Technology

Who Is King? Michael Jackson Vs Sir Isaac Newton

What's on people's mind? Who or what is impacting us most? That is easy to decide: go to Google, put in the search field the n-gram (the sequence of n words) that describes the item you want to check,* and watch the number of hits.  So the bigram ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Dec 19 2010 - 12:36am

Net Neutrality Premise Debunked

The economic reasoning underlying network neutrality regulationadopted this week by the Federal Communications Commission is fundamentally flawed, according to Professors J. Gregory Sidak and David J. Teece in an article published in the Journal of Compet ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 25 2010 - 4:02pm

Decoding the Unusual Wordpress "Pharma Hack"

Every now and again, something happens that makes you want to shake someone's hand and then take a hatchet to their throat- and there's a good chance that a number of these occurrences will be in computer science. Recently, I ran into one of the ...

Blog Post - Patrick Adair - Jan 14 2011 - 8:04pm

IBM Computer Watson Odds On Favorite To Jeopardize Human Rivals

LONDON, January 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/-- With a famous showdown between man and machine looming, bookmakers Bodog.com are sad to report that IBM's Computer, known as Watson, is the odds-on favorite to beat both Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad ...

Article - Anna Ohlden - Feb 14 2011 - 8:18pm

Transhuman Topics: Unethical Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is my own field of research for 12 years now. It is one of the, if not the most important of the emerging technologies, and it is widely believed to be the vital ingredient to many by transhumanists desired transformations, be it slowing do ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Mar 11 2012 - 7:32am

Robot Babies Learn To Walk The Right Way

For robots to get 'smart', they have to learn to adapt.   University of Vermont roboticist Josh Bongard has created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. Over gene ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2011 - 2:31pm

Community Jury Style Loan Pools As Insurance And Investment Vehicles

A potentially new form of public finance and public insurance may lie in institutions of community jury banking.  Jury banking is a new concept, as far as I can tell, though it is a combination of immigrant loan pools, and microfiance schemes.  Immigrant l ...

Article - Ed Chen - Jan 24 2011 - 7:32am

Holographic TV May Make 3-D TV Ancient Before It Takes Off

If wearing 3-D glasses makes you feel like we haven't progressed much since the 1950s, you are not alone.   Fortunately, MIT is in the 1970s- namely, the movie "Star Wars" from 1977, using a 2011 Microsoft Xbox Kinect to create streaming hol ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 27 2011 - 6:36pm

We Are All Makers, a TED Talk by Dale Dougherty

The fundamental evolutionary advantage of human beings over all other species on this planet is our ability to  make  things. We make tools to make more complex tools to make end products that help us survive, thrive, and develop. Pre-humans may have star ...

Blog Post - Matthew T. Dearing - Feb 2 2011 - 9:59am

A Proposal For The District Community Jury Style Bank

A Proposal for the District Community Jury Style Bank:   Executive Summary: A Jury Style Bank would be a wholly innovative form of banking and community development which can expand the formal banking system while also increasing the community’s financial ...

Article - Ed Chen - Oct 23 2011 - 6:22pm