#Technology and Inequality The signs of the gapeally, a chasmetween the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon valley.
Twenty minutes away in San jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungleeputed to be the largest in the countryas taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe
Indeed, people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San francisco. The anger in Northern California
and Anthony Atkinson, an economist at the University of Oxford, Piketty collected and analyzed data, including tax records,
and several other European countries in which such historical data are available.)The gap between the wealthy and everyone else is largest in the United states. The richest 1 percent of the population has 34 percent of the accumulated wealth;
bove a certain level, it is very hard to find in the data any link between pay and performance.
Racing Ahead y reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality.
The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew Mcafee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has gained recently unlikely prominence for an academic economist.
While Piketty writing is sprinkled with references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence.
and TV had broadened greatly the audiencesnd hence the rewardsor those in show business and sports. Thirty years later
and thanks to software and other digital technologies. Why hire a local tax consultant when you can use a cheap,
The ability to copy software and distribute digital products anywhere means customers will buy the top one.
Why use a search engine that is almost as good as Google? Such economic logic now rules a growing share of the marketplace;
and building a business becomes less capital-intensiveou don need a printing plant to produce an online news site,
In an article called ew World Order, published this summer in Foreign affairs, Brynjolfsson, Mcafee, and Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate and professor at New york University, argued that uperstar-based technical change is upending the global economy.
and Mcafee argument that the transformation of work is speeding up as technological change accelerates.
nor is concentrated such growth in computer-intensive sectors. According to Autor, the changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy,
He says that because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and such high-profile technologies as Google driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think.
Despite impressive anecdotal accounts, these technologies are not ready for widespread use. ou would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life,
As both a rock climber and a user of prostheses Herr has direct experience with frustratingly poor prosthetic designs
Herr worked with Pratt to develop a computer-controlled knee joint that uses a magnetorheological fluid a fluid
and postdocs working on projects is strewn with computer parts coffee cups wires rolls of tape random tools
This science he says is critical for designing the hardware and software control systems of bionic devices.
and reprogrammed the prosthesis with algorithms that would allow it to execute the necessary rotations.
Whereas brain-machine interfaces would require invasive surgery for brain implants he wants to connect electronic devices to the peripheral nerves at the site of the injury allowing people to control bionic limbs with their existing nerves
Building an exoskeleton that makes movement easier is challenging the device must provide a benefit to the user that exceeds the burden of wearing it.
or building wearable devices that can dramatically boost its abilities. I admire Hugh s creativity and unique approach and his drive says Woodie Flowers SM 68 ME 70 Phd 72 an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering who helped supervise Herr s graduate research work.
but has shown not any data on the results. However he said of the plasma it looks like it s doing what it s supposed to do.
and slick TV ads were said illegal, it, since they never been cleared by the agency. But Deboe, a mommy blogger and author of children books, found a way to get the health information she wanted anyway.
Using a low-budget Web service called Promethease she paid $5 to upload her raw 23andme data.
Within a few minutes she was looking into a report with entries dividing her genes into ad newsand ood news. As tens of thousands of others seek similar information about their genetic disposition,
they are loading their DNA data into several little-known websites like Promethease that have become, by default, the largest purveyors of consumer genetic health services in the United Statesnd the next possible targets for nervous
and Mike Cariaso, a computer programmer. It works by comparing a person DNA data with entries in SNPEDIA,
a sprawling public wiki on human genetics that the pair created eight years ago and run with the help of a few dozen volunteer editors.
consumers complained angrily about the FDA on the company Facebook page, where they also uploaded links to the Promethease website,
calling it a orkaround, a way to get xhaustive medical infoin reports that are imilar,
because although DNA data is easy to gather, its medical meaning is less certain. Consumer DNA tests determine which common versions of the 23,000 human genes make up your individual genotype.
In barring 23andme health reports, the FDA also cited the danger that erroneous interpretations of gene data could lead someone to seek out unnecessary surgery
a professor at Stanford university who helped developed a DNA interpretation site called Interpretome as part of a class he teaches on genetics. s it going to be concentrated by medical associations,
or out there on the Internet so people can interact? Now a question is whether Promethease and sites like it could,
or should, be the next target of regulators. Lennon believes his service is outside the FDA reach,
and you have to shut down Webmd and Wikipedia, too. Reached by MIT Technology Review, the FDA said it has authority to regulate software that interprets genomes,
even if such services are given away free. The agency does not comment on specific companies. e know that they know about us
MIT Technology Review tested several interpretation-only sites using DNA data of anonymous donors posted publicly by the Personal Genome Project,
a data sharing initiative started by Harvard Medical school. All the sites quickly reported gene variants contained in the files
although the number of variants reported varied, from as few as 35 to as many as 17,667 for Promethease.
