We’ve had the industrial revolution, and now we’re amid the data revolution. ‘Big data’ is a tectonic shift that will continue to affect many things we do for decades to come.
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While the president is “the ultimate authorizer of Armageddon,” what if his mind “is deranged, disordered, even damagingly intoxicated?
The latest X Prize competition was unveiled to “develop a mobile solution that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.”
In his groundbreaking 1995 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes Elliott, a patient who had no problem understanding information, but who nonetheless could not live a normal life. Elliott […]
Joi Ito has championed the MIT Media Lab’s inter-disciplinary approach to problem-solving. That means instead of specializing, going deep enough in a number of fields in order to understand the nuances and connect with other experts.
Skype programmer Jaan Tallinn isn’t so sure we’ll ever be able to build networks that can replicate– even in a business context – the communicative power of meeting in person. Instead, he believes, we’ll continue to edge asymptotically closer.
More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a percent that is estimated to increase to 70% by 2050. Much of the urban growth will be in the emerging […]
The brain is hardwired for storytelling. What stories give us, in the end, is reassurance. And as childish as it may seem, that sense of security – that coherent sense of self – is essential to our survival.
An extreme-ultraviolet microscope for creating the next generation of microchips has been created by scientists in collaboration with leading semiconductor manufacturers.
How could science fiction get it all so wrong? Big Think posed this question to Jim Kakalios, Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota in a previous post. In […]
Here’s why the B.B.C. has switched off its auto-feed tweets during the day—human tweets are more likely to get people interested and engaged, retweeting and clicking through.
Stanford’s experiment in offering its three most popular computer science classes to the public for free online has seen a huge take-up, with 200,000 people enrolled.
The high-tech parents from Silicon Valley are now sending their kids to a school—the Waldorf School of the Peninsula—that sells itself as computer-free. Why? Such technology is a distraction, turning […]
“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, “because there’s the […]
Ahead of a U.N. climate conference, another large cache of emails stolen from climate scientists has been published. Where does such fervent doubt over climate change come from?
IBM envisages tomorrow’s computer as a big sandwich of silicon chips. It’s teaming up with 3M to develop a special glue that would make the evolutionary leap in computing possible.
Like a superhero masking their “real” identity, Cindy Sherman may be the most photographed person in history whose “real” face (whatever that means) remains a mystery. Since the 1970s Sherman’s […]
Last month, I posted my review of “An Unquenchable Thirst”, Mary Johnson’s luminous and enlightening memoir about the twenty years she spent as one of Mother Teresa’s nuns. After writing […]
Steve Jobs was right again. A year and a half after Apple’s late founder endorsed HTML5, the programming technique is quickly winning over programmers and website developers.
“To me, being a DJ and being the Director of the Media Lab are essentially the same thing,” says Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab.
Google has unveiled a music purchasing platform that allows musicians to directly upload their songs for purchase, bypassing record labels entirely. Is this the nail in the coffin?
Small computer implants that read brain activity like radio waves are becoming less invasive and more effective at interfacing with computers. There are a range of commercial uses.
Honda’s Asimo robot can now run faster, balance better on uneven surfaces, hop on one foot and even pour a drink. Some of those skills may allow it help clean up the Fukushima plant.
Employers now have a new tool “to cut through the crap and get to the right person” when recruiting–a video interview screening service.
I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazinewrite-up on the release of The Corrections. It began: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. […]
Unrestrained obstructionism as a political strategy practically guarantees that the epitaph on the GOP’s 2012 presidential aspirations will read “too stupid to quit while they were ahead.” Is John Boehner […]
The Kindle Fire itself isn’t groundbreaking as far as devices go, but it should provide the most convenient platform for accessing Amazon’s many services. It can succeed without killing the iPad.
Expect 2012 to be the year of a major push to sell us ‘families’ of interconnected screen devices that use the cloud to store our digital entertainment libraries.
We survey the groundbreaking ideas of 2011 from experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Sal Khan, Daniel Burrus, Michio Kaku, Steven Pinker and many others.
At the end of War and Peace Tolstoy compares belief in free will to medieval cosmologies where the Sun revolved around the Earth. To know the true cosmos, he writes, […]