Technology

Are you being monitored all of the time? You certainly are, by both corporations and the government. It just may not be obvious in the U.S., whereas in London you are filmed by government 300 times each day, and that concerns privacy advocates. What if the spying were more obvious? Like a webcam that looks like human eye? There is a reason that webcam companies do not make a camera that looks like a human eye, and that is partly due to not wanting to be the product reminding customers that if you can watch something, something can watch you back. It is also partly because of the "Uncanny…

If you missed the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, wait a few years and catch the next one. One happened in 2012, and in 2003, and since it was only discovered as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s, they may have been happening forever. If it isn't coronavirus, it could be a new flu.  Not much can prevent viruses from mutating, but a new paper says machine learning might be able to slow pandemics down - by improving testing. The analysis found that if a simulation used who an infected individual has been in close contact with, where and for how long, containment would be…

Though it is common to complain that advertising is following you everywhere and algorithms control our news, it is instead the case that the more tedious or challenging a task becomes, the more humans trust computers instead. Not many people listen to 4,000 songs to create a playlist they like, they make a playlist with a few and let Spotify do the rest. A recent study involved 1,500 individuals evaluating photographs. The team asked volunteers to count the number of people in a photograph of a crowd and supplied suggestions that were generated by a group of other people and suggestions…

At the height of his career, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla became obsessed with an idea. He theorised that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly through the air at long distances – either via a series of strategically positioned towers, or hopping across a system of suspended balloons. Things didn’t go to plan, and Tesla’s ambitions for a wireless global electricity supply were never realised. But the theory itself wasn’t disproved: it would have simply required an extraordinary amount of power, much of which would have been wasted. Now, a research paper has suggested…

Whatever Uncanny Valley when it comes to machines still existed in 2019 got a lot smaller in 2020. We're even being nicer to them since 2020. People mostly dispense with social norms of human interaction and treat machines differently. The behavior holds true even as machines became more "human" seeming, such as Amazon's Alexa or Morgan Freeman in your vehicle navigation system. Human default behavior is often driven by heuristic thinking -- the snap judgments people use to navigate complex daily interactions. The Uncanny Valley says that as artificial things begin to seem more human, but…

The world is addicted to plastic. Plastic pollution is one of the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Each year, 78 million metric tons of plastic packaging is produced across the world and of that, only 14% is ever recycled. What isn’t recycled, ends up in the ocean. Our addiction to plastic has fueled a massive increase in the supply of disposable plastic products that has choked the world and which we have proven unable to handle. In Africa and Asia, where waste collection systems are either inefficient or nonexistent, plastic pollution is at its most visible. Yet, this…

The mosquitoes that carry zika, like Aedes aegypti, are considered by all but the most activist ecologists to be useless disease vectors. There is nothing they do in nature that isn't easily done by other mosquitoes and they can safely join the 99.999999999% of species that have gone extinct without causing a cascade of doom.  Seriously, Send me your hate mail, @ me on Twitter, try to cancel me, I don't care, that is absolutely correct. They are ecologically useless and have survived despite that, because evolution is not always fair. After years of study across two different…

If you are thinking you might buy a Creality 3-D printer to save money making stuff at home, a new MLS listing may make you change your mind. It is the first 3D-printed home to get a government permit in the United States and is on sale for a whopping $299,999. The house is $213 per square foot, and you are so far from Manhattan you might as well live in Scranton, but whether it sells right away or not is less important than the proof-of-concept. The hook is that it was printed on site using SQ4D's Autonomous Robotic Construction System (ARCS) and they want to get a patent to have robots…

In January of 2020 we began to write about "coronavirus 2019" due to concern regarding increased cases of pneumonia during a mild flu season, while the Chinese dictatorship was denying there was any problem at all. Just over a week later a key whistleblower in Wuhan, Li Wenliang, turned up dead after being arrested and held prisoner for a month by the communist government for "rumor-mongering." In hindsight, the evidence was there despite China rushing to suppress it, even telling the World Health Organisation to state that the disease could not be transmitted from human to human...or else. A…

Computers are well-known for being able to recover information quickly - a Google search will often give you the result you wanted as you type, even if you make spelling errors - but are not known for creativity. They are good for storage and retrieval. A new study finds those may be flipped. The distinction was never absolute anyway. Though it was only in 1996 that a computer beat a chess champion, computers beat lower quality players all of the time. And our memory may be better than we think, it is instead that the brain strategy for storing memories may lead to imperfect memories,…