Data gathering usually requires an extensive infrastructure, but open mobile technologies could change that. An interview with Yaw Anokwa of the Open Data Kit project.
Thierry Henry’s handball during the now infamous France-Ireland World Cup qualifying match, clearly caught on camera and later acknowledged by the player himself, has reignited in some quarters an often discussed call for the use of technology to aid referee decisions during soccer matches. But the real problem isn’t technology, and rather than being behind the times, soccer has actually been ahead of much of society.
Not only will we spend the rest of our lives in the future, we also spend quite a bit of our present thoughts on it, wondering about, and wanting and dreading, the technologies, problems, discoveries, and upheavals that await us. But this focus on the future might be dulling our edge when it comes to adapting to it in creative ways.
Improved life expectancy across the developed and most of the developing world is one of the main triumphs of medicine. But although the expected lifetime of an individual is slowly increasing in most countries, the maximum lifespan isn’t.
This is an interview with Marko A. Rodriguez, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Besides doing basic research on applied mathematics and computer science, he is doing work on computational eudaemonics — the use of computer algorithms to increase happiness by helping us make better decisions, even suggesting new options.
Conserving ecosystems is not enough. Too much of the global ecosystem has already been damaged beyond recognition, and the economic and demographic pressures driving this deterioration are still present and, if anything, strengthened.
We are used to scale being the telltale characteristic of state involvement in warfare. Individuals can go on shooting sprees, and terrorist cells can put bombs, but only states can engage in large-scale warfare. But, as most metaphors of the ‘cyber-’ kind, this intuition breaks down with so-called cyberwarfare.
There’s a dark magic in every negotiation table. No matter what the stakes — political, economical, personal — there’s a sinister spell worthy of a Voldemort clouding minds and making what should be impossible a daily occurrence.
Space travel is very cheap. There’s no friction in the vacuum of space, so once you get something to move, it just keeps moving without spending any energy. The problem lies in getting things away from the gravity well of a planet.
Issue 20(1) of JET is now complete, with Jamie Cullen’s article on the Chinese Room thought experiment, plus reviews of Watchmen and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True.
There are useful, if unexpected, lessons to be learned from pirates: progressive management from the pirates of the sea, and how to run a media business from the ‘pirates’ of the net.
There are good reasons for healthcare to be an attractive business. The demographics are fantastic, with aging populations practically everywhere, and specially so in higher-income countries. Unlike other fields, technology doesn’t necessarily lowers margins. For reasons that have more to do with market incentives than scientific limitations, most research is focused on profitable high-complexity, high-cost interventions, and for every cost-saving development there’s a new procedure that requires sophisticated equipment and highly trained specialists. A large and growing percentage of GDP is dedicated to healthcare, both by individuals and governments. And to top it all, the market is full of inefficiencies and complex barriers of entry.
How likely is for people to make adequate probability judgments, and how much do intelligence and formal education help them? The answers will likely surprise you.
It’s often said that we live in a Knowledge Economy. So we invest in IT and use it to automate administrative activities. That’s like using engines in farms but still move around on horses. The underlying problem is that no matter how intelligent and capable the members of a group might be, for most organizational cultures administrative activities are the only sort of relevant intellectual activities.
IEET Assistant Director Marcelo Rinesi is editing a new online magazine, Frontier Economy, focusing on the economic and business implications of emerging technologies.
IEET Assistant Director Marcelo Rinesi has begun Hectowords, a blog of short SF stories (or contemporary fiction; sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference…).
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