Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s your Uber ride arriving to take you to work.
Uber is researching how to offer customers short-haul flights on vertical-takeoff aircraft in future, the ride-hailing company’s Product Head Jeff Holden told a a Recode reporter on stage at the Nantucket Conference on Sunday.
Holden said the company is looking into drone-like aircraft, “so we can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around.”
Interacting with people through brainwaves either via technology or a telepathic six sense has been long explored in the genre of science-fiction: in Hollywood blockbuster X-Men the character Professor X is telepathic and has the ability to tap into and read other people’s minds.
While the concept of telepathy or thought-controlled communication was once thought to be a futuristic concept or a concept reserved only for the realm of science-fiction, technology today is advancing fast, with the world soon to expect the commercialisation of holograms as explored in The Time Machine, autonomous cars as seen in iRobot and now brainwave communication like in X-Men.
While science-fiction explores the dark side of these technologies, the real world is exploring a multitude of applications to enhance and improve people’s everyday lives.
Frugality, crafting inexpensive knock-offs and making do with little may be the ethos of India’s pharmaceutical industry, its manufacturing sector and the spirit with which our scientists conduct their research but an Indian-origin bio-engineer at Stanford University has just won one of America’s grandest prizes — the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant — worth Rs.4 crore for designing a $1 microscope.
Towards do-it-yourself science
Manu Prakash from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh and an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has made a name for fashioning ingenious devices that make the essence of science — observation and experiments — accessible to those who can’t afford expensive instruments.
By Waverly Labs Translates Languages for You in Real Time!
Full Story: http://goo.gl/U95zrp
As you’ve probably heard, there’s a live-action version of the classic manga The Ghost in the Shell with Scarlett Johansson coming next year, and now the first teasers have arrived.
The spots, which initially aired during tonight’s Mr. Robot season finale, are glitchy and weird; impressionistic moments rather than traditional teasers. (As somebody that grew up on ‘90s visions of our inevitable cyberpunk future, it’s an aesthetic I happen to personally enjoy. The only shame is that Ralph Fiennes isn’t around to sling some black market MiniDisc memories.)
Of course, stylized teasers can’t erase the one thing that has undeniably defined the new version of Ghost in the Shell thus far: its casting controversy. When it was first announced that Scarlett Johansson would be starring in the film, there was concern among fans that a white actor was taking the lead role in a story that is considered quintessentially Japanese. When the first still photo from the film showing Johansson appeared, the concerns over the film’s whitewashing only intensified.
Posted in education, futurism | Leave a Comment on Interview: Education Minister Hekia Parata on Preparing New Zealand’s Future Generations to Take on the World — By Michelle FlorCruz | Asia Society Asia Blog
“Asia Blog spoke to Parata ahead of the launch of the Center for Global Education at Asia Society to discuss the importance of globally-minded future generations.”
SEPTEMBER 15 — When it comes to making forecasts — whether it’s predicting the outcome of an election or determining whether a marriage will last — what good is intuition? Can our gut instincts guide us to correct outcomes, or are they too unreliable to be useful in a world ruled by data?
People can use intuition to make remarkably accurate predictions, social scientists have shown. In an experiment published earlier this year, for example, psychologists found that call-centre employees speaking with registered voters a week before an election could foresee with surprising accuracy which ones would flake out on their plans to vote. “It’s surprising to me because it’s such a short exchange for callers to be able to make useful inferences about whether respondents are actually going to do what they say,” the lead researcher, Todd Rogers, told me when the study was published. He cited other studies where ordinary people showed extraordinary abilities to intuit others’ personality traits, sexual orientation and racial attitudes.
At the same time, unconscious judgments can be contaminated with biases. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman laid out many of the perils of gut instinct in his 2011 best-seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Among them are anchoring (being overly influenced by the first information you receive), hindsight bias (wrongly believing past events were predictable or predetermined), and the availability heuristic (giving too much weight to what you already know and not enough to what you know you need to look up).
