Technology is Information

The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. And its mobility is still increasing. The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered ...

 getting water from air

in 2011 an Australian inventor won the James Dyson Award for a device that cools the air using underground coils, so you only need enough energy to pump the air down a pipe. Another low energy technique is that used in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and is basically just a piece of mesh strung between two poles, with a trough under it. They get a fog too, and as it flows through the mesh, drops of water condense and run down into the trough. But NBD Nano claim that the beetle’s skin is sev...

 Algorithm that Presents Opposing Viewpoints

Social networks allow people to connect with each other and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, users tend to connect with like-minded people and read agreeable information, a behavior that leads to group polarization. Motivated by this scenario, we study how to take advantage of partial homophily to suggest agreeable content to users authored by people with opposite views on sensitive issues. We introduce a paradigm to present a data portrait of users, in which their cha...

 What If People Stopped Valuing Money?

Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizenes as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for mo...