The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups. "This isn't about startup incubators or policy positions. It's not about "innovation in America" or which tech blog loves startups the most. This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we're all too stunned to figure out what's next. So we watch Lana Del Ray turn circles in a thousand animated gifs."
posted by flex on Apr 19, 2012 - 9 comments

The Control Revolution And Its Discontents - "the long process of algorithmisation over the last 150 years has also, wherever possible, replaced implicit rules/contracts and principal-agent relationships with explicit processes and rules."
posted by kliuless on Feb 23, 2012 - 25 comments

The library system in Polk County, Florida has installed vending machines so that patrons who aren't close to a library can still check books out.
posted by reenum on Jan 31, 2011 - 49 comments

Inducement Prizes -- Best known for the Ansari X Prize, the DARPA Grand Challenge and the Clay Mathematics Millennium Problems, inducement prizes have a long history, but their recent successes have led to increased government interest, viz. challenge.gov, and resulted in the development of vaccines, thanks in large part to the work of Michael Kremer.^* [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jan 6, 2011 - 8 comments

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson discuss tech evolution, overpopulation, the singularity, and spoons. [more inside]
posted by AceRock on Oct 21, 2010 - 1 comment

Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.
posted by Miko on Nov 4, 2009 - 4 comments

Barack Obama has responded to the 14 questions posed by ScienceDebate2008 (discussed previously). The Martian Chronicles has outlined some key points of his response. John McCain has not responded to the questions, but has indicated that he will respond.
posted by gruchall on Sep 1, 2008 - 63 comments

Dean Kamen's Artificial "Luke" Arm - Segway inventor reinvents the prosthetic arm: "I've been able to do stuff with this that I haven't, seriously haven't, done in 26 years... uh, pick up a banana, peel a banana and eat it without it squishening... I can't wait to get one of these in a real environment, a home environment, and actually my wife can't either. She's going, oh yeah, I got lots of stuff for you to do."
posted by kliuless on Feb 19, 2008 - 59 comments

Dr. President: "The next president of the United States of America will control a $150 billion annual research budget, 200,000 scientists, and 38 major research institutions and all their related labs. This president will shape human endeavors in space, bioethics debates, and the energy landscape of the 21st century." With the coming election, the AAAS has created a new website and devoted a section of their journal Science to the Democratic and Republican candidates' positions on science and technology issues. But to help further clarify their positions, some people are calling for the candidates to have a presidential debate on science and technology. [Via The Intersection and Wired Science.]
posted by homunculus on Jan 9, 2008 - 48 comments

“[O]ur military today oversees spending of about a billion and a quarter dollars every day. Most of that is misspent. Over this past quarter-century, we've reinforced an old industrial-policy military with hardware that makes increasingly less sense, spending most on things that provide the least return. The principal argument for that is: ‘We have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day.’ But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you're going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons.”
posted by jason's_planet on Apr 10, 2007 - 58 comments

VeinViewer is an infrared-absorption interactive "X-ray" device using advanced real time signal processing and a projector. Google video. YouTube video with short explanation.
posted by loquacious on Dec 20, 2006 - 19 comments

Airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning , the fax machine - in 1870 " Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Faith Popcorn: all of them famous prognosticators. Yet each comes off a piker when compared to the true master of industrial clairvoyance, Jules Verne."
posted by Voyageman on Apr 1, 2002 - 7 comments

teens spin web of the future. great article re: the winners of a competition for teenagers maintaining useful, unique, nonprofit sites.

Emily Boyde, 17, of Newcastle, Australia, was the only female finalist. Her Web site, MatMice, allows kids to create their own Web sites and view sites made by their friends.

She taught herself to write HTML, the language used to create Web sites. "I don't know a lot of other females who do this sort of thing," she said. "But after I saw the Internet, I liked the look of it. So I decided to learn to use it myself."

Emily rocks my world.
What do you think of the winners?
posted by gusset on Jun 25, 2000 - 2 comments

Those of you who're Slashdot kids have probably already seen this new computer made in Taiwan, but it's so small, it may have been overlooked.
posted by jason on Apr 23, 2000 - 3 comments

Oh my god. With this new site, Microsoft just crossed an invisible line of decency. Who are they kidding? Would you believe any pro-Microsoft commentary on the site came from a site visitor and not an internal MS employee? They've just lost what little credibility they had left.
posted by mathowie on Nov 9, 1999 - 1 comment