August 2011
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Watch(via NYTimes Brings You the Kitchen Table of the Future - DesignTAXI.com)
I doubt that this incarnation will be a hit since it is not mobile or physically adaptive. Kitchen tables are usually associated with food or drink, which seems to disturb the interaction (or is it the other way round??)… My iPad on the other hand can reside together with my tea, juice and sandwiches without trouble!
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Freakonomics » Our Future Looks Fat: Study... →
The results of a new study by public health researchers at Columbia University and Oxford University forecasts that by 2030, there will be an additional 65 million obese adults living in the U. S., and 11 million more in the U.K. That would bring the U.S. obese population up from 99 million to 164 million, roughly half the population.
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Meat without slaughter: '6 months' to bio-sausages... →
The first lab-grown sausage might be just six months away, though, according to Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands - a major pioneer and champion of the technology. Post has experimented mainly with pig cells and has recently developed a way to grow muscle under lab conditions - by feeding pig stem cells with horse fetal serum. He has produced muscle-like strips, each 2.5...
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Stanford’s latest global virtual classroom may... →
This is a really interesting experiment in remote and free education on a scale we haven’t seen before. If your are interested in AI, why not taking the class yourself?
If something really is changing the mindset on what academic educations can be in the future it is initiatives and experiments like this.
Stanford University has launched a new experiment in distributed education, offering...
The political party that wants to ban PowerPoint |... →
Switzerland could become the first country to outlaw PowerPoint presentations if a new party runs in the October parliamentary elections. Matthias Poehm, founder of the Anti-PowerPoint Party, claims that €350bn could be saved globally each year by ditching the scourge of public speaking. Poehm believes that the software takes people away from their work and teaches them little. “There is a...
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'Flexitime' school that rewrites the book on... →
Welcome to the world of flexitime schooling which will see a child in Spain educated through Skype from the UK and a mother who splits her son’s education between home teaching and school. Hollinsclough Church of England primary school in Staffordshire is the first in the UK to introduce a part-time policy for pupils.
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Now she has 11 full-time pupils, 10 part-timers and as many as...
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Britain to launch personalized medicine project :... →
A UK pilot project for mass genetic screening of cancers will begin next month. The project will combine personalized medicine and centralized research, with the aim of benefiting patients and scientists.
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Surplus material from biopsies on the tumours will be sent to three centralized laboratories and tested for specific genes and mutations. Eventually it is hoped that this...
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Virtual Assistant Replaces Driver's Manual in... →
The next time you ask yourself “why did that warning light just turn on?”, your car may very well answer you right back with a brief explanation. Audi has developed an interactive owner’s manual that uses a video avatar and voice recognition software to provide a virtual mechanic to help out drivers.
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And that’s just the beginning. Currently, Audi scientists...
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Public library will lend out people as ‘living... →
Slated to open sometime in the coming weeks, Surrey’s 77,000-square-foot City Centre Library will be notable in many ways, not least of which is its LEED silver certification for sustainability. Even more intriguing, though, is that in addition to a planned collection of some 100,000 items, the CAD 36 million library will also allow users to “check out” human experts with knowledge of particular...
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Timely: An iPhone App That Warns You When... →
In Japan, which is still reeling from the earthquake and tsunami in March, Apple just released news that its new iOS 5 operating system will allow users the option of receiving early earthquake notifications on their iPhones. The warning app plugs directly into Japan’s national earthquake warning system, one of the most advanced in the world, and can buy iPhone users anywhere from seconds...
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NHS to crowdsource the next wave of healthcare... →
The UK’s Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has launched a competition inviting developers, doctors and patients to submit ideas for health apps that could help patients make informed decisions about their care.
This seems to be a good initiative. I wonder if anyone have thought about how to deal with the responsibility issues…
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When algorithms control the world →
Algorithms are spreading their influence around the globe
If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle...
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Hacked in 60 Seconds: Thieves Could Steal Cars via... →
infoneer-pulse:
iSEC researchers Don Bailey and Mat Solnik claim to be able to hack their way into a securely locked car because its alarm relies on a cell phone or satellite network that can receive commands via text messaging. Devices connecting via a cellular or satellite network are assigned the equivalent of a phone number or Web address. If hackers can figure out the number or address for...
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British Libraries Push Back →
infoneer-pulse:
Major research libraries in Britain have told the two largest journal publishers that they will not renew their “big deals” with them if they do not make significant real-terms price reductions.
Research Libraries UK, which includes the Russell Group university libraries, as well as Britain’s national libraries and Trinity College Library Dublin, have told Elsevier and...
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Memory contaminates perception | Mo Costandi |... →
We take it for granted that we see the world as it actually is, but in fact, we do not. Our perception of the world is the brain’s best guess at what is actually happening, based on the information it receives through the senses. Optical illusions clearly demonstrate that the brain does not always interpret sensory information correctly, by producing a discrepancy between what we see and and...
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Innovators Gone Wild: Patent Office Issues... →
infoneer-pulse:
And the winner is: Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., which has just received patent number 8,000,000 for a device to help people with a certain type of vision impairment see better.
Patent No. 8,000,000 is not actually the 8,000,000th patent granted in the United States. Patent No. 1 wasn’t issued until 1836; the approximately 10,000 earlier patents used a different indexing...
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“It is by now an old idea in futurology, originating with Alvin Toffler, that...”
– GPS and the End of the Road, fantastic long read from The New Atlantis (via curiositycounts)
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Social Connectedness and the Future of Well-Being →
The good news about this is that in many ways, we actually are moving into a more socially connected world, despite a fair amount of conventional wisdom that digital technologies isolate us. For example, a recently released working paper by Stefan Bauernschuster and colleagues finds that “virtually all estimates… for all social capital measures point in the positive direction” between digital...
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Study: Austerity Leads to Violence And Instability →
The relation between austerity and riots is so clear that former IMF chief economist and Noble prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz coined a phrase to describe what happens after the International Monetary Fund demands austerity in return for loans to indebted countries: “The IMF Riot”.
National crowdsourcing project to better predict... →
If intelligence agencies could have accurately predicted the events of 9/11, imagine how world history would have changed.
A new model for crowdsourcing predictions called Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES) is transforming the way future events are forecast – combining the collective knowledge of many individual opinions in a unique way that improves accuracy beyond what any...
Generation F*cked →
The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the...
“The idea of the future of news is often met with fear and uncertainty. But...”
– The Future Of News Is Going To Be Awesome
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Smart grid may crush power companies at unexpected... →
The smart grid could go a long way in conserving energy and smoothing out load demand for the nation’s utilities. Researchers at MIT however, say there may be a law of unintended consequences at work with smart grid. If too many people set appliances to turn on, or devices to recharge, when the price of electricity crosses the same threshold, it could cause a huge spike in demand — and...
