Technology

Mr. Cloud, I Don’t Like You Any More.

My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke. Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did G ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Nov 10 2022 - 5:00pm

Want To Buy A Tech Company?

If you’ve drunk the MBA kool-aid, you believe VCs and M&A bean-counters rationally price their investments. If an honest professor has confessed to you that company valuation is a black art, i.e., that there’s a heavy dose of intuition involved, you’v ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Nov 24 2022 - 9:43am

?? 'AI Could Be The Best Or Worst Thing To Happen To Humanity'- Stephen Hawking's Speech & Mindlessness Of Chatbots

This is a speech Stephen Hawking gave at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Monday. It’s actually an upbeat and optimistic speech, but one particular phrase from the speech is scaring many people. Stephen Hawking has a love of the dramatic, and he oft ...

Article - Robert Walker - Nov 25 2022 - 5:20pm

‘Peer Community In’ May Accomplish What Open Access Could Not

In 2017, three researchers from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud, founded Peer Community In (PCI), a peer-review-based service for recommending preprints ...

Article - The Conversation - Dec 22 2022 - 11:34am

UPDATE: One Drive Down, Microsoft Claims A Server Misconfiguration. Service is back up, Skype is still down.

O ne Drive a service many Windows users rel y on for storage and, unadvisedly as backup, is down.  This will be especially bothersome for devices that have smaller internal drives and rely on the cloud for storage, and for certain office apps that rely on ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jan 12 2023 - 10:39am

TalkLife And AI Can Help People Be More Empathetic About Mental Health

Empathy is critical to having supportive conversations about mental health. But this skill can be tricky to learn, especially in the moment when a person is sharing something hard.  ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 24 2023 - 9:53am

FAIRY- How To Make Smart Materials Fly

Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots. Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robot ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 1 2023 - 6:18pm

Chat GPT: AI Eventually Replacing Sitcoms And Perhaps News Commentary?

W e already know Chat GPT and the tech behind it can replace comedy acts. Right now a new ongoing stream of “news” totally made up news like stories, is being powered by Chat GPT and animated using the Unreal video game engine. Unreal engine a 3D game eng ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Feb 12 2023 - 8:16pm

AI Language Models Like ChatGPT May Paraphrase Without Citing The Source

With ChatGPT a huge fad, students may be excited that their next paper will be easy, because if it is truly AI it will start from the unique seed you give it. Yet it does not work that way. Language models that generate text in response to user prompts use ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 18 2023 - 5:01am

Government Lockdowns During COVID-19 Led To Less Activity

Some companies profited during the government lockdowns and then lingering social stigma about being outside the home. Exercise bikes, office furniture, and coffee machines all did well. It will be decades before we know how many have been impacted in ways ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 20 2023 - 11:00am