Digital products such as eBooks and digital music are often seen to liberate consumers from the burdens of ownership. Some academics have heralded the “age of access”, where ownership is no longer important to consumers and will soon become irrelevant.
In this week’s Light Start, we’ve got Samsung losing to a 3D printer, Microsoft’s army Hololens, SpaceX’s Starthopper, and MK 11’s Kollector.
When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. Take, for instance, an AI program that let web users compose music along with a virtual Johann Sebastian Bach by entering notes into a program that generates Bach-like harmonies to match them.
In the Game of Thrones universe, confusing a photograph of actor Jack Gleeson, who played the popular HBO TV show’s despised sadist Joffrey Baratheon, for one of Maisie Williams, the beloved Arya Stark, is an egregious case of mistaken identity.
First SpaceX, and now Amazon plans to send 3,236 satellites into low earth orbit in a bid to beam internet to humans on the ground.
Light pollution is the excessive and obtrusive light produced by humans at night. This light is from artificial sources, mainly electricity from houses, offices, streetlamps, billboards or car headlights…
After years of rejecting calls for increased regulatory oversight of Facebook, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now called for more cooperation with government in dealing with problems posed by internet platforms and emergent internet technologies.
Educational toys have come a long way from the 90s, where anything that might teach kids something was routinely considered boring as hell. There may have been spreadsheets involved. Now, if you want to teach a small person something that might help their careers, you can just grab them a mini-robotics lab or something. The ‘or something’ bit nicely describe’s Lego’s new Spike Prime kit, an engineering, robotics and coding-focused aimed at younger folks than Mindstorm or Technic setups.
Research into digital technologies indicates that phrases such as “word of mouth” or “keeping in touch” point to the importance of face-to-face conversation. Indeed, face-to-face conversation can strengthen social ties: with our neighbours, friends, work colleagues and other people we encounter during our day.
We’ve been following the fortunes of the Bloodhound SSC, the rocket-powered car that was supposed to hit South Africa in order to break the land-speed record, almost from the very start. We thought that all was lost when the project was delayed, and then delayed some more, and then ran out of money but it’s back. Bloodhound SSC has become Bloodhound LSR (which stands for ‘Land Speed Record’) and has picked up a new sponsor: Ian Melett.