Brian links

FOR the past decade or so, generals commanding the world's most advanced armies have been able to rely on accurate forecasts of the outcomes of conventional battles. Given data on weather and terrain, and the combatants' numbers, weaponry, positions, training and level of morale, computer programs such as the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, designed by the Dupuy Institute in Washington, DC, can predict who will win, how quickly and with how many casualties.

Are the financial markets rational?  It's a tough claim to make as share prices and bond yields zoom up and down during a single day, hour, or even second, sometimes without any obvious reasons.  Yet for the first time in human history, the markets may be approaching the ideal of rationality that economists have long cherished.

Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard. Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn't a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market - at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. This is like day one of the mouse.  Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.

If the Space Race characterized the twentieth century, it's possible the Teleportation Race may characterize the twenty-first. Scientists all over the world are trying to perfect teleportation techniques, for a wide variety of applications including communications technology. (Sorry, this isn't the kind of teleportation that involves sending you through a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy.) And now, a group of researchers led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai have published a paper on ArXiv describing how they teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometres across a lake in China.

Search is a lot about discovery-the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I'm really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. 

Learning to code is becoming the key skill for anyone who wants to launch a tech startup, or even just get a job working at a hot tech company. That may seem intimidating, but programming is not some monumental skill that only specially gifted people can learn. Really, it it isn't all that different from learning to speak another language. If you can pick up the rudiments of Spanish or French in a couple of weeks, how hard could it be to get started with Ruby On Rails? The Developer Bootcamp is designed to help anyone get started coding - and they might even get a job at a startup or tech heavyweight out of it as well.

Ever since his grad student days at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Amir Ronen, now a scientist at IBM Research -  Haifa, has been thinking about the intersection of game theory and computer science. In fact, he's one of the leaders in a sub-discipline, called algorithmic game theory, which lies at the intersection of the two fields.

Inside NYU art professor David Darts' black metal lunchbox, painted with a white skull and crossbones, is the PirateBox - a tiny Linux server, a wireless router, and a battery. Turn the PirateBox on and you have a self-contained mobile communications and file-sharing device, whereby those in the vicinity can upload and download files securely and anonymously. (See this 2011 Ars Technica story for photos and details.) Built with free and open source software and openly licensed itself, the PirateBox has inspired a number of other projects, including Alan Levine's Storybox and now Jason Griffey's LibraryBox.

The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.

500 feet beneath the ocean's surface, the Colorado receives their orders!

In a controversial paper in Nature Physics, theorists claim they can prove that wavefunctions - the entity that determines the probability of different outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical particles - are real states.

Last year Golan Levin's son decided to build a car. Aside from the minor inconvenience of being 4 years old, the younger Levin faced an engineering challenge. His Tinkertoys, which he wanted to use for the vehicle's frame, wouldn't attach to his K'Nex, the pieces he wanted to use for the wheels. It took his father, an artist, hacker and professor at Carnegie Mellon, a year to solve that problem. In the process he cracked open a much larger one: In an age when anyone can share, download and create not just digital files but also physical things, thanks to the proliferation of cheap 3-D printers, are companies at risk of losing control of the objects they sell?

For those of you who don't know, the Raspberry Pi is a "credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard."   While "underpowered" compared to full sized traditional computers, there are some ground-breaking distinctions.  The Raspberry Pi Model B comes as a small computer motherboard with RCA video, audio, HDMI, LAN, two USB connections, and a small USB micro power connector on board - all for just $35.1

One of the enabling technologies for a quantum internet is the ability to store and retrieve quantum information in a reliable and repeatable way.  One of the more promising ways to do this involves photons and tiny clouds of rubidium gas. Rubidium atoms have an interesting property in that a magnetic field causes their electronic energy levels to split, creating a multitude of new levels. Switching the field off, returns the atoms to their normal state.

A new stage play that turns all your ideas about humanity on their head Do we achieve a better sense of self and others by interfacing with our machines? Or are we just losing the true essence of humanity?

Last Thursday, tech website Xconomy hosted a forum on "The Future of Robotics in Silicon Valley and Beyond." We were there, of course, and so were a lot of other famous robotics people, including Aaron Edsinger of Meka Robotics, who had an announcement to make: an entirely new company called Redwood Robotics, a joint venture between Meka Robotics, Willow Garage, and SRI International.

Researchers have remotely activated genes inside living animals, a proof of concept that could one day lead to medical procedures in which patients' genes are triggered on demand. The work, in which a team used radio waves to switch on engineered insulin-producing genes in mice, is published today in Science1.

We are living a unique moment in history. The development of communication technologies has produced a change in the modes of interaction of society, creating new forms of relating which are fundamentally different from those before. These new ways of relating and technologies have contributed to the emergence of new social and political movements. These movements, as exemplified by the Arab Spring, the democratisation movement in Iceland, and the 15M / TakeTheSquare / Occupy movement, are the most strinking examples of the potential of this new phase (together with other phenomena such as Wikileaks and Anonymous).

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

This honor goes to Dr. Ronald Breslow of Columbia University, who ended his recent paper "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society with an ominous editorial. After an otherwise technical paper about the prehistoric origins of amino acids, the conclusion takes a turn for the extremely sinister. Emphasis is ours: