New book 'Inventology' shows how today's inventors can tap big data, 3D printing, crowdfunding, more

Tech Republic ^ | January 26, 2016 | Hope Reese

[2ndDivisionVet]

With the internet age and its endless possibilities in the realms of publishing, communication, and collaboration, opportunities have never been so widely accessible for creators. But how has our new digital world affected the pathways to invention? In Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, out today, journalist Pagan Kennedy offers a fresh take on how the digital era has upended the traditional pathways for creation.

When Kennedy began writing about inventors for The New York Times, she soon "would marvel at how few of the people were professional inventors, designers, in corporate innovation labs." It led her to explore what it really takes to invent. Drawing from that experience, Kennedy debunks common misconceptions about how great inventions are born, explores situations that have led to invention, and highlights gender disparity in the world of invention. TechRepublic talked to Kennedy about the big takeaways she learned during the writing process, and the relationship between tech and invention...

[ifinnegan]

In a related article, Heathen Clinton spewed out a bunch of hype about some such.

[CharlesOConnell]

The Last Man To Understand All Of Mathematics Died 50 Years Ago. Such is the scope expansion of technical knowledge. This article makes no mention, though the book surely must, of the topic of Evolutionary Computation, the technique that designs can be made to “fight it out” with “survival of the fittest” through, if necessary, unlimited iterations until a problem is solved, replacing the efforts of thousands of generations of the lives of scientists and engineers. Given sufficient processing power, super-computers can perform high speed simulations to solve in months, technical problems that would take humans decades. An experiment of a few hours resulted in the virginal recreation from scratch of the design of a v-shaped FM antenna that took two Japanese scientists years to invent by painstaking trial and error.

Evolutionary Computation isn’t limited by reliance on 3-D printing, only on the limits of algorithms. Classical music programmers need to watch the robots on their tails. Programmers usually only roll out “the good stuff” during pledge. The Music Choice company uses music algorithms to search and robotically present thousands of extremely high quality compositions by composers completely unknown to long-hairs who have listened to classical music constantly for decades — “who is that composer? I’ve never heard the name” is a constant refrain. There are very few fields of human knowledge or endeavor that cannot be rendered obsolete by computers.