Category: Technology
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Watching Iran
A road to Damascus moment for me with Twitter this morning. Obsessed with watching the protests and post-stolen-election ripples in Iran, I found my way to #IranElection, and realized how much more information, direct from people on the ground, was there. It’s ongoing now, if slowing down. It’s modern, unfiltered news, which means rumors and…
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“Crowdfunding” journalism? Kind of sounds familiar…
Here’s the latest buzzy idea for saving journalsm: Be Obama. Crowdfunding, as described here is essentially allowing (hopefully) large numbers of people to contribute small amounts of money to fund journalistic endeavors. Spot.us, for example, posts lists of potential stories, lets freelancers sign up (or contribute their own ideas), and then lets people donate money…
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Steve Jobs thinks books are bunk
From an NYT blog, a Steve Jobs quote bashing Amazon’s (no longer new) e-book reader: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed…
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The beginning of the end of hardback books?
The Guardian wrote this weekend about Picador’s plan to stop publishing most literary fiction initially in hardback form. That means even stellar writers like Delillo, Naipaul, Banville and Cormack McCarthy will be going straight to paperback. I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer…
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From the heavens, a phone came to save us all…
The iPhone is here. I already feel myself to be a better, more fulfilled person. I’ve heard that the problems in the Mideast are under control now, as a result, and the bombs they found in London today were really what you’d call celebratory, not aggressive per se. Simply by repeating the mantra, or should…
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I love the smell of hype in the morning
One reason I’m very glad I’m not covering daily technology news at this particular moment: I don’t have to be a bit excited about Apple’s iPhone. I’ve seen a lot of hype in my time, but this product pretty much wins the gold medal. Fully years of speculation. So much breathless writing since Apple’s pre-announcement…
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What happened to just plugging the TV in?
So, kids, there used to be a day when you could go to the store, pick up a television, bring it home and actually watch TV. No, hear me out, I know it sounds like some kind of crazy fantasy, but it’s true. Once, in those wild college days, we even scoured back alleys for…
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Grand city, and cocktail robotics
I’m in Vienna for a few days, covering the extraordinary evolution of cocktail robotics. Roboexotica is an art show and technologist’s playpen, where towers of tubes and slides can make a decent mojito, a little blowtorch attached to a bottle can make what is by reports a truly awful (but fiery!) Spanish Coffee, and the…
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When Hell freezes over
OK, a quick word of explanation. Last week I flew to Geneva to visit the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building there, which will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world by a factor of about 10 when it turns on next year. Amazing, inspiring stuff, which I’ll write about for Wired…
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Help a writer. This is why the Net is groovy.
Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close…
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Your writing always seemed a little mechanical…
And so at last, writers, journalists, reporters, call us what you will, we’re being replaced by computers just like everyone else. The Thomson financial media group is using software programs to automatically generate earnings stories, within .3 of a second of the release of a company’s earnings statement. No chance of a John Henry moment…
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There is more than football in the world. Like, say, robot football.
There is more happening here than just the World Cup. Just take one example: This weekend was RoboCup, in which lots of little robots play, um, football. Maybe that’s not so totally different. But it was a blast to watch. It turns out that cheering for two pairs of wobbly little two-foot-high robots as they…
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Europe gets broadband over powerline spec
A European Comission-funded standards group has approved a standard for sending broadband data over power lines. Several German groups had experimented with the technology in the late 1990s, putting them ahead of U.S. efforts, but have abandoned the projects since, citing cost and efficiency concerns. Critics note that newer access technologies such as WiMax are…
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Europe wants a European Institute of Technology
The stats aren’t pretty. Europe used to win the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes (say what you will about parochial voting): 73 percent in the first half of the 20th century. That fell to 33 percent in the second half, and just 19 percent if you count from 1995 to 2005. Or take patents. Between…