Hollywood’s scripts always call for a protagonist. Margin Call has none.
Raymond Alvarez: The film Margin Call has to be regarded as a distorted reflection of reality. Just as Michael Douglas stood before a soon-to-be-fired audience in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, declared greed good, rationalization has become a mainstay. At the end of the day, we’re just cannon fodder.
Continue reading… “The dark hours before the storm: “Margin Call””
An artist’s rendition of a Mars One colony.
Martian colonization non-profit, Mars One, will begin accepting applications in July from people who want to colonize Mars, Space.com reports. The applications must be in video form and applicants have to pay a fee (the company told Space.com that it was to weed out insincere candidates).
Continue reading… “Mars One to begin accepting applications in July for 2023 mission”
MOOCs – massive open online courses
One of the world’s oldest, largest, and best business schools is the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They have 11 academic departments, 20 research centers, 230 standing faculty, and an endowment nearing $1 billion. With all those resource, it has produced 92,000 living alumni.
Continue reading… “A view into the digital world of MOOCs”
A prototype Samsung Windows smartphone.
The next big revolution in electronics are gadgets you can simply fold up to put in your pocket. We have already gotten a glimpse of the technology from manufacturers with Samsung showing off a ‘foldable’ phone.
Continue reading… “Manufacturers to reveal first ‘bendable’ gadgets that will never break”
Laboratory grown rat kidney.
Scientists in the the U.S. say the have “grown” a kidney in the laboratory and it has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine. Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.
Continue reading… “Scientists grow kidney in the laboratory”
Warning of mini-drones’ potential as a terrorist weapon.
Eric Schmidt, the influential head of Google, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns. He told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by the military could fall into the wrong hands.
Continue reading… “Eric Schmidt urges action to regulate mini-drones”
If kids are learning math, they should also learn logic.
These days learn-to-code startups abound. There is one in particular that is focusing on the very young and is having some success in elementary schoolsaround the country — even under served schools with no budgets for STEM but a great need for better tools.
Continue reading… “Why your kids should be coding”
SolarCopter
A team of masters students from the U.K. have built what they call the world’s first “solar copter.” It is a quadrotor that flies solely on solar power. It is only capable of short flights at the moment. But once the team adds a storage system they say it should fly longer. (Video)
Continue reading… “SolarCopter – world’s first solar powered helicopter”
Giving up reading the news will make you happier.
Some of us have learned to recognize the hazards of living with an overabundance of food and have started to change our diets. But, did you know that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body? The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike things that require thinking like reading books and long magazine articles, we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-colored candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be.
Continue reading… “News is bad for your health”
Men just don’t understand women.
It’s an old cliché that men don’t understand women. Now, new research suggests men really do struggle to read women’s emotions — at least from their eyes.
Continue reading… “Men really can’t read women’s emotions: Study”
Americans like an average of 70 pages.
Facebook wants you to like more pages so they have really been pushing users to like pages and it seems to be working. As Socialbakers notes, the average Facebook user in 2009 liked 4.5 pages. Now that figure has risen to 40. In the U.S., Facebook users like an average of 70 pages.
Continue reading… “How many pages does an average Facebook user like?”
By 2017 Verizon expects that number to grow to two-thirds.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s speech at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on Tuesday indicated that half of the traffic on Verizon’s mobile networks is now video, FierceWireless reported, and by 2017 Verizon expects that number to grow to two-thirds.
Continue reading… “50 percent of Verizon’s mobile network traffic is video”