Two of the sites appeared designed to steer users toward alternative medicine. Genetic Genie, a free service that carries ads for vitamins,
That site, however, directed users to get an xplanationof the results by contacting chiropractors, dieticians,
and mind-body healers whose telephone numbers it provided. The Promethease report was the most detailed
although its clunky, barebones design is not easy to use. It organizes a person genetic variations under categories such as edical conditionsand edicines.
Users can then click to see information about individual genes that scientific research has suggested could raise,
they launched SNPEDIA as a site that would let themnd anyone elseeep tabs on what science was learning about each gene variant.
Lennon says the site was modeled on Wikipedia. hat was the promise of the genome, that it should be for everybody,
Its CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, landed on magazine covers,
and a board member predicted that her startup would ecome the Google of personalized healthcare. It didn happen that way.
traffic to interpretation-only sites jumped. Interpretome maintained by Konrad Karczewski, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital,
Lennon says the site averages between 50 and 500 reports per day, including a free version and a faster-running paid product.
After all, they named their software after Prometheus, the titan who defied the gods by stealing fire from Mt olympus and giving it to mankind.
#Apple's Quiet Attempt to Shake up Wireless Carriers Could Benefit Us All If you happened to pore over the details added to Apple website yesterday about its new ipads,
you might have noticed that models with cellular capabilities include something interesting on the wireless front.
They use a special SIM CARD-the tiny card that allows your device to connect to a carrier network-called Apple SIM.
And unlike SIM CARDS in use today, it is locked not to a single carrier. You will be able to use a setting in ios to quickly switch from carrier to carrier right on the ipad
if you are using a pay-as-you-go plan, rather than swapping out the card for each switch as you usually would.
Apple points out a few benefits of this, saying: henever you need it, you can choose the plan that works best for you with no long-term commitments.
you may also be able to choose a data plan from a local carrier for the duration of your trip.
To start, you will be able to choose from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint in the U s,
what more interesting is the impact this could have on wireless data competition and prices if more carriers are added to the mix.
if you see that a carrier that supported by your Apple SIM is having a sale on a short-term data plan,
the Apple SIM is added eventually to the iphone (and, perhaps, similarly flexible SIMS appear for other smartphones as well).
Not only would it make it easier to move from one carrier to another, but it could also make it more affordable for people all over the world to communicate.
Given that the Apple SIM seems like a really intriguing technology that could change the wireless industry,
I asked Apple why the company didn mention the feature during its ipad news event Thursday in Cupertino.
For now, it more of an intriguing footnote to Apple refresh of its ipad line
which account for much of its iphone sales and subsidize their cost to consumers. That said, Apple does have a lot of influence over wireless carriers.
It even convinced Cingular Wireless (which then became a part of AT&T) to agree to sell the first iphone without even setting eyes on the device.
Perhaps it can come up with a way to convince the wireless companies to get on board for the Apple SIM
and the prospect of far worse floods the nation is sophisticated developing computer models of climate precipitation hydrology sea level
Its strategies guided by sophisticated computer models include building some inland water barriers as a second line of defense;
For example researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are using satellite data and local measurements to build a tool that can tell governments about expected patterns of land sinking in delta areas.
What itunes Did for Music? The point-of-sale terminal at the CVS drugstore in Palo alto, California, can accept payments through a quick tap from a smartphone.
The clerk isn sure how it works, though he knows it does because few kidshave used it.
But one shopper tries it by taking out his Android phone and clicking on Google alletapp intended to allow instant payment and taps the terminal.
Nothing happens. Then he tries Paypal payment app. Nothing. Out comes the leather wallet. Over the past decade, tech companies including Google, ebay Paypal,
and upstart Square, along with mobile carriers, credit-card companies, and various retailers, have proclaimed all the eath of the wallet.
and phone carriers, and consumer indifference. Though mobile payments at U s. retail stores will nearly double this year, to $3. 5 billion, according to market researcher emarketer,
Standing in front of a photo of an overstuffed billfold, Apple CEO Tim cook unveiled its mobile wallet at a September 9 event where he also debuted new iphones and the Apple Watch.
When Apple Pay launches Monday on new iphone 6 models, all it will take to buy a sandwich at Subway
or an air-chilled chicken at Whole Foods Market is to hold your iphone near a wireless reader and press your thumb on the home button.
The iphone Touch ID fingerprint sensor already used to unlock the phone, recognizes it really you.
Behind the scenes, a payment processor such as Visa recognizes an encrypted version of your credit card such as the one in an itunes account,
along with a onetime security code for that particular transaction, and approves the salell in less than 10 seconds.
which require unlocking the phone, opening an app, checking into a store, typing in a code,
user friendly products helped it popularize and seize commanding positions in music players and smartphones. If Apple Pay works as promised, it could do something similar for payments,
making mobile wallets appeal to the masses, starting with its influential army of iphone users. obile payment is finally hitting that pivotal moment
when all the pieces are coming together, says Matthew de Ganon, senior vice president of product and commerce for Softcard, a rival mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.
