The story that will emerge from the 2019 Seattle, Washington elections should be of interest to anyone working in campaigns, from data appending and other management services to more ephemeral strategists. The big picture part of the story is this: Some big corporations were fixated on the outcome of very local elections, for very localized […]
Writing for Live Science, Adam Mann suggests that the concept of time travel might be hardwired into our brains. Our tendency to conflate time and space in our linguistic structures is possible evidence of this “structural” tendency to believe that time is elastic or relative to space. Adam gives several examples using the work of […]
Traditional computing models are actually “pre-modern” in that the model of physics they take as their starting point is “classical.” They rely on formulae more analogous to Newton’s laws of motion than the quantization paradigm. But quantum computers are the order of the day, and they are about to take over the world. Recently, Google […]
The Peter Parker Principle is the name given to society’s acknowledgment of that immortal quote from Amazing Fantasy #15, the origin of Spider-Man: “With great power there must also come—great responsibility.” The quote even appeared in a United States Supreme Court decision. President Obama used it in 2010. We may need to revive the quote […]
Residents of cities like Detroit are getting fed up with police surveillance technology, and don’t care whether it decreases crime. Several digital rights advocacy groups are also weighing in, calling for bans on government use of facial recognition technology. There is a rejection of consequentialist or utilitarian arguments going on here—that is to say, if […]
Tentacle tech What it is: Researchers have managed to replicate octopus flesh, developing “a structure that senses, computes and responds without any centralized processing—creating a device that is not quite a robot and not quite a computer, but has characteristics of both.” Why it’s weird and awesome: Its developers call it “soft tactile logic,” and […]
Back when we were more optimistic about the effects of technology on society and everyday life, the joke was that if we don’t get jet packs, all that technology isn’t worth the effort. The joke facilitated the naming of a great Scottish indie group formed in 2003, and lots of social media about personal air […]
It may not have been as entertaining as a Star Trek fan convention, but last February in Munich, the European Space Agency and a handful of other EU organizations hosted the Big Data from Space conference, where hundreds of papers were read on the methods and applications of big space data. The conference brought together […]
It wasn’t a “roast” like Dan Robitzski of Futurism says it was, but in February, Harish Natarajan, a former championship college debater, won the audience vote over Project Debater, an IBM program designed to respond to its opponents in a debate and crystalize and summarize the issues in summation. The debate was about education subsidies. […]
“Anything that was in the world when you were born,” Douglas Adams wrote, “is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” We don’t know […]