They look a bit like communally written Wikipedia pages. But these articles—concise profiles of people and organizations, complete with lists of connected organizations, people, and events—were in fact written by computers, in a new bid by the Pentagon to build machines that can follow global news events and provide intelligence analysts with useful summaries in close to real time.
I imagine this technology will continue becoming more and more accurate until we eventually see it applied in areas like news and communication.
What's the best way to organize an auction in which bidders are competing for multiple items? That question has stood for 30 years, but MIT computer scientists believe that they have now answered it. In a pair of recent papers, Constantinos Daskalakis, the X-Window Consortium Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and his students Yang Cai and Matthew Weinberg describe an algorithm for finding an almost-perfect approximation of the optimal design of a multi-item auction.
Not exactly sure where this leads, since it's outside my understanding of economics, but it's cool to see such a question solved.
Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever--the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check our email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or...) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It's not abnormal, and it's not just for business. It's just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it's just life.
Mobile technology has replaced smoking as the social tic, changing societal interaction and our sense of connectedness. I really like the analogy, but it's interesting to note that smoking is often a social activity where technological interaction is often a means of escape.
Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: physical retailers will be hosed.
Researchers have proposed a method to automatically detect a new class of software glitches in smartphones called "no-sleep energy bugs," which can entirely drain batteries while the phones are not in use.
While limited because of it's Android-specific approach, this is definitely something all smartphone manufacturers need to be concerned about investigating.
We, the people, have the means to eliminate laws we find noxious through our elected officials. Many have hoped that the Supreme Court would rule the mandate unconstitutional because they have little faith in Congress's — our elected officials — ability to get anything of any importance at all done, and I have little doubt many of those people are angry with the Court's decision today. But that is not the Court's concern, nor their role. Their job is not to take up slack when our elected officials are shirking their duties, and it is not only unfair, but counter to our system of government, to expect the Court to do so.
Best write-up of the Supreme Court's recent ruling I've read yet.
One of the most promising [opportunities] came from Pratt & Whitney's Canadian subsidiary, which had a risky plan to open up an entirely new market—China. Large risks were involved, however: the program was shrouded in secrecy, for one. It also involved working with partners who had a reputation for ripping off technology.
And it just happened to be illegal.
Happy birthday America. Stay off this year's compilation. (NSFW language, obviously).
I'm not shocked about the science, just the typography.
Why are we still receiving these emails more than a decade after they first became widespread public knowledge? At this point the country of Nigeria is synonymous with this sort of electronic sleight of hand, and yet scammers still largely claim to hail from the West African country.
Apparently it's more economical for spammers to weed out the "intelligent Internet users."