from The New Yorker If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in […]
Author Archive | Professor Shannon
Chinese Dissidents Feel Heat of Beijing’s Wrath. Even in Canada.
from NYTs Search for Sheng Xue on Google in English and you will find the story of an award-winning writer who left China for Canada after the Tiananmen Square uprising and became one of the world’s leading advocates for Chinese democracy. But that same search in Chinese comes up with a very different portrait: Sheng […]
The Ecstatic Beauty of Baseball
from The New Yorker It’s right around the corner. That magical time of year when grown men put on their ball caps, pull up their socks, and take to the field. What is it about this sport that has captured our imaginations for more than two hundred years? It’s really just a simple game played […]
Farm Bankruptcies Shed New Light On Perils Of Big Agriculture
from Axios Chris Petersen, a third-generation hog farmer who says “I bleed rural” and tears up at the fate of family and friends, has found a way to keep his small holding going, and avoid the exodus that so many are making. His grown son and daughter have, too. But meanwhile, Petersen is at war […]
Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence
from NYTs In 2004, Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his pursuit of a technological idea called a neural network. It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines […]
‘Blurred Lines’ on Their Minds, Songwriters Create Nervously
from NYTs It’s not easy to be a songwriter in the pop world these days. Listeners rarely see your name. For anything but a giant hit, royalties from streaming are infinitesimal — and big tech companies seem to want to keep it that way. And then there’s the shadow of “Blurred Lines.” Four years after […]
Is Big Tech Merging With Big Brother? Kinda Looks Like It
from Wired A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work. When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she […]
It’s Time To Break Up Apple
from Fast Company A recurring theme of the last two years–politically, culturally, economically–has been yelling out loud what was supposed to be merely whispered or implied; throwing caution to the wind and, essentially, telling on yourself. That’s exactly what Apple did yesterday. This Monday, the beloved tech giant announced its big plans to seek fresh […]
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science
from Quanta No human, or team of humans, could possibly keep up with the avalanche of information produced by many of today’s physics and astronomy experiments. Some of them record terabytes of data every day — and the torrent is only increasing. The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the […]
Fintech Boom is Disrupting the Way Companies are Run
from readwrite Finance is a central tenet of business and a pillar upon which any successful company stands. After all, the point of capitalism is to create organizations which not only do something useful but those which ultimately monetize their plans and bring value to shareholders. More here.
The Servant Economy
from The Atlantic In March 2009, Uber was born. Over the next few years, the company became not just a disruptive, controversial transportation company, but a model for dozens of venture-funded companies. Its name became a shorthand for this new kind of business: Uber for laundry; Uber for groceries; Uber for dog walking; Uber for […]
How Cambridge Analytica Sparked The Great Privacy Awakening
from Wired ON OCTOBER 27, 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email to his then-director of product development. For years, Facebook had allowed third-party apps to access data on their users’ unwitting friends, and Zuckerberg was considering whether giving away all that information was risky. In his email, he suggested it was not: “I’m […]
Legal Scholar Tim Wu Says The US Must Enforce Antitrust Laws
from Wired LAST WEEK, PRESIDENTIAL candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced an ambitious plan to break up big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and block them from selling their own products on their platforms. Warren called out Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and Google’s acquisition of online advertising giant DoubleClick as examples […]
The Biggest Hacking Risk? Your Employees
from readwrite This January, a hacker broke into Ethereum Classic, one of the more popular cryptocurrencies, and began rewriting transaction histories. Until recently, blockchains were considered unhackable, but it’s clear that cybercriminals always find vulnerabilities. Here’s the lesson: If a blockchain can be hacked, no one is immune to the threat of cybercrime. And businesses […]
The College Admission Conspiracy Is Education’s Madoff Moment
from Forbes The scope, scale and cunning of the college admission conspiracy that has embroiled more than 50 elites, including Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, CEOs, prominent lawyers and others, is nothing short of higher education’s Bernie Madoff moment. Madoff, a crestfallen Wall Street investment titan spent more than 30 years “besting” the […]