Blog Archive

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The early internet kept showing us the future, and we rolled our eyes every time

In Tales of the Early Internet, Mashable explores online life through 2007 — back before social media and the smartphone changed everything.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed,” William Gibson famously wrote in 2003. With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we can add this about the era he was describing: the future was also unevenly believed. Even when it was right in front of us, we couldn’t see it through our assumptions. This was especially true of the things we were most passionate about. 

Everyone who was extremely online back in the late 1990s and early 2000s lost themselves to some new obsession when we got our first high-speed internet connection at home. Often it was an obsession that seemed somewhat illicit at the time, and utterly quaint now. For me, as for millions, that obsession was music — and acquiring it on Napster. 

This was spring of

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Internet
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Future Today Expands Its Hit Programming Into Free Linear “FAST” Channels

HappyKids, iFood.tv and The LEGO® Channel Will Debut on The Roku Channel

Future Today, the largest publisher of video streaming channels that reach millions of OTT viewers, today announced it is significantly expanding the footprint for its most successful programming by launching three new Free Advertising-Supported Linear TV (FAST) streaming channels on The Roku Channel, home of free and premium television on the Roku® platform, in the U.S.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200928005592/en/

HappyKids, iFood.tv and The LEGO® Channel Will Debut on The Roku Channel (Photo: Business Wire)

“Future Today is a great partner and we’re very excited to include their free linear channels on The Roku Channel,” said Ashley Hovey, Director of AVOD Growth, Roku. “We strive to deliver amazing, free ad-supported content to our engaged users. This partnership not only provides easier and immediate access to some of Future Today’s most popular

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Programming
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Chinese Americans look to new platforms as WeChat’s future remains uncertain

Back in April, when New York City was in the grips of COVID-19, Yuan Mingyue relied on WeChat to keep in touch with relatives in China, to check on their health and to share how things were in New York.

The social media app’s video call function, similar to FaceTime, proved especially useful as a lifeline for Yuan, who came to the United States 10 years ago and lives in Queens, once America’s center for Covid-19.

While FaceTime works for Apple customers, not everyone in China owns an iPhone or another Apple device.

So when President Donald Trump’s WeChat ban was to take effect Sunday — even as a federal judge temporarily put the brakes on his order — Yuan began the dizzying task, like so many other Chinese Americans, of figuring out workarounds.

“We can use other Chinese platforms, like Sina Weibo or QQ, or otherwise just make a

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Technology
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In the Future, Propaganda Will Be Computer-Generated

The ideal scenario for the modern propagandist, of course, is to have convincing personas produce original content. Generative text is the next frontier. Released in a beta version in June by the artificial-intelligence research lab OpenAI, a tool called GPT-3 generates long-form articles as effortlessly as it composes tweets, and its output is often difficult to distinguish from the work of human beings. In fact, it wrote parts of this article. Tools like this won’t just supercharge global propaganda operations; they will force internet platforms and average users alike to find new ways of deciding what and whom to trust.

When I prompted GPT-3 to opine on these issues, it captured the problem succinctly:

For the moment, at least, it seems unlikely that generative media will be effective in the same way as traditional media at promoting political messages. However, that’s not to say that it couldn’t be. What

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Computer
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Future mental health care may include diagnosis via brain scan and computer algorithm

IMAGE

IMAGE: MRI images like this one were screened by a machine learning computer algorithm designed by a research team at the University of Tokyo. The algorithm learned to identify the brains…
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Credit: Image by Shinsuke Koike, CC-BY

Most of modern medicine has physical tests or objective techniques to define much of what ails us. Yet, there is currently no blood or genetic test, or impartial procedure that can definitively diagnose a mental illness, and certainly none to distinguish between different psychiatric disorders with similar symptoms. Experts at the University of Tokyo are combining machine learning with brain imaging tools to redefine the standard for diagnosing mental illnesses.

