StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 143 MetaTextbook is an artificial intelligence (AI)-led content producer which creates visual content for electronic textbooks customised to the interests and hobbies of the reader. For example, if a student likes football, most of the images in the physics or geography textbooks for this particular student will be related to football. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING The customisation of imagery makes the content easier to understand and internalise thanks to two key factors: 1) The relevance and familiarity with the images creates a shortcut to existing knowledge in the student's mind; 2) The virtuous cycle of reassurance engendered by familiarity gives confidence to the student that the effort required to learn a lesson is minimal. Aristotle described this process in Rhetoric: " To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people. " PRINCIPLES OF IMAGE SELECTION The company applies the principle of  conceptual metaphors to select or create images ...

StartupRealities No 17 SpaceBonanza Limited is a moonshot-project company that searches for extraterrestrial (ET) civilisations in space with the goal of adopting their novel technology and commercialising ET intellectual property on Earth. The company finances the deployment of powerful telescopes to search for intelligent life beyond Earth and transmit encoded messages, with the expectation that it will have the first-mover advantage when contact with aliens is eventually established. SCIENCE The company focuses on exploring the habitable zone of nearby stars, i.e. the region in star systems with planets close enough to their star to sustain liquid water on the planet surface. SpaceBonanza transmits encoded messages to the nearby stars with science questions such as "How can you achieve time travel?" and "How do you utilise quantum entanglement?" TIMELINE Investors are bankrolling the company for a period of 35 years as SpaceBonanza is not expected to gene...