Is there a doctor in the house? The answer may always be, “yes.”
Many people are searching for new ways to get medical care and gone may be the days of waiting in the doctor’s office thanks to the new mobile app age. The new Doctor On Demand app for Android and iOS will allow you to see the doctor from wherever you are.
Continue reading… “Doctor on Demand app lets you see a doctor from wherever you are”
The Internet affects the economy differently than the new businesses of the past did.
John Doerr, a venture capitalist, predicted in the 1990’s that the Internet would lead to the “the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” The Internet has created a tremendous amount of personal wealth. Just look at the rash of Internet billionaires and millionaires, the investors both small and large that have made fortunes investing in Internet stocks, and the list of multibillion-dollar Internet companies—Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Amazon. Add to the list the recent Twitter stock offering, which created a reported 1,600 millionaires.
Continue reading… “The Internet is the greatest facilitator of inequality in history”
A new wrinkle in the control of waves.
Flexible, layered materials textured with nanoscale wrinkles could provide a new way of controlling the wavelengths and distribution of waves, whether of sound or light. The new method, developed by researchers at MIT, could eventually find applications from nondestructive testing of materials to sound suppression, and could also provide new insights into soft biological systems and possibly lead to new diagnostic tools.
Continue reading… “Flexible materials could provide new ways to control sound and light”
Bitcoin
What should we be thinking about a currency like Bitcoin? The first thing we should remember is that money is a sort of collective fiction. What money we choose to trust says much about how we see the world.
Continue reading… “Bitcoin and other money fictions”
Time to change the weather!
Quote of the Day: “Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.” – Robert Bloch
Continue reading… “Top 14 Photos of the Week”
A map was created by Redditor atrubetskoy that shows how much snow, on average, it takes to cancel school across the United States. Atrubetskoy also shared a few helpful facts about the map’s limitations and inaccuracies on reddit:
Continue reading… “Map: How much snow does it typically take to cancel school in the U.S.?”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odQw5BDnCRs[/youtube]
Harvey Milk understood the power of human empathy when he famously advised his “gay brothers and sisters” to come out, but “only to the people you know, and who know you.” It is hard to hate people you know and who know you.
Continue reading… “How human empathy will shape the design of artificial intelligence”
Nearly all technological advances in the past century or more have depended on our ability to produce and manipulate the vast variety of materials that nature has given us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of electronics. From a smorgasbord of semiconductors, polymers, and metals, we’ve been able to create a dazzling array of circuitry that now underpins pretty much every aspect of modern life.
Continue reading… “Making a better invisibility cloak with lasers”
One way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price.
Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
Continue reading… “Is this the end of the golden age for higher education?”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Many of us suffer from a sinister and often contagious disorder, something I call just-in-case disease.
We own toolboxes full of tools, just in case we need to fix something. We have kitchens full of appliances just in case we want to prepare a meal. We have cars in our garages just in case we need to go somewhere. We even have closets full of clothes we know we’ll never wear just in case we get desperate.
NASA is taking steps that could lead to colonization of other planets.
NASA is working on plans to make water, oxygen, and hydrogen on the surface of the Moon and Mars. It is vital that we find a way of extracting these vital gases and liquids from moons and planets if we ever want to colonize other planets, rather than transporting them from Earth (which is prohibitively expensive, due to Earth’s gravity). The current plan is to land a rover on the Moon in 2018 that will try to extract hydrogen, water, and oxygen — and then hopefully, Curiosity’s successor will try to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen in 2020 when it lands on Mars.
Continue reading… “NASA plans to make water and oxygen on the surface of the Moon and Mars by 2020”
In the cryptocurrency world, Bitcoin (and Litecoin) garner the most attention, but there are now 83 (and counting) virtual currencies to store your wealth in. Bitcoin’s market cap is over $10 billionis and is by far the highest but we wonder whether the miasma of mimiccers – from Unobtainium to the ironically-named StableCoin and from ‘Philospher Stones’ to HoboNickels – serves to reduce the confidence in Bitcoin as a new method payments, or bolsters it as the clear market winner.
Continue reading… “There are now 83 (and counting) cryptocurrencies in the world”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.