Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race

Creative Commons image via NASA

It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them.

The Evolution of Classroom Technology

The Reading Girl (1896). A. C. W. Duncan

Posted by Nicholas Fragkias on Κυριακή, 5 Οκτωβρίου, 2014

Classrooms have come a long way. There’s been an exponential growth in educational technology advancement over the past few years. From overhead projectors to iPads, it’s important to understand not only what’s coming next but also where it all started.

Winter technologies / Crystal of darkness

1024 * 768

This is small snowflake, 1 mm in diameter or slightly bigger. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, december 2014, Moscow. 19 RAWs averaged.

Interactions of the technical and the social

benheine.deviantart.com

 

Saskia Sassen

Digital formations of the powerful and the powerless

Saskia Sassen compares the impact of two kinds of socio-technical formations on the public sphere: electronic capitalist elites concentrated in global cities and globally networked, local social activist movements. Both have the power to transform existing political and economic systems.

The aim is to contrast two kinds of socio-technical formations that have crystallized in recent years: global ICT-mediated financial markets and, a very different case, local social actors geographically dispersed yet increasingly part of a globally articulated space even though they mostly are not in direct communication with each other. Each of these two types of formations has variable and often complex relationships with territory, law, state authority, and diverse kinds of power. The emphasis here is on interactive domains, which include formations as diverse as electronic trading networks and elementary electronic community lists and boards.

Ideas for Improving Science Education

IVΑNYI GRάNWALD, Bιla, In the Valley, c. 1900, Magyar Nemzeti Galιria, Budapest

 

 

· By Claudia Dreifus, The New York Times, September 2, 2013

If you could make one change to improve science education in the United States, what would it be? Science Times asked that question of 19 Americans — scientists, educators, students — with a stake in the answer. Their responses follow.

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience / Viewing Where the Internet Goes

 

Erin Lubin/The New York Times

Kwabena Boahen holding a biologically inspired processor attached to a robotic arm in a laboratory at Stanford University.

By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, Published: December 28, 2013

The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’

By THOMAS NAGEL, The New York Times, August 18, 2013,
 815 Comments

 

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is a brief statement of positions defended more fully in my book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” which was published by Oxford University Press last year. Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising, given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks. It seemed useful to offer a short summary of the central argument.

Building a Better Tech School

Viktor Koen

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, The New York Times, April 12, 2013

 

IF all the hopes and hype are warranted, a nondescript third-floor loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan offers a glimpse of the future, for New York City and for Cornell University. In truth, it doesn’t look like much — just cubicles and meeting rooms in space donated by Google. But looks deceive; here, with little fanfare, Cornell’s new graduate school of applied sciences is being rolled out.

The 33 Digital Skills Every 21st Century Teacher should Have

 

 

The Poet’s Garden, 1888.

 

Every single teacher is concerned about his/ her teaching practices and the skills involved in this process. How many times have you wondered about a better way to teach the same lesson you have delivered to an eariler class? How often have you used technology to engage your students and improve their learning ? These are some recurring questions we keep regurgitating each time our teaching skills are put to the test.

Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found

Lysov Yuri, Near Waterfall

 

Site where oldest computer lay for thousands of years may yield other treasures and even another Antikythera mechanism

It took more than 100 years to work out from its corroded remains how the Antikythera mechanism worked. Video: New Scientist

In 1900, Greek sponge divers stumbled across "a pile of dead, naked women" on the seabed near the tiny island of Antikythera. It turned out the figures were not corpses but bronze and marble statues, part of a cargo of stolen Greek treasure that was lost when the Roman ship carrying them sank two thousand years ago on the island’s treacherous rocks.

Have science museums had their day? e.t.c., e.t.c.

Edward Lear (1818-1888) A View Of The Nile Above Aswan

 

• Podcast: Have science museums had their day?

Ian Sample meets the director of London’s Science Museum, Ian Blatchford, to discuss the role of museums in an era of quantum mechanics, particle physics and genomics

• Presented by Ian Sample and produced by Jason Phipps

• guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 September 2012

The Science Museum in London is a treasure house of wonderful technological artefacts such as Stephenson’s Rocket and Apollo 10. But are its glory days numbered in the new era of quantum mechanics, genomics and particle physics? What exhibit could possibly do justice to these abstruse fields of science?