Artificial intelligence to transform web: Russian tycoon – “”I think that in 10 years if you ask a question on a social network and you get an answer you will not know if a computer or a person has answered you,” Milner told the financial daily. “When you receive a question, you will not know if it has been asked by a person or an artificial intelligence. And by answering you help the computer create an algorithm.”..”

what it’s like being sacked by a computer… – “On Monday the 13th of December – two weeks before Christmas – I was sacked by a Google algorithm. It sent an email to me and summarily killed my main source of income. No humans were involved in this process at all. It was, literally, the most inhumane letting go I have ever experienced….” One of his films:

Cory Booker: The Mayor of Twitter and Superhero of the Blizzard – “If you’re a mayor of a northeastern U.S. city, you probably despise Cory Booker right now, because the tweeting mayor of Newark, N.J., is now a social-media superhero, able to move towering snowbanks in a single push — or by sending the shovels and plows your way….” See also: Lord of the Fliers: Will Anarchy Break Out Among Throngs of Stranded Air Travelers?

The Nintendo 3DS Will Destroy Children’s Eyeballs – “Well, now when parents tell young kids to turn off the 3D on Nintendo’s 3DS ’cause it’ll ruin their eyes—they’ll actually be right….”

100 Trillion Connections: New Efforts Probe and Map the Brain’s Detailed Architecture – “The noise of billions of brain cells trying to communicate with one another may hold a crucial clue to understanding consciousness…”

Air New Zealand introduces ‘Cuddle Class’ – “Skycouch, also known as ‘Cuddle Class’, gives couples and families the opportunity to lie down like they would on their couch at home. Two passengers travelling together will be able to buy the third seat at half-price….”

GPS III – Delivering Impressive GPS Navigation Benefits – “Since the removal of selective availability, the United States Global Positioning System (GPS) services have become progressively integrated into our everyday lives. Few would realize that as well as providing navigation services, the incredibly accurate time keeping provided by GPS satellite atomic clocks is used in time dependant activities such as stock trading, electricity grid control and credit card transactions. Yet, for all the progress there is still much to come….”

The Metal Marvel That Has Mended Brains for 50 Years – “Lithium—a simple metal and the oldest drug in psychiatry—might protect the brain against mental illness, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. One problem: There’s no profit in it….”

A Pinpoint Beam Strays Invisibly, Harming Instead of Healing – “Marci Faber was one of the three patients. She had gone to Evanston Hospital in Illinois seeking treatment for pain emanating from a nerve deep inside her head. Today, she is in a nursing home, nearly comatose, unable to speak, eat or walk, leaving her husband to care for their three young daughters. Two other patients were overdosed before the hospital realized that the device, a linear accelerator, had inexplicably allowed radiation to spill outside a heavy metal cone attachment that was supposed to channel the beam to a specific spot in the brain. One month later, the same accident happened at another hospital….”

An Introduction to Net Neutrality: What It Is, What It Means for You, and What You Can Do About It – “An Introduction to Net Neutrality: What It Is, What It Means for You, and What You Can Do About ItWe’ve dropped the net neutrality term around here a few times, but you may not entirely understand what it’s all about. Here’s a primer on what net neutrality is, how it might affect you, and what you can do about it….”

Twitter Doorbell with Photo via TwitPic – “I’m 17 and received a NerdKit for Christmas (thanks, dad!) and quickly picked up the different style of programming and thought processes required. I remembered reading about someone using an Arduino to make a doorbell that sent a tweet when rung. I thought, can I do this with my NerdKit? Of course!”

The printed future of Christmas dinner – “Christmas dinner traditionally centres on the turkey or goose. But if US scientists have their way, everyone may be sitting around a printer. The team at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL) are building a 3D food printer, as part of the bigger Fab@home project, which they hope one day will be as commonplace as the microwave oven or blender….”

My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage Act — Here’s Why We Must Fight to Protect Julian Assange – “The Espionage Act is a huge danger to our open society; it’s been used to send hundreds of dissenters to jail just for voicing their opinions, transforming dissent into treason….”

2010 review of green technologies – “From electric cars to solar-powered planes and giant turbines, 2010 has seen huge progress in green technology development…”

The 10 biggest tech ‘fails’ of 2010

Why global warming causes winter storms

Researchers eavesdrop on encrypted GSM call: all you need is a $15 phone and 180 seconds – “It’s hardly a fresh idea — researchers have claimed that GSM calls could be cracked and listened in on for years. But there’s a difference between being able to do something with a $50,000 machine and a warrant, and being able to do the same thing with a few $15 Motorola phones, a laptop, open source software and 180 seconds of spare time….”

