Archive for the 'Technology' Category
“Smart Cities”
February 20th, 2014Via: Fast Company: Tech giant Cisco thinks there’s something to all this talk of ”smart cities”–and that connecting roads or license plate readers to the Internet is going to be big business. In the latest installment of their ongoing expansion into the Internet of Things, Cisco recently announced an agreement with Swiss security firm AGT […]
Cambodia: Homemade Bamboo Trains
February 20th, 2014Via: YouTube: Cambodia has one rail line. It is not well built, not maintained, and generally unsafe. For that reason, Cambodia no longer operates heavy trains. The people, however, have created an inexpensive and lightweight system to travel safely on the rails. These bamboo trains are pushed by small gasoline engines, and roll on two […]
Brain Implant Lets One Monkey Control Another
February 20th, 2014Via: Live Science: In work inspired partly by the movie “Avatar,” one monkey could control the body of another monkey using thought alone by connecting the brain of the puppet-master monkey to the spine of the other through a prosthesis, researchers say. These findings could help lead to implants that help patients overcome paralysis, scientists […]
Chicago: Predictive Policing Experiments
February 20th, 2014Via: The Verge: When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a […]
‘Star Wars’ at Sea: Navy Ready to Deploy Laser System This Summer
February 17th, 2014Via: AP: Some of the Navy’s futuristic weapons sound like something out of “Star Wars,” with lasers designed to shoot down aerial drones and electric guns that fire projectiles at hypersonic speeds. That future is now. The Navy plans to deploy its first laser on a ship later this year, and it intends to test […]
“A Robotic Wingman of Sorts”: Heavily Armed Drones May Accompany U.S. Fighter Pilots Into Combat
February 15th, 2014Via: U.S. Naval Institute: Could the U.S. Navy’s future Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft have an air-to-air role? The service’s director of air warfare Rear Adm. Mike Manazir posed that it could during a Dec. 20 interview with USNI News. Manazir contemplated the possibility that that the UCLASS, which is primarily being […]
Secret Military Contractors Will Soon Mine Your Tweets
February 13th, 2014Via: DefenseOne: The Army wants a contractor to conduct detailed social media data mining to “identify violent extremist influences” around the world that could affect the European Command, responsible for operations in Europe as well as Iceland, Israel, Greenland and Russia. Though the project is classified Secret, an Army contract shop in Europe posted a […]
You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi.
February 13th, 2014Via: ProPublica: The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime. But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching my book Dragnet […]
After 5 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes
February 13th, 2014Via: Mashable: Persistence, it turns out, does pay off. After rejecting it five times, Apple has finally approved an app that tracks every U.S. drone strike and sends a push notification to users every time a flying robot carries out a deadly mission around the world. Josh Begley, the data artist and developer who made […]
Much of the Editing Work on Wikipedia Is Done by Bots
February 13th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: Less well known is Wikidata, an information repository designed to share basic facts for use on different language versions of Wikipedia. Wikidata therefore plays a crucial role in lubricating the flow of information between these online communities. Maintaining all this data is a difficult job. It requires significant editing and polishing, […]
