I.B.M.’s Watson, named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, is an artificial intelligence program running on approximately 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second. Designed to answer questions posed in natural language, Watson will play “Jeopardy!” next week against the show’s top two living players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Neil Weinberg...

When you see the videos, you may think of Star Trek and The Borg. But a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration priority review program for exceptional medical devices will fast-track a DARPA-funded, brain-controlled prosthetic arm. FastCompany reports: The arm, which was developed at a cost of over $100 million by DARPA and Johns Hopkins University over the past five years, is controlled by a microchip in the...

Do Arabs, particularly people living in states alongside Egypt, have a right to be skeptical of claims that America is a defender of democracy and human rights? Americans may not like to hear it – but there is massive suspicion that the U.S. does and is doing everything it can to extend the rule of Hosni Mubarak and other friendly dictators. According to one of the leading commentators in the Maghreb,...

The NYTimes: Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light. That...

What chance is there that Arab militaries will give up the power to choose who rules to those now protesting in the streets? Columnist Issa Goraieb of Lebanon’s L’Orient Le Jour warns of the unlikelihood such a thing, particularly in Egypt, and also cites his native Lebanon in cautioning Arab protesters to consider what will happen when some form of democracy is finally achieved. For Lebanon’s...

I really wish that right-wingers would make up their minds about whether the free market is supposed to put wealth in more hands or fewer — they’re making me dizzy trying to figure out whether wealth creation is noble or evil:

I’ve been busy in recent weeks putting together a symposium on The Future of the Book. It’s past. It was a success… I’m relieved. For it, I did a presentation titled, “Is Book A Verb? The Social Future of the Book.” In it I posit that we are in the midst of moving from a Literal Tradition of sharing and passing on culture to a Social Tradition. I used Prezi, the zooming online...

The sense that the Egyptian people have reached a watershed and are finally going to insist on greater influence over their leaders is palpable in this article from Amal al-Oumma, the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood of Alexandria. The author, Reem al-Masry, writes of what the Egyptian uprising means to him and what it has taught his people about Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled that nation for 30 years. For...

Are social networks like Facebook and Twitter the cause or a symptom of events taking place around the globe? O Globo columnist Risoletta Mirand argues that despite their growing centrality to modern humanity, they are more like channels for society as it is, rather than protagonists in themselves. For O Globo, Risoletta Mirand writes in part: “It’s a fact that social networks are, indeed, an...

In this AP video, he explains his decision to go into space. Reuters: At a news conference on Friday, Kelly declined to discuss details of his wife’s condition. But he said he was planning on her being at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for the targeted April 19 launch of Endeavour’s two-week mission, NASA’s last scheduled shuttle flight. “She’s made progress every day,”...

Is the violence in the streets of Cairo destined to worsen? Rafiq Khoury of Yemen’s Al-Wahdawi warns that – whatever the outcome – there is little doubt that those protesting against Hosni Mubarak are about to confront a far more harsh reaction than they have until now. Explaining why Egypt is no Tunisia, for Al-Wahdawi, Rafiq Khoury writes in part: No noise is louder than the sound of change...

In this age when Internet has extensively intruded our public and private space, a literary event last evening held at the Alliance Française, New Delhi, marked a wonderful start to a new forum “Written Word, Etc.” A packed auditorium comprising young students as well as elderly folks, were in for a memorable treat. They listened with rapt attention the celebrated Indian author Vikram Seth in...

Does it make any sense for the Iranian regime to encourage ‘people power’ uprisings across the Arab world, only months after a its own sham election and the suppression of its own people? Sensible or not, this article from Iran’s state-controlled Tehran Times encourages Arabs in Egypt and elsewhere to continue to rise up against their oppressive rulers, but warns them not to play into the...

When it comes to Egypt, is it time for the United States to stop hedging its bets? According to columnist Thomas Spang of Austria’s Salzburger Nachrichten, without actively asserting its waning influence, Washington risks the worst imaginable outcome for the Western world: an Egypt governed by Muslim fundamentalists. For the Salzburger Nachrichten, Thomas Spang writes in part: A sober analysis of the...

Call it a Cold War hangover or a broken deal with the Devil – but according to columnist Stefan Kornelius of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Egypt shows that the era of paying off potentates regardless of how they treat their citizens and mistaking stagnation for stability is over, and the will of the people will no longer be denied. For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Stefan Kornelius writes in part: For...

After a five-day internet shutdown, President Hosni Mubarak said he would seek re-election. And apparently turned the internet back on: Reports from bloggers and Egyptian twitterati have confirmed that the Internet has been restored in Egypt by the country’s major Internet Service Providers ISPs. The decision has yet to be clarified as whether it is a single sided decision from the major telecom operators...

Will the Yellow Pages — the once indispensable to have and indispensable to advertise in powerhouse — soon be outlawed in San Francisco, a victim of the same technology revolution that short-circuited another onetime mainstay of American life, the pay telephone? It sounds that way: San Francisco would become the first city in the nation to ban the unsolicited distribution of the Yellow Pages under...

According to Zhang Guoqing of China’s state-controlled Xinjingbao [Beijing News], it seems that President Obama has finally woken up to the fact that America’s state of development is the most pressing issue for the nation. Unfortunately, the scholar from our largest creditor’s state-sanctioned media writes, Obama may be too late, and Americans and the U.S. media aren’t ‘buying it’. For...

As Joe Gandelman reported earlier, the popular revolt in Tunisia against that country’s corrupt and brutal leadership is credited with inspiring similar uprisings in other countries in the region, including Egypt, where the government headed for the last 30 years by Hosni Mubarak just took the unprecedented step of shutting off almost all Internet connection within the country.

It’s time to take a moment and say a prayer of remembrance. 25 years ago today I was a reporter on the San Diego Union, sitting at a desk in the main office in Mission Valley in San Diego next to one of my favorite editors Steve Droessler (who is still there despite the paper having changed ownership). It was a big day because the Challenger was going to be launched with the first teacher in space. The...

As protests in Egypt that many believe were inspired by the upheaval in Tunisia continue to grow today, the government of Egypt has taken what some say is an unprecedented step:slicing off all International connections to the Internet. Meanwhile, protest fever has seemingly spread to Yemen. Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government...

Twenty five years ago today I was sitting in a physics class when I heard the devastating news of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. At 11:39 am (EST) they ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God’. With thanks to John Denver and a You Tube User I offer this post as a tribute to the brave men and women who gave their lives for us all. May God Bless Their Memory. And...

I can describe President Obama’s State of the Union speech in three words. Just do it. I can describe Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s rebuttal in one word. Huh? And, Mr. President, what’s this 1960′s Sputnik moment? Nice try for the metaphoric oratory to goose our nation’s return to excellence. To my ears, the Soviet space shuttle orbit played second fiddle to Obama’s...

‘Condemned to partnership’ is how Christoph Prantner of Austria’s Der Standard describes relations between the two most important nations on earth. Pranter writes that despite that forced smiles and wolfish grins, Europe and the world had better hope that despite their differences, the two find a way to make things work between them. For Der Standard, Christoph Prantner writes in part: “The...

Are policymakers in the United States so married to a ‘zero-sum Cold War mentality,’ that they are damaging relations with China? Or is China a genuine threat that manipulates its currency and shamelessly steals American intellectual property? According to this editorial from the state-run China Daily, those who see China as an adversary are shooting themselves – and the world – in the...