MachineMachine /stream

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Quite the opposite, so long as we grasp the fresh routes to knowledge, and connection, that technological change brings, says Nick Harkaway. These are old, old fears in a new…

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With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds…

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The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when…

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Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance. Three scholars whose work touches a variety…

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The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge…

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Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time: In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the…

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In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper. I've written toward…

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Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get. Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp…

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Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It's hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures. Read below for the…

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This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "12 Events That Will Change Everything," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American. The presentation was…

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We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the…

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently…

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...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

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Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules: * Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never…

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Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod…

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Pick up a 30-year-old astronomy textbook and you will find more illustrations of planets than actual pictures; Pluto still holds onto its full planet status and exoplanets are theoretical. In…

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For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

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The author of Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott, refutes the belief that the internet is turning today's youth into "the dumbest generation". Tapscott illustrates how the net has changed the…

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We don't have any trouble coping with three dimensions – or four at a pinch. The 3D world of solid objects and limitless space is something we accept with scarcely…

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Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also…

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TED has earned a lot of attention over the years for many reasons, including the nature and quality of its short-form conference presentations. All presenters lucky enough to be asked…