Monthly Archives: June 2016
Financial services: is a robot stealing your job?
This keynote speech, delivered for the financial IT platform Intelliflo, looked at technology advances from both a consumer and business point of view
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Another fracking melodrama
For the first time, American scientists have published a paper showing that wastewater from a shale-gas well and a coalbed methane site, disposed of by injecting it into a deep well, has reached a surface stream.
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"As transport secretary , caught driving sans insurance. As health sec, had a bizarre row with a nurse. Once, he asked female Ukrainian refugees: ‘Where are the men?’, forgetting how war had brought them to Scotland".
@FraserMyers at his funniest. CELEBRATE THE RARE GOOD NEWS!
It's a factory near Guildford, actually.
I first heard that joke when I shared a BT platform with Neil Hamilton, when he was still a Tory. The roadie said Neil's wife Christine was manufactured that way.
Unfair, but... who said life was fair?
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking