Captain Cyborg accepts another degree from puny humans The nation's favourite would-be cyborg overlord and media strumpet, Professor Kevin Warwick, has been rewarded with another academic bauble. The post-human Brummie was given a Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth last week for his work as Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. It adds to a growing …
"Last year we noted how Wikipedia's entry for Britain's Greatest Living Scientist had been miraculously cleansed of any controversy or criticism of Warwick's work or public statements. The following passage, the last remnant of any disquiet amongst Warwick's scientific peers, was subsequently removed"
It was removed because the wikipedia bots are part of the forthcoming robopocalypse and won't stand for criticism of quislings like Captain Cyborg.
He isn't a cyborg! the REAL cyborgs are those living daily with implants!
People with artificial bionic limbs, artificial eyes (still in its infancy)
These people are all out there, and they are letting themselves be used as guinea pigs to advance cybernetics...
Lets celebrate them and the scientists & engineers who design and build their prosthesis!
I am hopeful that within the next 5 years bionic limbs will reach a point where we can properly interface them with the nervous system, and bond them onto the skeletal structure, we HAVE the technology to do both.. We've proven it can be done, now it is an engineering problem...
I'm always amused at people's reactions when I point out that my pacemaker has more on-board compute power than the Apollo missions. Except for under-30s, who often ask what an Apollo mission was. :-(
I'm certainly more of a cyborg than Kevin "I got chipped like a dog, which gave me cyberpowers" Warwick.
Doesn't everything now have more compute power than the Apollo missions?
I used to install a PIC-chip based nurse-call system in care homes, each call point had more compute power than the Apollo guidance computers, all they did was make a light blink and tell other devices on the system to make a bleeping noise.
It was a very good system, shame the salesmen we worked for were such cunts.
bleep bleeeeep!
yeah but even with the Warwick dilution factor , the flurry of degrees in totally bullshit subjects would re-inflate it.
Wait, what am i thinking , its science. who would want or need that in this day n age.
now if you had a degree in "Britains got the X factor" . . . . .
I did go to Reading Uni and Prof Warwick was my personal tutor. There was a notice board of clips of articles and interviews with him, I was reading it and he came up behind me and said "I shouldn't believe everything you read." Basically it's his job to advertise the department, to get people interested and enthusiastic about the department, this sometimes means that he oversells what he does.
While I was there he was also that rarity in a professor who actually lectured, he took us for motors and related subjects.
I found him to be a thoroughly nice chap, well schooled in his subject and able to talk off the cuff about all areas in Cybernetics at the drop of a hat. I daresay that most of the people here don't even understand what Cybernetics actually is, let alone his achievements - Do you really think that he would have so many honorary doctorates if he was a charlatan? - It's also odd that a similar professor Ross Anderson, who also oversells the work of his department and his achievements is lauded on these forums as being the savior of IT security. I assume that's because he sticks it to the man and Prof Warwick doesn't.
"Do you really think that he would have so many honorary doctorates if he was a charlatan?"
You mean more than jeremy clarkson, or ian paisley, or terry wogan, or dubyah, or kermit the frog.
well that changes everything! i'll have to take him more seriously... tell you what i'll apologise in person, whats his mac address?
(sycophantic fuckwit)
There is quite a difference in getting an honorary degree in your area of expertise, when you already have several degrees at various levels and proven research in that area, than there is getting an honorary degree for being a public figure in a particular area.
Also, I'm not sure where you get off calling me a "sycophantic fuckwit", it's astonishingly aggressive, to say I haven't provoked you in any way and I strongly suspect you'd never say that if you met me, or anyone else, face to face. That you would judge me as such for making an honest comment in a subject where I have experience says more about you than it does about me.
@Naughtyhorse:
Right, no contribution to the field. Must've been someone else who demonstrated a working neural interface that allowed the long term transmission of neural impulses to and from a living person's nervous system then, right?
Oh, wait.
I dislike a lot of his media antics because they're bloody silly at times ("I'm a cyborg, just like every registered pet cat or dog! Oh, wait, that doesn't sound very impressive...") but to suggest he's done nothing in his field is to buy into the increasingly desperate El Reg trolling on the subject rather than actually read about the work he has done.
"The Institute of Physics selected Kevin as one of only 7 eminent scientists to illustrate the ethical impact their scientific work can have: the others being Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Nobel, Oppenheimer and Rotblat"
I suspect this in one of the very few parallels that can be drawn between the other six and this fatuous self -publicist.
It would be comforting to think that there is only a finite amount of flummory in the world and that, by so assiduously accumulating it, this idiot is removing it from other places - thereby functioning as a kind of shite magnet.
How dare you mock someone with a stunningly-low combined Erdos-Bacon number of 6? I learned this from the great man's About page on his web-site. My About page just says that I like movies and ice hockey, no doubt omitting any mention of my Erdos-Bacon number because it is laughably high. It's probably over 15.
But considered it likely he was just good at getting media attention, raising the profile of the subject and so on and therefore an acceptable annoyance. Then he went further and further, I suppose the media tend to encourage you to do that once they have focused on you as a public image (the Colin Pilinger effect).
Then I found out he got his batchelors at my old university.
There was an article today about implanting a gene into monkeys to render the neurons blue light sensitive.
This is a very interesting technique as light is a much more effective way to target individual neurons rather than the current magnetic or electrical techniques.
Someone should volunteer for human trials of this research.
AC/DC
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