Mannerisms

Here’s a strange contraption which doesn’t give much of a clue about what it was built to do: But it did it. Moral: Looks Aren’t Everything

Using AI digital agents as a sales tool appeared to have a great deal of promise but they have not been adopted as fast as anticipated as shown by the Gartner Hype-Cycle for Sales Transformation:

Germany is leading in emissions trading while the US is lagging behind, says a new OECD study. Only Iceland and Japan cone lower in investing in the market-based climate tool. In 2023, just 7 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were covered by an emissions trading system, one of the lowest shares among the 79 countries analyzed. Europe’s largest economy, ...

Thanks to R&D World for this one – the largest sackings of R&D staff this year:       Top 10 layoffs at companies YTD in 2025 with sizable R&D operations as of October 3.  

Gartner has identified five risks which emerged in Q3:    

In an attempt to meet their continuing shortage of engineers, the Admiralty are now offering commissions on the General List to graduates who have mechanical, electrical, or science degrees with suitable subjects. Hitherto, the only route from civilian life to a General List commission has been through the Dartmouth cadet en-try, between the ages of 17 and 19. So, 64 ...

Tomorrow the US House of Representatives  votes on the release of the Epstein Files. President Trump has been anti the release but this week said on  Truth Social: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.” 57% of U.S. adults disapproved of Trump’s handling of the  Epstein affair, while 22% said they approved ...

There is a massive resource which needs to be utilised, Ed confides to his diary, over 100,000 tech employees were laid off in the last 12 months with 50K in the US and 30K in the UK and the problem is there are a bunch of predator fake employment agencies doing their best to take them for a ride. These ...

In 2008 the iPhone was one year-old and an instant success. A key factor in that success was its multi-touch screen technology. How far  did it close the gap between smartphones and mobile computers? Could it enable handsets to perform most daily tasks as easily as a laptop computer? asked Guillaume Largillier, co-founder and chief strategy officer of French company ...

  When Elon does a deal, it’s worth looking to see if it has any wider ramifications. For xAI’s $12 billion Colossus datacentre in Memphis  he is looking to rent the  GPUs rather than buy them in an off-balance-sheet financial arrangement.. With the datacentre server replacement cycle currently running at 5-6 years, and better GPUs coming out annually, the AI ...

122 years ago, after 15 years of experimentation, an aviation pioneer prepared to demonstrate the world’s the first manned flight. A wire snagged on the launch mechanism and the aeroplane crashed into the Potomac. The pioneer was ridiculed in the press and US Congress with one congressman saying that the government should not fund attempts at manned flights and scorning ...

Gold topped $4k an ounce last week while global gold mining production has already reached or is close to its peak, having stagnated at between 3,000 and 3,300 metric tons annually over the last decade. While new gold deposits are still being discovered, as in Wangu, China, large reserves are gradually becoming scarce, with the majority of production still happening ...

The most widely used investment is equities,  according to a six country survey by Statista Consumer Insights. The other most widely used investment products are bonds, real estate, insurances, and precious metals and Cryptocurrencies. Equitiesare the most popular form of investment in India (39 percent of respondents said they currently own/use it), China (36 percent), Germany (23 percent) and the ...

Thanks to Omdia for this one – the top ten power chip manufacturers – all have less than 5% market share except Infineon with 17.5%, Onsemi with 8.5% and ST with 7%. Infineon Onsemi ST Mitsubishi Fuji Hangzhou Silan BYD Micro Vishay Toshiba Nexperia  

At $1.5 trillion, Tesla is currently valued at more than 300 times its trailing-twelve-months earnings. To put that in perspective, even $5-trillion juggernaut Nvidia, a company that many consider overvalued, has a TTM price-to-earnings ratio of “just” 55. Nvidia is already at the very heart of the industry that will supposedly re-shape our lives for years to come, however, while ...

WHAT is claimed to be the only genuine aluminium and universal solder has recently been demonstrated. It requires the use of no fluxes when used on aluminium and its alloys, pewter, tin, or magnesium. When used on other materials the conventional fluxes are used. So, 64 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of May 10 1961 The ...

Elon Musk’s pay package, unveiled by Tesla’s board of directors in September, grants Musk up to 424 million additional shares to take his stake in the company to around 25 percent. For Musk to earn the full payout, though, he has to help Tesla reach several highly ambitious, borderline impossible goals. For each of the 12 equally sized tranches of ...

I have a wheeze to resurrect the Dodo, Ed confides to his diary. After a visit to Mauritius I realise how much the bird means to the locals despite the fact that it became extinct 250 years ago. The bird’s emblem is on the local currency, on beer bottles, pictures, tea towels, mugs, plates and is the subject of toys ...

Icera Semiconductor is a “big, hairy, audacious plan”, according to one of its venture capital backers, Martin Gibson of Atlas Ventures, which has helped make Icera Europe’s best-funded fabless semiconductor start-up company amassing $142.5m in VC funding. Gibson told the 2007 International System and SoC Conference in Prague: “For many companies the VC-backed start-up model is broken. I don’t want ...

Proponents of the technology think that AI has almost limitless potential and will ultimately help humanity tackle and solve complex challenges such as climate change, disease prevention and resource management. Sceptics are more focused on ethical and social concerns that the rise of AI unquestionably raises. Issues like job displacement, misinformation and the potential misuse of autonomous technologies raise questions ...