Tooth fillings acting as radio receivers may be nothing more than a myth, but scientists at the National Taiwan University are developing an artificial tooth that would send rather than receive transmissions. They’re working on embedding a sensor in a tooth to keep an eye on oral goings on, along with a Bluetooth transmitter to transmit the data and tell your doctor what your mouth's been up to.
Scientists developing Bluetooth tooth that spies on your oral habits
Via Build:
when Norman Augustine, longtime chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, insists that liberal-arts deficiencies are putting the United States at a strategic disadvantage, corporate America takes notice.
In June, Augustine added his name and endorsement to The Heart of the Matter, a Congressional report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that argues for large-scale education reform — namely, balancing math, science, and business training with greater reading, writing, and arts education.
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Via Instapundit and City Journal:
…we have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children. In the 1960s, sociologist Herbert Gans identified a growing chasm between family-oriented suburbanites and people who favored city life—“the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.” Families abandoned cities for the suburbs, driven away by policies that failed to keep streets safe, allowed decent schools to decline, and made living spaces unaffordable. Even the partial rebirth of American cities since then hasn’t been enough to lure families back. The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating “creative class”—a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students—occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich, traps for the poor, and way stations for the ambitious young en route eventually to less congested places. The middle-class family has been pushed to the margins, breaking dramatically with urban history. The development raises at least two important questions: Are cities without children sustainable? And are they desirable?
The Childless City by Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres, City Journal Summer 2013
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Via Bloomberg:
The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data.
…
The simple answer is to blame consumers, who shouldn’t use mobile phones, credit cards, banks or the Internet if they don’t want to be tracked. But that argument deliberately ignores the reality of today’s world. Everything we do involves computers, even if we’re not using them directly. And by their nature, computers produce tracking data. We can’t go back to a world where we don’t use computers, the Internet or social networking. We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.
Via Business Insider:
Click farms have become a growing challenge for companies which rely on social media measurements – meant to indicate approval by real users – to estimate the popularity of their products.
For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar.
How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity - Business Insider
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Ponder:
Via Business Insider:
In recent years, some of the most famous names in tech, like Microsoft's Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos have been founding and investing in companies that are looking to the stars.
Whether for personal dreams of adventure or for profit, these companies are doing the engineering and basic science needed to get humans into space.
They're also looking at other opportunities that space provides, like access to resources that are hard to get on Earth and the ability to collect information about our planet from a different perspective.
Companies for billionaires who have everything.
Via Business Insider:
The state of Pennsylvania is killing a contract with IBM because, as of July, the project was $60 million over budget and a whopping 42 months behind schedule, state officials said.
That's three and a half years late.
Project managers are critical to their organizations for controlling time, cost, and scope of projects.