“Psychiatrists, including me, often talk about symptoms and behaviors with patients and their teachers, friends and parents. We only meet patients in the hospital or clinic, not out in their daily lives. We have to make medical conclusions using subjective, secondhand

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Computer
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5 Future Technologies That Will Be Mainstream by 2020

geralt / Pixabay

Tech companies rang in the start of the new year by unveiling some of their ambitious plans for the coming months. Startups and multinational companies alike are beginning to feel the ripple effects of innovation in the industry, with technology becoming more intertwined in everyday lives each year.

As 2018 progresses, here are 5 future technologies you can expect to reach the public in the next couple of years.

1. The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has long been talked about amongst tech insiders as the next big innovation in home technology. In recent years, IoT has begun carve a niche for itself in everyday life with the growing adoption of systems like Google’s Home and Amazon’s Alexa. These devices will continue to integrate more aspects of the home into one harmonious system by utilizing the internet, allowing a user to control anything from the

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Technology
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Future technology: 22 ideas about to change our world

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Self-healing ‘living concrete’

Bacteria growing and mineralising in the sand-hydrogel structure © Colorado University Boulder/PA

Bacteria growing and mineralising in the sand-hydrogel structure © Colorado University Boulder/PA

Scientists have developed what they call living concrete by using sand, gel and bacteria.

Researchers said this building material has structural load-bearing function, is capable of self-healing and is more environmentally friendly than concrete – which is the second most-consumed material on Earth after water.

The team from the University of Colorado Boulder believe their work paves the way for future building structures that could “heal their own cracks, suck up dangerous toxins from the air or even glow on command”.

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Living robots

Scientists create ‘living robot’ © Douglas Blackiston/Tufts University/PA

© Douglas Blackiston/Tufts University/PA

Tiny hybrid robots made using stem cells from frog embryos could one day be used to swim around human bodies to specific areas requiring medicine, or to gather microplastic in the oceans.

“These are novel living machines,” said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert

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Technology
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The future of programming – O’Reilly Radar

Programming is changing. The PC era is coming to an end, and software developers now work with an explosion of devices, job functions, and problems that need different approaches from the single machine era. In our age of exploding data, the ability to do some kind of programming is increasingly important to every job, and programming is no longer the sole preserve of an engineering priesthood.

Is your next program for one of these? Photo credit: Steve Lodefink/Flickr.

Is your next program for one of these?
Photo credit: Steve Lodefink/Flickr.

Over the course of the next few months, I’m looking to chart the ways in which programming is evolving, and the factors that are affecting it. This article captures a few of those forces, and I welcome comment and collaboration on how you think things are changing.

Where am I headed with this line of inquiry? The goal is to be able to describe the essential skills that programmers need for the

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Programming
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The Evolution of Technology: Past, Present and Future

MySpace, YourSpace, BookFace: The Social Media Awakening

We’ve watched texting evolve from sending text-only messages (literally texting) to the addition of imagery, thanks to the viral spread of gifs, memes, emojies and bitmojies. In fact, with the spike in video-sharing, actual text is shrinking (meet SnapChat, Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Periscope, Vine, etc. and shorthand abbreviations). SMH.

Social networks continue to change the way people engage with one another. Ironically, the constant connection and way people interact with one another seems to morph to a more superficial setting online. Although superficial at times, this form of communication helps people stay closer to each other when they would have otherwise lost contact.

Face to Face (Virtually, Speaking)

Face-to-face conversations via technology are resurfacing, though, and even strengthening, thanks to higher-quality video and streaming capabilities (enter: Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, FaceTime, live streaming, etc.). With more people engaging in web/video conferencing online,

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Technology
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Tech of the future: technology predictions for our world in 2050

When we think about 2050 it seems like it is ages from now and we imagine a completely different world, but in reality, it is just 30 years from now and we can already know what will be possible to have by that time. We have a lot of environmental, social problems and let’s see how technology may solve them by 2050. Today’s article is about tech of the future!

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Before writing this article, I did a small research and checked what industry influencers think about this topic, for example Mr Kurzweil, Business Insider, Forbes, etc.
Let’s start with Ray Kurzweil – the world’s foremost futurist, authoring bestsellers like “The Age of Spiritual Machines” and “How to Create a Mind.” He’s so influential that Google hired him to lead its artificial intelligence

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Technology