Computers/Infotech/UI

Breakthrough: proton-based chips that communicate directly with living things

University of Washington scientists have just crossed another major threshold between humans and machines: they’ve built a transistor that uses protons instead of electrons. Their ultimate goal: create devices that can communicate directly with living things certain biological functions that involve protons — eventually even control them — a “first step toward ‘bionanoprotonics‘.” Yes, there [...]

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Is Sponge Bob destroying kids’ minds — or accelerating their intelligence?

Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become “handicapped” in their readiness for learning, says a new University of Virginia study. U.Va. psychologists tested 4-year-old children immediately after they had watched nine minutes of the popular show “SpongeBob SquarePants” and found that their “executive function” — the ability to pay attention, follow rules, [...]

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teleXLR8 returns, featuring quantum physicist Gildert on ‘Hack the Multiverse!’

This exciting news just in from Giulio Prisco: “teleXLR8 is reopening on Sunday 21 10 a.m. PST with a talk by [experimental quantum physicist/programmer] Suzanne Gildert on Hack the Multiverse!.” The teleXLR8 online talk program is “a telepresence community for cultural acceleration,” as their blog puts it. Translation: an audiovideo seminar — think TED in [...]

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Discounted Refurbished Notebooks Lot Sale

Discounted Laptop Lot Sales

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How to measure emotions

Are you a geek who has trouble “reading” people? Now there new hope. Research at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Cambridge to help people on the autism spectrum has spawned two new technologies to measure emotional response, along with a company called Affectiva to market them. In the videos below, MIT’s Dr. [...]

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Stephen Malinowski’s ‘Music Animation Machine’

Watson: supercharged search engine or prototype robot overlord?

My initial reaction to reading about IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer and software was a big fat ho-hum. “OK,” I figured, “a program that plays “Jeopardy!” may be impressive to Joe Blow in the street, but I’m an AI guru so I know pretty much exactly what kind of specialized trickery they’re using under the hood. It’s [...]

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Jeopardy!, IBM, and Wolfram|Alpha

About a month before Wolfram|Alpha launched, I was on the phone with a group from IBM, talking about our vision for computable knowledge in Wolfram|Alpha. A few weeks later, the group announced that they were going to use what they had done in natural language processing to try to make a system to compete on Jeopardy! [...]

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book review | Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In 1938, existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote “Hell is other people.” Sartre may never have cobbled together his existential philosophy that viewed human individuals as utterly alone — alienated, atomized beings in a vast meaningless universe — if he had grown up playing with social robots and holding others at a discreet psychological distance [...]

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Thinking about the hardware of thinking: Can disruptive technologies help us achieve uploading?

As we begin to run larger and more brain-like emulations, will our current methods of simulating neural networks, using general-purpose silicon processors, be enough, even in principle? As we wish to run computations faster and more efficiently, we might we need to consider if the design of the hardware that we all take for granted [...]

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