Electric Bicycles a call to lebanese inventors

I have seen this new bike called the optibike (http://www.optibike.com/). It is a mixed electrical mechanical bicycle. It can combine electric power with pedal power to go very fast. I am thinking that this is the kind of bike that we need in Beirut if bicycle transportation is to become viable. With all the slopes that we have in the country this will make it easier to go up the roads, for example the sessine slope.

One thing that I think the optibike is missing is regenerative braking. I think a bike with such a braking system will utilize the liIon battery to its maximum.

So this is a call to lebanese inventors to come up with a bike that is like the optibike but with the addition of regenerative braking. Once invented we will lobby Parliament for bike lanes all over beirut.

Mining bulletin boards Data

I am wondering what happens to all the data stored in online chat forums and discussion boards. Do you think that they can be mined by companies to produce some important metadata about individuals, trends and policies. Can they be used for artificial intelligence research, for example language processing and "watson" types answer robots. This has already been happening on the web with targeted advertising. For example you read an e-mail about a wedding on gmail and you get an advert about wedding dresses (there are smarter examples, see if you can think of some or remember some that happened to you).

What is different about online discussion board data is that it groups several opinions on a certain topic, exploiting this data could be a topic for an interesting research paper. For example an analysis of the lebanese online forums could reveal what sample of lebanese think about some issues and be used by politicians to target political campains. It could also be used to israelis mossad to identify trends in lebanese thinking. In fact i do think that the mossad is exploiting this data in online forums. At least building profiles of people who use them, same as the CIA is doing with facebook. But for me the biggest potential is in the AI research. All the conversations going on can be exploited by a soficticated computer to simulate intelligence.