Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Business turnaround – Lego story
The story of Lego has been used as an example for many a MBA course. The story is incredible. Lego – a privately owned company did almost everything right – they listened to the customer, they developed products in different categories, enabled innovation in their company and came up with unique ideas. When the technology…
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Managing PDF Literature
Each researcher spends quality time managing the literature that they have collected in the form of papers and PDF’s. However, the collection of PDF continues to grow and there are very little in the form of tools that help manage it. There are three(3) great open source tools that work wonderfully to manage the collection…
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Plant communication
Plants communicate with each other. That much is known. However, what is not known is how plants communicate using symbiosis. Dr Johnson has reported new work in Ecology letters that shows that plants use symbiotic fungi to enable communication. Communication also causes interesting secretion by plants when infected by aphids. These secretions that are volatile…
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Touch screen on any surface.
Carnegie Mellon researchers, Robert Xiao, Chris Harrison and Scott E Hudson have come up with a touchscreen system that can be used on any surface. They have used a projector coupled with a depth measuring system that enables any surface to be converted to a touch screen. More information here and the technology can be…
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Endrov: An image analysis platform
ImageJ is one of the popular image analysis programs along with Fiji, Bioimage and Icy. There is another program that is used for image analysis that has several qualities that make it very useful. It is written completely in Java and so can run on multiple platforms, is object oriented for image storage that enables…
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Dreams can be seen by other people too
A Japanese group has compiled images that correspond to those seen by the person in a dream enabling researchers to reconstruct the dreams. In short, this was accomplished in two passes: first recording the images that are relevant to people and then correlating it with the specific areas of brain stimulated, as seen through MRI.…
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Bug eyes with camera
It is known that eyes of the common fly is a compound eye with multiple detectors and multiple lenses. It has always been thought that the 180 degree vision would be very useful and could be very high resolution. Though interesting to think about in terms of camera’s, it has been difficult to create multiple…
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Haploid maps : Large data sets of haploids
There are large data-sets that are being generated that are amazingly large, completely open for anyone to use and see and can generate valuable conclusions. Hapmap is one such grand project. This is made up of participants from US, UK, China, Japan, Canada and Nigeria. Look at the link below to get all the…
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Collaboration and new business models in Venice.
Murano is known for the glass blowing industry in Italy’s venice. Tourists visit in great numbers and almost all of them pass by Murano to buy some glass piece of value. However, what they buy are the usual momento’s and nothing very expensive. Thus, a glass blower who has to keep the kiln working day…
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Imaging in the microwave to pick strawberries
Robert Dudley was trying to design a system that would pick out the ripe cauliflowers that were ripe amidst the leaves. However, he ended up discovering a system that can decide when the strawberries are ripe for picking. His system uses imaging with microwave, light and terahertz radiation. He found that the microwave radiation, that…
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