Junot Diaz Dispatches from the Apocalypse
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz has an incredibly powerful piece on the Earthquake in Haiti, and what this apocalypse has revealed about the world. The Haitian earthquake was no […]
2011
Questioning Technology
Kevin Kelly over at The Technium got an interesting request from a reader: what questions about technology would you ask a Chinese peasant? The 15 questions. Would your grandparents be […]
We’re all inattentive superheroes.
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how we can make humans better, and what the consequences of making people better might be, so reading about how amazing […]
Cracking the Facebook Code
Recommendation agents pay a minor, but increasingly important role in our lives. Whether it’s Amazon’s book recommendations, or Netflix, Pandora Radio, or Google Search, we rely on algorithms and computers […]
Brains, Minds, and Machines @ MIT May 3-5
The granddaddies of artificial intelligence are holding a conference on reinvigorating the field, bringing together the best thinkers in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the social sciences for three […]
Silicon Valley: Hackers, hucksters, and the hopeful
Two articles in the business news caught my eye recently, providing very different takes on entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. From Business Insider, Google’s Larry Page Does Exactly the Right Thing: […]
A Train Runs Through It
To these Thai fruit vendors, a train roaring through the middle of their makeshift market, coming inches away from their lychees — and their toes — is just another part […]
From Hot to Shot in Four Years
Talk about time compression. The Flip video camera went from being a red-shot start-up in 2007, to a best-selling item, to a half-billion-dollar acquisition target, to defunct, in only four years. […]
TED: Eric Whitacre, A virtual choir 2000 voices strong
Talk about bottom-up collaboration to achieve large goals. This shows how to create a choir with over 2,000 voices from around the world, each singing alone, in front of his […]
In A World of Rapid Change, What Kind of Critter Do You Want to Be?
There are two kinds of critters on this planet. One produces zillions of offspring, then pays scant attention to them, playing the odds that some will survive. The other produces […]