In the U s. there are only about 220,000 merchant point-of-sale terminals featuring the wireless payment communications system known as near field communication (NFC.
In recent months, card data breaches At home Depot, Target, and others have alerted consumers that credit
because card numbers aren stored directly on the phone or on Apple servers. Instead, digital tokens, encrypted numbers that look like card numbers,
and stored on a secure chip in the phone. During a purchase, that token and a onetime transaction-specific code are sent to process the payment,
Though Google Wallet and others have used tokens, Apple Pay will deploy them more widely. Notwithstanding Apple own recent icloud breach that exposed nude celebrity photos
says David Brudnicki, chief technology officer for Sequent Software, which provides mobile wallet services to banks, retailers,
For one, only iphone 6 and eventually iphone 5 owners with an Apple Watch can use Apple Pay.
and data about them to Apple, says Richard Crone, CEO of the payments advisory firm Crone Consulting.
The Softcard mobile wallet joint venture of T-Mobile AT&T, and Verizon is touting its support of more than 80 Android phones
and the ability to pay at retailers including Mcdonald, Subway, and Walgreens. Paypal, soon to split off from ebay,
and Google continue to push their wallet apps as well. Individual retailers which have persuaded customers to use their own apps have no intention of replacing them with Apple Pay.
Starbucks, for instance, lets customers pay by launching an app and holding up the phone screen with a QR code to a reader on its cash registers.
But spokeswoman Maggie Jantzen says the bigger reason that 15 percent of Starbucks purchasesome six million transactions a weekre now completed via mobile is combined the appeal of payment
a rewards program, and a store locator all in one app. Apple will have to offer a lot more to merchants than it currently does
Payments experts think the company will allow outside software developers to create apps that can add such features to Apple Pay.
Tibbits then uses a 3-D printer to apply materials that are known to shrink or grow under certain conditions.
or twist in various ways depending on the pattern produced by the printer. He and his colleagues are developing design software that simulates the way different patterns of these materials printed onto different kinds of composite materials will behave under different conditions.
So far Tibbits has demonstrated materials that respond to light water and heat. But he says it should be possible to make ones that respond to air pressure and other stimuli.#
#Inspired by Wikipedia, Social scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys Gathering data about human preferences
and activities is the bread-and-butter of much research in the social sciences. But just how best to gather this data has long been the subject of fierce debate.
Social scientists essentially have two choices. On the one hand there are public opinion surveys based on a set of multiple choice questions a so-called closed approach.
Today Matthew Salganik at Princeton university in New jersey and Karen Levy at New york University outline an entirely new way of gathering data inspired by a new generation of information aggregation systems such as Wikipedia.
Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents they say.
when it comes to analyzing the data collected in this way. Projects like Wikipedia are the result of user-generated content on a massive scale.
The question that Salganik and Levy ask is whether surveys could also be constructed by respondents themselves at least in part.
To find out these guys have developed a new type of data collection mechanism that they call a wiki survey.
and Levy created a free website called www. allourideas. org on which anybody can create a pairwise wiki survey
Since 2010 this website has hosted some 5000 pairwise wiki surveys that have included 200000 items
These included ideas that would have been unlikely to emerge through other data gathering methods such as Keep NYCS drinking water clean by banning fracking in NYS watershed
That could be done by comparing the results to those gathered by other forms of data collection.
What s more analyzing the data from pairwise wiki surveys is still something of a statistical experiment.
That is an interesting new approach that allows the collection of data that would be difficult to get by other methods.
In particular it allows data to be gathered in a way that reflects the well-known long-tailed distribution of contributors.
For example on Wikipedia most of the information is intuited by a tiny proportion of editors.
If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form it would exclude about 95%of the edits contributed say Salganik and Levy.
when it comes to data analysis. And therein lies a significant challenge. Time for the statisticians to get busy y
Ali Shakouri a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University says the cost savings sound plausible given the material being used
or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones. OLEDS could be used in large sheets,
because manufacturers typically use equipment developed for making high-resolution displays, says Michael Boroson, the chief technology officer of OLED Works.
The factory will be able to produce a million 15-centimeter-wide panels per month. Even with such advances, it will take years to bring costs low enough to make OLED lighting widely used.
Some engineers for instance have used the idea of grid cells as inspiration for new algorithms to control robots or autonomous submarines.
The hope is that it could also be distributed using the same global network of liquid fuel transport that moves petrol around the planet.
an Ad-Free Facebook Alternative The first thing I noticed on Ello a new ad-free social network is the abundance of white space.
