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Can humans trust robots? No … how about we ask whether robots can trust humans, eh?

hitchBOT is going to try and cross Canada this summer as a hitchhiker. Why that’s novel: it’s ostensibly a robot made out of a bucket. “This is both an artwork and social robotics experiment,” Zeller and Harris told me in… Continue Reading

Maybe this is why everyone you ever talk to seems to be in the process of redesigning their website

Have two job interviews this week, and am also working freelance for another group right now — in all three cases, the organizations admit their website is “rough” and want to see a re-design of it. They have coders/developers and… Continue Reading

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Is Kemper County, Mississippi going to be the future of the climate change battle?

You may have heard about the Kemper County (MS) power plant — here’s the Wiki for it, for good measure — as it could be a major step forward in the climate change battle. Here’s the basic situation: the plant converts coal into… Continue Reading

Climate change will soon be arriving at your breakfast table, and General Mills might start fading as a company around 2035

Quick, semi-humorous story before we get into this: last October, General Mills came to my graduate school to recruit. They had set up interviews on a Thursday, and conducted probably 10-12 that day. It just so happened that the same… Continue Reading

The ‘telemetric age’ — a.k.a. ‘The Internet Of Things’ — could be normative by 2025. (Gird your loins!)

This, today, from Pew Research: “One positive effect of ‘ubiquitous computing,’ as it used to be called, will be much faster, more convenient, and lower-cost medical diagnostics. This will be essential if we are to meet the health care needs… Continue Reading

Estonia is a small country in northern Europe that has about as many people as Hawaii; it became a global leader in technology, though. Here’s the valuable lesson for the world.

Estonia, a former Soviet republic, is now often considered one of the leading digital centers of the world (some call it “E-Stonia” as a result). People vote online, people do their tax returns in moments via mobile (and get their… Continue Reading

The two “next big things” for tech are the mobile space and data. As such, is Facebook about to overtake Google?

You can certainly make a case that the Internet/tech world is shifting a bit. Mobile is “the next big thing,” and that space hurts Google — phrased simply, there’s less space for ads; phrased in a more complicated way, Google does know what… Continue Reading

Honda (a car company) and UC-Davis just built a smart home together. Wait, why?

Our homes + our cars = 44 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So what if the two were synced up — as part of the emerging “Internet of Things” or “smart grid” — in an effort to get to zero-carbon… Continue Reading