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Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention…
50 here is what the Deep Thought team wrote about the relationship between search depth and chess strength in a 1989 article: The ascent of the brute-force chess machines back in the late 1970s made one thing crystal clear: there is a strong causal relationship between the search speed of a chess machine and its…
In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. When NPR analyzed the number of people who left at least one comment in…
Transformative play is a special case of play that occurs when the free movement of play alters the more rigid structure in which it takes shape. The play doesn't just occupy and oppose the interstices of the system, but actually transforms the space as a whole. A cyberfeminist game patch that creates transsexual…
"The pie keeps growing because things that look like wants today are needs tomorrow," argued Marc Andreessen, the Netscape cofounder, who lelped to ignite a whole new industry, e-commerce, that now employs mil)ns of specialists around the wodd, specialists whose jobs weren't even lagined when Bill Clinton became…
An understanding of what the Internet is. "I found it on the Internet" is not an accurate statement. You found it on a computer connected to the World Wide Web. Ways to formulate queries. Typing "childhood obesity" into a search engine is not the best way to discover what health problems are associated with being…
ACTING Players who enjoy acting like getting into character and speaking in their characters' voices. Roleplayers at heart, they enjoy social interactions with NPCs, monsters, and their fellow party members. Engage players who like acting by ... giving them opportunities to develop their characters' personalities and…
Our most powerful tool against the robots is the natural world. This fact is overlooked almost entirely in human/robot war literature because humans are the ones writing it, and humans tend to think of the natural world as basically a good thing to be in. Sure, we like our air conditioning, to be sheltered from the…
Before you judge the analogy with theology as being too harsh, conduct the followingexperiment. Randomly select one of your own publications from a year or two ago and think about what would be involved in reproducingthe results. How longwould it take, assumingyou would be able to do it? If you can’t reproduce those…
The drawback to covering your tracks like this on a daily basis is that it sometimes makes you look like, well, like you’re covering your tracks. People who engage all of their privacy functions sometimes stand out in a transparent society. It may make people suspicious, thinking that you’re up to something. If you’re…
In the Ne± Netherlands, a unique partnership between Shell Oil Company and Dutch greenhouse businesses enables surplus carbon dioxide produced at the Shell refinery in Pernis, outside Rotterdam, to be pumped into greenhouses as an alternative to pumping it directly into the atmosphere as waste. The partnership was…
In his Spiritual Exercises, the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis writes: We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But…
In software design, when you find yourself feeling particularly proud of a neat little bit of design or code, stop and ask yourself how someone who didn't give birth to it will regard it. If it turns out to be overwrought or too slick for the need, you should probably kill your darling and replace it with an ordinary…
You see the problem fo obtaining facts from experience--it sounds very, very simple. You just try it and see. But man is a weak character and it turns out to be much more difficult than you think to just try it and see. For instance, you take education. Some guy comes along and he sees the way people teach…
The most famous quality measure is PageRank [221], discussed earlier, which builds on the intuition that a page which is cited by many other pages is likely to be of significant quality. The insight of PageRank is that the obvious way to subvert that model is to set up a load of dummy pages to cite the page which one…
The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo…