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Net Neutrality: A Guide to (and History of) a Contested Idea
This week, news broke that the Federal Communications Commission is considering new rules for how the Internet works. In short: the FCC would allow network owners (your Verizons, Comcasts, etc.) to...
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The Electronic Medical-Records Email(s) of the Day, #3
For background on the EMR saga, see this original article and previous installments one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Our series went on hiatus while I was on the road in Mississippi....
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The Man Who Thinks He Has Solved the MH370 Mystery
Anyone familiar with modern Malaysia -- and hey, that should include almost everybody in this era of MH370 coverage -- knows the name "Dr. Mahathir." For more than two decades, Mahathir Mohamad,...
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What Ray Kurzweil Is Doing at Google
1. What Ray Kurzweil is doing at Google: teaching computers to read. "So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at...
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What Happens When a Driverless Car Encounters Construction
It's clear, now, that Google's driverless cars are a real thing. Using a combination of extremely detailed maps, a quiver full of sensors, and sophisticated machine learning techniques for seeing the...
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The Surprising Birthplace of the First Sperm Bank
In a country scandalized and outraged so easily, the sperm bank has been naturalized. To say one works at a sperm bank would cause no more of a commotion than to say one works at an investment bank,...
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Beyond 'Screen Time:' What Minecraft Teaches Kids
All video games are not created equal. I wouldn’t recommend we encourage youth to play just any game. I doubt transferable skills are learned by repeatedly flapping a bird into a drainage tube. The...
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How to Stop Solar Power Plants from Incinerating Birds
The Ivanpah solar thermal power plant in the Southern California desert supplies enough carbon-free electricity to power 140,000 homes. For birds, bats and butterflies, though, the futuristic project...
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These 3D Images of Insects Are More Detailed Than Your Nightmares
The serious bug collector will tell you that no entomological compendium is ever truly complete. Even the most vivid color-wheels of butterflies are missing something—often many somethings—either...
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How Much Should Facebook Be Paying Us?
1. Wages for Facebook, by Laurel Ptak. "Ptak’s own elegant, angry manifesto has bewildered as much as it has enlivened. Some people on Twitter wondered if this wasn’t all a joke, while others took to...
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The Slow Cooker That Requires No Electricity
Sitting on my counter is my newest piece of culinary equipment: an eco-friendly Wonderbag slow cooker, the brainchild of Sarah Collins, a South African entrepreneur. She has monetized an exceedingly...
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Why the British Library Is Spending $55 Million on News Archives
Just 2 percent of the British Library's massive archive of print newspapers have been digitized. That's going to change. The institution is completing a seven-year effort to upgrade its news archives,...
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A Terminal Condition: The Cathode Ray Tube's Strange Afterlife
The cathode ray tube is dead. “Rust in peace,” ministered the New York Times in its 2009 catalogue of obsolescence for the aughts. The obvious play on words conjoins an industrial mythos with a...
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The Value of a Positive Tweet: $22.26*
Corporate messaging matters, but word-of-mouth rules. We don't trust brands. We trust people. It's always been this way. And yet the Internet has changed the way we find and respond to other people's...
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What a Toilet Hoax Can Tell Us About the Future of Surveillance
I wasn't actually surprised to learn that public officials in Toronto had agreed to install "smart toilets" in the city's convention center so they could analyze public, um, data. As a privacy...
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Want More Renewable Energy? Send in the Drones
When the world’s largest photovoltaic power plant went online this week in Arizona, it began generating 290 megawatts of clean green electricity that’s powering 100,000 homes in neighboring California...
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A Eulogy for Twitter
We've been trying to figure out the moment Twitter turned, retracing tweets to see whether there was something specific that soured the platform. Something is wrong on Twitter. And people are...
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Why We Unfriend
In the 1997 movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the two title characters, worried that they haven’t done anything noteworthy to share at said reunion, decide instead to lie and claim they...
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How Japan's Status as a Rising Solar Superpower Helps China
Since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that took Japan’s nuclear industry offline, the country has been installing so many photovoltaic panels that last year it accounted for 17 percent of the world’s...
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Remember the Great Airbnb Protests of 2014
1. Somehow I don't think chanting 'sharing is caring' helps the Airbnb cause. "'We know that this proposal would make it nearly impossible for regular people to share their homes,' David Owen, an...
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