by sean.

Inventor Dean Kamen previews the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the Department of Defense, to help the 1,600 “kids” who’ve come back from Iraq without an arm (and the two dozen who’ve lost both arms). Kamen’s commitment to using technology to solve problems, and his respect for the human spirit, have never been more clear than in this deeply moving clip.

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

“Corey Phelps, an assistant professor of management and organization at the UW Business School, and Melissa Schilling, an associate professor at NYU, “analyzed the innovative performance of 1,106 companies in 11 different industries over a six-year period. They examined the pattern or structure of strategic alliance relationships among companies in each industry. They found that how firms are connected to one another influences the number of patented inventions they obtained. Those that secured more patents were classified by Phelps and Schilling as being more creative.”

According to the researchers, “companies reap greater benefits when they are part of a network that exhibits a high degree of clustering and only a few degrees of separation, both of which are characteristic of a small world network.” [via zdnet.com]

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

continuous partial attention n. A state in which most of one’s attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.” [via wordspy]

Linda Stone who coined the term, distinguishes CP from multi-tasking: “When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing… (whereas CPA is motivated by the desire) to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.” [via WikiHome]

“CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be ‘a live node on the network’… The message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. ‘We’re not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything… Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible.’” [via newsweek]

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

“The Department of Defense’s “Augmented Cognition” video is supposed to represent a plausible scenario for a human-computer interface that uses EEG and other technologies to figure out what to feed to operators, allowing teams to do fast analysis of giant amounts of data.” [via boingboing]

Here’s the video (caution: the movie is 93MB!): Augmented Cognition International Society

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