Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Inexpensive Electric Cars Sooner Rather Than Later?
April 6th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford, but a new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with or even beating gas cars on cost. The true cost of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars is a secret closely held by manufacturers. And […]
Sea-Based X-Band Radar: Another Multi Billion Dollar Pentagon Boondoggle
April 5th, 2015Via: Los Angeles Times: Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were effusive about the new technology. It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country. If North Korea launched a sneak […]
Car Completes 99% of 3,400-Mile U.S. Road Trip in Autonomous Mode
April 3rd, 2015Via: AP: An autonomous car’s recent 3,400-mile U.S. road trip proves there’s at least one thing computers do better than humans: Follow the speed limit. Auto supplier Delphi Corp. fitted an Audi Q5 with radar, cameras and laser sensors to navigate the 15-state journey from San Francisco to New York, mostly traveling on highways. The […]
AI Interns: Software Already Taking Jobs from Humans
April 1st, 2015Via: New Scientist: Humans used to manually move data between the relevant systems to complete these tasks, copying a phone number from one database to another, for instance. The user still has to call up and speak to a human, but now an AI does the actual work. To train the AI, it watches and […]
Amazon Tests Delivery Drones at Secret Canadian Site After U.S. Frustration
March 31st, 2015Via: Guardian: Amazon is testing its drone delivery service at a secret site in Canada, following repeated warnings by the e-commerce giant that it would go outside the US to bypass what it sees as the US federal government’s lethargic approach to the new technology. The largest internet retailer in the world is keeping the […]
“The messengers do talk… They end up asking each other which apps they work for”
March 25th, 2015It’s not Portlandia. Baylandia? Oh yeah, Silicon Valley. Via: Medium: Angel the concierge stands behind a lobby desk at a luxe apartment building in downtown San Francisco, and describes the residents of this imperial, 37-story tower. “Ubers, Squares, a few Twitters,” she says. “A lot of work-from-homers.” And by late afternoon on a Tuesday, they’re […]
Hollywood Increasingly Re-Animating Dead Actors
March 25th, 2015Via: The Hollywood Reporter: No actor is indispensable. That is the blunt lesson from the fact that Universal Pictures was able to complete its April 3 tentpole, Furious 7, following star Paul Walker’s death in a November 2013 car accident about halfway through the shoot. Beyond saying that brothers Cody and Caleb stood in for […]
Amazon Now Wanting to Automate Pick and Pack
March 25th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: Robots will use the latest computer-vision and machine-learning algorithms to try to perform the work done by humans in vast fulfillment centers.
Apple Patent Envisions Tracking People in Real Time
March 25th, 2015.gov has probably been doing it for years, so why not? Via: cnet: Apple’s current Find My Friends feature could one day expand into more of a Track My Friends feature. Granted to Apple on Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, a patent called “Sharing location information among devices” describes a process that […]
Technology and Persuasion
March 23rd, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: The idea that computers, mobile phones, websites, and other technologies could be designed to influence people’s behavior and even attitudes dates back to the early 1990s, when Stanford professor B.?J. Fogg coined the term “persuasive computing” (later broadened to “persuasive technology”). But today many companies have taken that one step further: […]
