by Erik Kain on March 5, 2012
Every now and then we hear rumors of the death of the PC. The rise of the tablet, and especially the iPad, makes these rumors far more common. Take this article in the New York Times, titled “As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline Of PC.” To be fair, it’s a reasonably balanced article, [...]
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by Erik Kain on February 22, 2012
Like the future, our biology is inescapable. As advances in technology give us greater control over our own biology, the debate over science and bio-ethics keeps heating up. In a review of Jonathan D. Moreno’s new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, Ronald Bailey writes: Our biopolitical and bioethical struggles span human concerns from [...]
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by Erik Kain on February 8, 2012
Imagine driving in a car that does all the work for you – like ‘s Siri voice technology, but at the wheel of the vehicle you’re riding in – your life, in other words, in the palm of a computer’s hand. It’s not science fiction, either. This is technology already being developed. Wired has a [...]
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by Erik Kain on February 6, 2012
eBooks are on trial once again. This time, they represent nothing short of an existential threat to democracy itself. In the prosecutor’s corner we have novelist Jonathan Franzen, playing the role of ‘bookservative’ and decrying the rise of these anti-democratic digital tomes. “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 30, 2012
The American people bankroll the federal government’s four biggest spending items to the tune of $2.2 trillion annually. Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, and Social make up over two thirds of the federal budget. By contrast, the slivers of the federal budget that go toward innovation are drops in a very big bucket. “We like to think of [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 26, 2012
announced recently its entrance into the digital textbook market. Dead-tree textbooks, the company claims, are a thing of the past. And, as David Thier notes, is off to a very strong start with its new textbook service – selling over 350,000 textbooks in just three days. Many are enthusiastic about the tech giant’s entrance into [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 7, 2012
South Park lampoons Thor, the History Channel, and for-profit colleges all at once in its latest Thanksgiving special. I’m catching up on the last season of South Park and we watched A History Channel Thanksgiving last night which is a brilliant spoof of several things all at once. It’s most obviously a spoof of the [...]
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