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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectSoftware
authorScientific American
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Online Social Science: Can the Web Graduate from Digital Petri Dish to Virtual Laboratory?
From ACM Opinion

Online Social Science: Can the Web Graduate from Digital Petri Dish to Virtual Laboratory?

In many ways the Internet is the ultimate virtual laboratory.

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?
From ACM Opinion

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?

Okay, great: we can control our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition.

Bluebrain: Noah Hutton's 10-Year Documentary About the Mission to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain
From ACM Opinion

Bluebrain: Noah Hutton's 10-Year Documentary About the Mission to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain

"Nothing quite like it exists yet, but we have begun building it," Henry Markram wrote in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American. He was referring to a "fantastic...

Does a Public "find My Iphone" Search Violate Personal Privacy?
From ACM Opinion

Does a Public "find My Iphone" Search Violate Personal Privacy?

A guy stole my iPhone. I tracked it and posted his address online. Was that wrong?

How the Icloud Hack Happened and How to Avoid Being Next
From ACM Opinion

How the Icloud Hack Happened and How to Avoid Being Next

Mat Honan, the technology reporter who was digitally disemboweled this past weekend, has revealed exactly how he was so spectacularly owned. His case, a cascade...

Why Siri Is Still the Future
From ACM Opinion

Why Siri Is Still the Future

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S last year, the new phone looked just like the previous one. It had a better camera and a faster chip, but it could do only one...

A Rosie Future: Jetsons-Like Gadgets with 'ambient Intelligence' Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities
From ACM Opinion

A Rosie Future: Jetsons-Like Gadgets with 'ambient Intelligence' Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities

Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually...

From ACM Opinion

The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis

Digital innovators Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor...

How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human
From ACM TechNews

How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human

Siri, a program in the latest Apple iPhone that can carry out a wide spectrum of vocal commands without requiring training or special syntax from the user, stands...

From ACM Opinion

How Can Malware Be Stopped?

The world of cybersecurity is starting to resemble a paranoid thriller.

From ACM Opinion

The Joke's on Your Computer: The Latest Humor Coded Into Software

In Google Maps, the distance-measuring tool offers a choice of three unit systems: Metric, English or "I’m Feeling Geeky." If you click the third one, you’re...

­se It Better: The Worst Trends in Tech
From ACM Opinion

­se It Better: The Worst Trends in Tech

Consumer technology doesn't always get better, faster and cheaper. Here are four bad moves that prove the future isn't always bright.

From ACM Opinion

Can Math Beat Financial Markets?

Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...

From ACM Opinion

Can Math Beat Financial Markets?

Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...

From ACM Opinion

Why Gadgets Flop

According to the old saying, you learn more from a failure than a success. Well, if that's the case, the consumer electronics industry ought to have a master's...

Can Tornado Prediction Be Improved?
From ACM News

Can Tornado Prediction Be Improved?

Advances in computer modeling and other technologies still cannot overcome the fundamental complexity of thunderstorm and subsequent tornado formation.

Online 24/7: "life Logging" Pioneer Clarifies the Future of Cloud Computing
From ACM Opinion

Online 24/7: "life Logging" Pioneer Clarifies the Future of Cloud Computing

Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, paperless for more than a decade, envisions data centers saturated with information and services readily available via the...

Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones
From ACM News

Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones

In medicine, there's the patient and there's the chart. And the chart is paper.

Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate
From ACM Opinion

Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate

I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day.

From ACM Opinion

Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later

Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University...
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