The Next Big DDOS Attack May Come via BitTorrent – “Thought BitTorrent was just about downloading movies and TV shows? Think again: The BitTorrent protocol can be abused to initiate massive denial of service attacks, which could be used to take down large-scale websites, according to a talk given at Germany’s annual Chaos Communications Congress hacker conference. The exploit detailed during a talk titled “Lying to the neighbors” is based on BitTorrent’s ability to download data without the help of any centralized server, also known as trackerless BitTorrent….”

‘Zombiesat’ Is Alive! – “Can reanimated corpses ever really be brought back to life? In the case of the Intelsat Galaxy 15 satellite that had its “brains fried” by a solar flare nine months ago, it would appear that zombies really can be brought back from the dead…”

After the Storm: Satellite catches U.S. East Coast blizzard moving out to sea – “The U.S. East Coast endured a powerful blizzard over the past several days that dumped more than a meter of snow in some locations. NASA’s Geostationary Operational Environment Satellite (GOES-13) caught this picture of the storm moving out to sea late Monday night, leaving behind a whitened landscape from at least North Carolina to New York….”

The man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game – “Piers Corbyn not only predicted the current weather, but he believes things are going to get much worse, says Boris Johnson….”

Photographs To Cover Cost Of Medical Bills – “It is the last photograph Joao Silva took in October, just before losing both of his legs in a catastrophic landmine explosion. Silva, an award-winning New York Times photographer, is now recovering in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Meanwhile, to help defray the costs of his medical treatment, his friends recently organized an auction in Johannesburg of some of his most famous photographs….”

The Mechanic Trailer

NETRA: Interactive Display for Estimating Refractive Errors and Focal Range – “We introduce an interactive, portable, and inexpensive solution for estimating refractive errors in the human eye. While expensive optical devices for automatic estimation of refractive correction exist, our goal is to greatly simplify the mechanism by putting the human subject in the loop. Our solution is based on a high-resolution programmable display and combines inexpensive optical elements, interactive GUI, and computational reconstruction. The key idea is to interface a lenticular view-dependent display with the human eye at close range – a few millimeters apart. Via this platform, we create a new range of interactivity that is extremely sensitive to parameters of the human eye, such as the refractive errors, focal range, focusing speed, lens opacity, etc. We propose several simple optical setups, verify their accuracy, precision, and validate them in a user study….”

MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors – “Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: In the near future, we’ll be able to build machines that learn, reason, and even emote their way to solving problems, the way people do. If you’ve ever been interested in artificial intelligence, you’ve seen that promise broken countless times. Way back in the 1960s, the relatively recent invention of the transistor prompted breathless predictions that machines would outsmart their human handlers within 20 years. Now, 50 years later, it seems the best we can do is automated tech support, intoned with a preternatural calm that may or may not send callers into a murderous rage….”

Use Your USB Flash Drive As a “Key” to Lock Your PCs – “You might have seen in the movies; a USB drive is inserted into a computer and it immediately springs to life. It is not difficult, you can use an application PREDATOR for exactly same thing….”

If virtual desktops great, why not used more? – “If VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is so great, then why aren’t you using it? Laptop computer (Credit: Openclipart.org (metalmarious)) It’s a really good question, isn’t it? Brian observes that however encouraged we are by the progress VDI has made, and however enthused we may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, we, personally, are not using desktop virtualization. You don’t see analysts and developers doing so. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse–the people selling VDI, for goodness’ sake!–use traditional “fat” notebooks….”

New ‘super’ computer that’s greener, 20 times faster than desktop PCs – “Scientists at the University of Glasgow have developed an ultra-fast computer chip, which is 20 times faster than regular desktop computers. Regular PCs have two, four or sometimes 16 cores but the new central processing unit (CPU) developed by the researchers effectively had 1,000 cores on a single chip….”

Many U.S. companies are hiring … overseas – “Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn’t anyone hiring? Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They’re hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat….”

[[[Interesting reading #652 – 1,000-core chips, China’s carrier killer, 2011′s tech concepts, Simulating the entire planet and much more!]]]

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