How human empathy will shape the design of artificial intelligence

[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.

 

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Making a better invisibility cloak with lasers

Invisibility

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.

 

 

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Is this the end of the golden age for higher education?

higher education

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.

 

 

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The Disruptive Nature of the Sharing Economy: Finding the Next Great Opportunities

Sharing-Economy-1

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.

 

 

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NASA plans to make water and oxygen on the surface of the Moon and Mars by 2020

apollo-17-jack-schmitt

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.

 

 

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There are now 83 (and counting) cryptocurrencies in the world

currency

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.

 

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iPhones to replace room keys at select Starwood hotels

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4d3NmO4-_k[/youtube]

The international hospitality chain, Starwood, has two boutique hotels that will soon let travelers bypass the check-in counter and unlock their room by using digital keys sent to a special application available for Apple’s iPhone.

 

 

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EteRNA – an online video game connects players into a real biochemistry lab

sn-crowdsourcing

EteRNA

The latest research rage is crowdsourcing – Kickstarter to raise funding, screen savers that number-crunch, and games to find patterns in data – but most efforts have been confined to the virtual lab of the Internet. Researchers have now crowdsourced their experiments by connecting players of a video game to an actual biochemistry lab.

 

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Neuroplasticity: How our brain rewires and adapts (Infographic)

neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity helps the brain to reorganize itself.

The human brain is a marvelous thing. It helps us learn, helps us adapt. A core part of these abilities is thanks to neuroplasticity, which allows our human brain to reorganize itself as necessary — even after traumatic brain injuries (TBIs).

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
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By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

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