MachineMachine /stream

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With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the…

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Infographic on compulsive hoarding

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Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts,…

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Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper…

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This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern…

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Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. When people say, “I looked it up on Google,” they are committing a solecism. When they try to erase…

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Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information…

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In case you haven’t heard, the newest champion of "Jeopardy!," the popular TV game show, is a computer. Watson, an enormous computer developed by researchers at IBM, was pitted against…

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What does it mean to read in a digital age? Researchers are just beginning to explore the question, and educators are engaged in passionate debate about how reading may be…