Unlike Facebook which rages with status updates trending topics and ads imploring me to click on things my friends like Ello is quiet and calm.
and entrepreneur Paul Budnitz Ello contends that on social networks like Facebook we the users are the product as our data is sold to advertisers who hope to entice us with ads in our feeds.
and one of several manifestos posted on the site says that those behind Ello dislike ads more than almost anyone else out there.
It doesn t sell user data to third parties either and you can decide whether or not you want to let it gather information about your own Ello activity to improve the site.
To make money it plans to take up a freemium model where it sells features to users.
This anti-ad (and in many ways anti-Facebook) ethos coupled with a stark simple design that looks
as if the German industrial designer Dieter Rams had created a more social version of Tumblr is probably not causing many people to ditch Facebook
but it is making plenty of them curious about the new social network. Ello began its invite-only beta test in August with 90 people
and while Budnitz won t divulge how many people are currently using it he says Ello is now getting up to 31000 requests for invites per hour.
In a smartphone-obsessed world that s a lot attention for a social network that doesn t even have an app yet.
But since the social network is still so small it s hard to tell whether I ll need it in the same way
I do Facebook and Twitter where I m accustomed to paying with the breadcrumbs of data
I drop along the way. Several elements of Ello s design are smart: your profile photo shows up within a circle and you can follow other users by dragging their circular icons into either a friends
or noise category and recategorize them at any time by moving the circle to and fro. You can view a feed of updates from either category with the noise one sporting a somewhat compressed Tumblr-esque layout that makes it easier to glance at many posts at once.
which is the opposite of how it s done on Facebook or Twitter. And it s embarrassingly easy to delete a friend s comment on one of your posts by clicking a tiny gray x next to the comment which
but swelling user base Ello feels kind of like a party at a hip art gallery where the guest list is kept secret.
So Ello is basically a stripped-down (commercial-free for now) Tumblr/Twitter? Is that it?
Ello simply states that it will soon offer special features that users can pay a small amount to get;
Budnitz says one example many users ask for is the ability to control multiple profiles with just one login for
and for a number of other startups like Evernote and Strava but it s not clear how well it can work on a social network especially one that wants to grow.
and its sudden popularity appears to be straining the social network. The search function seemed really slow
While some features have already been built a long list of them are still to come such as the ability to block other users from seeing your profile to post music
Apps for iphone and Android are in the offing but for now the only way to use it on a smartphone
or tablet is via a mobile browser. Despite the long to-do list Ello is off to an intriguing start.
There s room for a social network that is both pretty to look at and a pleasure to use e
#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,
The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it.
Not Programming Eugene Izhikevich thinks you shouldn t have to write code in order to teach robots new tricks.
Instead of programming you show it consistent examples of desired behavior. Izhikevich s startup Brain Corporation based in San diego has developed an operating system for robots called Brainos to make that possible.
To teach a robot running the software to pick up trash for example you would use a remote control to repeatedly guide its gripper to perform that task.
After just minutes of repetition the robot would take the initiative and start doing the task for itself.
Brain Corporation hopes to make money by providing its software to entrepreneurs and companies that want to bring intelligent low-cost robots to market.
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
The chip on that board is made by mobile processor company Qualcomm which is an investor in Brain Corporation.
At the Mobile Developers Conference in San francisco last week a wheeled robot with twin cameras powered by one of Brain Corporation s circuit boards was trained live on stage In one demo the robot called
and could then copy its software to new robots with the same design before they headed to store shelves.
Brain Corporation s software is based on a combination of several different artificial intelligence techniques. Much of the power comes from using artificial neural networks
But they might eventually offer a more powerful and efficient way to run software like Brainos.
Brain Corporation previously experimented with reinforcement learning where a robot starts out randomly trying different behaviors
while faster than programming it produces less predictable behavior. You wouldn t want to use the technique to ensure that an autonomous car could detect jaywalkers for example he says.
Researchers from Carnegie mellon and Intel developed the prototype headlight which scans the road ahead using an infrared camera
The Carnegie mellon-Intel prototype includes a camera a computer and a digital projector. Information from the infrared camera is processed by a computer that tries to identify relevant objects on the road such as cars, pedestrians or road signs.
The projector uses a light source that is 4700 lumens (much brighter than a halogen headlight) with an array of almost 800000 micromirrors that can be controlled individually by the computer.
The ability to control the light with so many micromirrors provides a high-resolution, highly tunable system that can also turn on
and off every pixel in just under one millisecond (the flap of a fly wing takes almost three times as long).
says the Carnegie mellon programmable headlight could improve automotive machine vision. This is a great example of taking ideas from computer vision
and applying them to a challenging real-world problem, he says. This is a known stumbling block for self-driving vehicles
which recently presented its findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich Switzerland is still modifying the prototype
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