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thinkahol *

What if the revolution that ends 'gun control' is a technological one? - St. Louis gun ... - 0 views

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    And now, as CNC milling machines and stereolithography (three dimensional printing) devices fall in price to the point of being not out of reach for a hobbyist's workshop, home manufacture of scary "assault weapons" will soon be a few mouse clicks away.
thinkahol *

An illustrated guide to the latest climate science « Climate Progress - 0 views

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    "In 2009, the scientific literature caught up with what top climate scientists have been saying privately for a few years now: * Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected - particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet. * If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century's end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming - much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that's not the worst-case scenario! * The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme. That's no surprise to anybody who has talked to leading climate scientists in recent years, read my book Hell and High Water (or a number of other books), or followed this blog. Still, it is a scientific reality that I don't think more than 2 people in 100 fully grasp, so I'm going to review here the past year in climate science. I'll focus primarily on the peer-reviewed literature, but also look at some major summary reports."
thinkahol *

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. 'Diplomacy' - Truthdig - 0 views

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    WikiLeaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks described the leak as "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities."
thinkahol *

Humanity Needs to Keep Pace with Technology (cont'd) | The Veracious Blog - 0 views

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    When we talk about participation, we have to be a bit more specific. On the publishing side, there's clearly more participation than we've ever seen in the past. But in order for this tidal wave of information to be useful, we need to be able to separate fact from fiction. We need to encourage participation on the receiving end. What we need is evaluating participation. With the breadth of niche information and sources we have the ability to get at the best of what is known on a myriad of topics and contexts. Every niche has its experts and its hacks, its enthusiasts and detractors. But for the remaining 95% of us who are not subject matter experts, deriving the accurate or useful information from the sea of what is available can be complicated, time-consuming and simply unverifiable. We need a way to quantify the value of information, or more specifically, the veracity of information.
thinkahol *

In historic shift, smartphones, tablets to overtake PCs - Computerworld - 0 views

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    Computerworld - Shipments of smartphones, tablets and other app-enabled devices will overtake PC shipments in the next 18 months, an event that may signify the end of the PC-centric era, market research firm IDC said.
thinkahol *

Dr. Daniel G. Nocera - YouTube - 0 views

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    The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b
Todd Suomela

The Role of Intimacy in the Evolution of Technology - 0 views

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    by Alessandro Tomasi In this article, Georges Bataille's notion of intimacy will be re-interpreted to show that it has a role to play in the evolution of technology. The specifically human form of intimacy can be experienced through the successful adoption of technological devices that have the qualities necessary to fit in and work out in our life context. If they manage to become part of our life, then we experience them as projections of our psychophysical personality, and, as such, they escape our positing, objectifying consciousness. Intimacy can be seen as the organizing principle that shapes the evolution of technology towards an ideal end that promises at least an approximation to the absolute intimacy that is unique to the gods.
Nits Mahajan

Take Advantage Of Clinical Genomics Market - Read This Research Report By World Researc... - 0 views

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    Clinical Genomics Market By Test Type (Diagnostic, Genetic, Newborn Screening, Prenatal, Carrier Screening), Software, Method (Molecular, Chromosomal, Biochemical Tests), End User (Hospitals and Clinics) - Global Forecast to 2023
Esther Jarrell

Cloud Infrastructure Market by Type - 2022 | MarketsandMarkets - 0 views

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    209 Pages Report] Cloud Infrastructure Market categorizes global market by Type (Hardware: Server, Storage, Switch, Services: Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a service, Content/Application Delivery Network, Managed Hosting, Colocation), End-User Industry & Geography.
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
Todd Suomela

Hello, Darkness - 96.03 - 0 views

  • But the implication of electricity in the sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made to do--pursue leisure, earn a living--there are simply far more usable hours now in which to do it
  • In the United States at midnight more than five million people are at work at full-time jobs. Supermarkets, gas stations, copy shops--many of these never close.
  • Living with electric lights makes it difficult to retrieve the experience of a non-electrified society. For all but the very wealthy, who could afford exorbitant arrays of expensive artificial lights, nightfall brought the works of daytime to a definitive end. Activities that need good light--where sharp tools are wielded or sharply defined boundaries maintained; purposeful activities designed to achieve specific goals; in short, that which we call work--all this subsided in the dim light of evening. Absent the press of work, people typically took themselves safely to home and were left with time in the evening for less urgent and more sensual matters: storytelling, sex, prayer, sleep, dreaming.
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  • John Staudenmaier, a historian of technology and a Jesuit priest, for a recent conference at MIT. (The essay will appear in a book called The Idea of Progress Revisited, edited by Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish.) Staudenmaier makes the point--obvious when brought up, though we've mostly lost sight of it--that from the time of the hominid Lucy, in Hadar, Ethiopia, to the time of Thomas Edison, in West Orange, New Jersey, the onset of darkness sharply curtailed most kinds of activity for most of our ancestors.
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    Speculative connections between electric lighting, sleep deficits, and health.
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    I wonder if the driving force behind the sleep deficit is in fact more pervasive, and indeed global in nature: the triumph of light.
Todd Suomela

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) by John M. Carroll - Interaction-Design.org: HCI, Usab... - 0 views

  • The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering. Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.
  • One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.
  • In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.
primusit

sfp interconnect - 1 views

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    Wireless Interconnect is at the heart of most modern technology, and the need for strong, secure wireless performance is only growing with IoT and the popularity of smart devices. Module systems must offer reliable performance and support the latest protocols to provide easy internet access for end consumers.
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