Archive: Mar 2018

“Soon, talking to strangers will be even easier” is the title of a recent article in Wired magazine about language translation technology. Author David Pierce begins the article with a description of current technology that helps travelers navigate foreign locations. He continues with “as translation tech improves, though, the benefit will extend way beyond just helping you get around. When translation happens quickly and accurately enough to have a conversation that spans two languages and feels almost natural, we’ll be able to experience places in an entirely new way.” Maybe the technology will evolve to better enable conversation between two people speaking the same language but using different dialects. For example, I was surprised by how many times I did not quite get what a British person was saying to me during my recent vacation to London. Eventually, of course, translator microbes will solve all of our problems :).

More than a dozen United States cities have pledged to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to honor net neutrality, in response to last year’s Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate requirements for equal access to the Internet, so now ISPs can block content, throttle speeds to some sites or services, or give preferential treatment to others. According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, “We’re gonna use our economic power to force the hands of these companies. We’re gonna build a movement among other cities.” It will interesting to see if this movement really takes off. Perhaps it may even lead to a resurgence of technorealism. We’ll see…

A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about an online game designed to help people detect fake news. This game is even more timely than I initially thought, as I just learned about a new research study that found that falsehoods are more popular than truths on Twitter. The study “analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” Wow!

Smartphones are heavily used for checking social media, taking pictures, and playing games. Now it appears that they are also being used to increase our health and wellness. The Pacific Standard website has an interesting article about a new app for those who have survived heart attacks. The app reduces those patients’ hospital re-admission rates, which creates the potential to save lives, improve outcomes, and reduce expenses. Hopefully many more apps like this are in development!