Futurist Thomas Frey: When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.
Continue reading… “Will Big Data Destroy the Stock Market?”
Much of what we believe to be factual has an expiration date.
In primary school you learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. There weren’t any that were known to exist outside of it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more “candidates”) and demoted Pluto to a mere “dwarf planet”. Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.
Continue reading… “Samuel Arbesman explains ‘The Half-life of Facts’”
Companies that had collected unstructured data (texts, emails, reports, and so on), but had no idea about what to do once it was stored.
Even though Big Data is all the rage it’s rare that you’ll hear real case-studies from companies that are storing, processing and analyzing vast stores of data.
Continue reading… “Companies store data but have no idea what to do with it once it’s stored”
Black Friday still reigns supreme on mobile devices.
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it looks like Black Friday still reigns supreme on mobile devices. According to data compiled by the mobile data compression company Onavo, when it comes to increases in usage, mobile apps from Amazon, Newegg, and Gilt all saw significantly higher gains on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday.
Continue reading… “Mobile shopping on Black Friday saw higher gains compared to Cyber Monday”
The new PlayMaker school in Los Angeles is using gaming technology to teach curriculum.
Maybe play isn’t the opposite of work but synonymous with it. There is a growing body of scientific evidence, reviewed here by the University of Georgia, showing education is not the same as disinterested drudgery: For children and adults, “play is an important mediator for learning and socialization throughout life.”
Continue reading… “New movement in the classroom to put play back in education”
Google’s driverless car
California, Florida, and Nevada have made Google’s driverless cars street-legal and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Some day automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles. Within twenty to thirty years the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.
Racks of networking equipment connect servers inside a Google data center
In a new research exercise known as the Daily Information Needs Study, Google wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you wouldn’t think to search for online.
Continue reading… “Google to improve its mobile search services by searching the ungoogleable”
350 million plus users suffer from “Facebook addiction syndrome”
The social media landscape has been evolving at a rapid pace over the last few years. It has also become more fun with the addition of Instagram and Pinterest. (Infographic)
Continue reading… “Twenty-seven significant social media statistics and facts for 2012”
Artificial intelligence experts are investigating ways to commercialize “deep learning.”
Scientists are confident about a machine learning technology that can recognize and replicate human activities like seeing and thinking even though it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.
Continue reading… “The future of Silicon Valley tech is deep learning”
The value of data is only as good as the information and insights we can get from it. The information and insights will help us make better decisions and give us a competitive edge. The promise of big data is that one could glean lots of information and gain many valuable insights. However, people often don’t realize that data and information are not the same. Even if you are able to extract information from your big data, not all of it will be insightful and valuable.
Continue reading… “The fallacy of big data and why we need even bigger data”
Lettuce vending machine
After a nuclear holocaust has blocked out the sun or rampaging zombies have taken over our farmland there is finally a device that will guarantee we can still grow vegetables in the dark. This Japanese lettuce-growing vending machinet doesn’t require sunlight (it uses fluorescent bulbs) and it can churn out a surprising yield of lettuce: 60 heads a day, or over 20,000 a year.
Eventually, everything will become a canvas.
Someone will make the world’s first ”printable house” within the next year. ”It might not be a very good house but it will go down in history,” says American futurist Thomas Frey, author of the prediction and a speaker at the Creative Innovation conference in Melbourne next week. ”Eventually, we’ll be ‘printing’ 30-storey buildings – and huge replicas of, say, the Statue of Liberty to put on top.”
Continue reading… “World’s first “printable house” right around the corner”