Robots with cameras, microphones and sensors searched for victims stranded in flooded homes and on rooftops. They assessed damage and sent back images from places rescuers couldn’t get. It was August 31, 2005, two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. These robots were a crucial connection between emergency responders and survivors. Ten years… Read more »
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Is it the beginning of the end for online comments?
Vibrant online communities? Or cesspools of abuse? Have comments had their day? The debate about comment sections on news sites is often as divisive as the comments themselves. Recently outlets such as The Verge and The Daily Dot have closed their comments sections because they’ve become too hard to manage. And they’re far from alone. Moderating comments… Read more »
How hackers hijack the net’s phone books
Cyber criminals have stepped up their abuse of one part of the net infrastructure – the Domain Name System (DNS). This acts like a phone book and translates the website names people use into the numeric equivalents that computers are happy with. So when you type bbc.co.uk, DNS translates that into 212.58.244.18 so your browser can… Read more »
Gaming needs to do a ‘better job’ at recruiting women
“If you take a computer science degree or a game development degree, if there are a 100 people on that course and 90 are male then that influences our talent pool and who [we’re] going to hire” says Craig Duncan, studio head of Rare, a UK game development firm. Gaming is not the only industry that… Read more »
Robots are NOT coming for our jobs
Technology has made life easier and more comfortable in countless ways over the past few hundred years. But a relatively new brand of fear mongering suggests the workplace will soon become too easy, making some human workers obsolete. The rise of robots in different industries has led some experts to predict that artificial intelligence will take over a third… Read more »
Google Could Rig the Next Election
By manipulating its search results, Google could decide the next election. The world’s most-used search engine is so powerful and national elections are so tight, that even a tiny tweak in Google’s (GOOGL, Tech30) secret algorithm could swing the 2016 presidential election, according to Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral… Read more »
Google is now Alphabet
Google’s plan to reorganize into a holding company called Alphabet is as creative as the company itself. Like all publicly-held companies, Google faces dual challenges of sustaining its growth through innovation and meeting the expectations of its shareholders. The ever-increasing pressures to deliver short-term results while continuing to make big bets on high-risk, high-gain… Read more »
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