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Furthermore, the NSA has designated more than 150 colleges and universities as centres of excellence, which qualifies students and faculty members for extra support. It can also fund research indirectly through other agencies, and so the total amount of support may be much higher. A leaked budget document says that the NSA spends more than $400 million a year on research and technology — although only a fraction of this money might go to research outside the agency itself.

Many US researchers, especially those towards the basic-research end of the spectrum, are comfortable with the NSA’s need for their expertise.

“I understand what’s in the newspapers,” he says, “but the NSA is funding serious long-term fundamental research and I’m happy they’re doing it.”

The data suggest that for these students the dimension of time is in complex, dynamic and contingent interplay with a range of networked devices and shifting material domains and practices, which are mobilised for textual engagement and production. It will argue that student entanglements with devices and digitally mediated texts serve to pause, distribute, elongate and render simultaneous the temporal nature of their practices in emergent 'temporal practices' in complex relationships of co-agency with devices and technologies. It will conclude that a typological analysis is inadequate to understanding these complex, emergent engagements.

Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.

He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"

Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages: The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

“The circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressing emotion,” Goleman said. The area of the brain that governs focus and executive functioning is known as the pre-frontal cortex. This is also the part of the brain that allows people to control themselves, to keep emotions in check and to feel empathy for other people.

“It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”

Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Free textbooks written by 100+ leading designers, bestselling authors and Ivy League professors. The textbooks are assembled in a gigantic 4000+ page encyclopedia covering the design of interactive products and services like websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, you name it.

Clearly, when things are networked, that has an impact on how actual value is produced. In many cases, it is no longer the industrially manufactured product that is the focus, but rather the web-based service that users access through that device.

In many and diverse sectors of the global economy, new web-based business models being hatched for the Internet of Things are bringing together market players who previously had no business dealings with each other

The question for you is: in this new cyber-physical galaxy, will your company become a new sun, a planet, a minor moon — or be reduced to stardust?

evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood

Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.

The bold new era of content distribution and technological efficiency has served up entire, original award-winning series series like Netflix' House of Cards and Orange is the New Black for consumption in one sitting, if the viewer desires.

Quite frankly, we've never had it so good.

empowered the consumer.

Both have established impressive track records leading Pandora’s strong team of technologists.

“I’m excited to promote two top technology leaders to these important positions.

Mr. Conrad has led Pandora’s engineering and product organization from the product’s inception and has guided the team as they delivered increasingly sophisticated playlist techniques, mobile, consumer electronics and in-car listening technology, as well as sophisticated advertising solutions