Austin, Texas — Twitter, but increasingly Facebook and YouTube, are becoming essential elements to the way ordinary people in Mexico protect themselves from the war on drugs, according to experts sitting on a panel at South By Southwest Interactive called, “Life on the Line: Tweeting the Drug War.” Panelists included University of Texas at Brownsville…
When Facebook users clicks on the ‘like’ button, they are not only approving a video, a friend’s status or a page, they are revealing more than they think about themselves to perfect strangers. A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge have analysed 58,000 Facebook users’ Likes and were able to paint a very…
When the line at Starbucks is long, when class gets dull, when conversations get personal, when loneliness strikes, we grab the phone like an Old West quick draw. Though our generation is marked by social media, experts are anxious of its effects on relationships, specifically our capacity for communication. “We’re setting ourselves up for trouble,”…
Is the way we talk about the human mind messing with our ability to think about it clearly? The philosopher Colin McGinn is a tough book reviewer. He looks like a cop in an old movie about cops and robbers, and writes like one. And when he decided to take down Ray Kurzweil’s new book,How to…
A leading neuroscientist says Kurzweil’s Singularity isn’t going to happen. Instead, humans will assimilate machines. Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.” “The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it,” says Nicolelis,…