We all know about the risks of credit card theft. But few of us know how it really works. This revealing, chilling report from NPR’s Planet Money takes you to an online marketplace for stolen numbers. It may change forever the way you see those plastic cards in your wallet. (A 4-minute NPR story includes excerpts from the longer podcast.)
Radio story • Podcast
Month: June 2011
Categories
About Digital Planet
Digital Planet is about your future, starting today. The posts on these pages expand the horizons of Digital Planet with links to articles, videos, illustrations, quotations, discussions, and other interactive resources. Some of these posts cover events and inventions that surfaced after the book was printed; others expand on subjects or ideas presented in the book. Each post is cross-referenced to relevant chapters in Digital Planet, the book. If you have suggestions for future posts, please email your ideas to us.
—George and Ben Beekman
This year Watson, an IBM computer, beat two champions on TV’s Jeopardy. This PBS Nova program goes behind the scenes and explains how Watson’s creators pulled it off.
Within the span of a few days, Microsoft and Apple demonstrated radically different successors to their current operating systems: Apple’s Lion (OS X 10.7), coming in July, and Microsoft’s Windows 8, due in 2012. Both are departures from traditional desktop OSs, borrowing concepts popularized on phones and tablets. This Wall Street Journal article discusses the different approach these two companies are taking.
In an age when “friend” is a verb, many of us have hundreds of social-network friends. But Oxford Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that we’re wired to max out our meaningful relationships at about 150. This NPR story has details. Can technology help us break Dunbar’s limit, and is that a worthwhile goal?
Categories
-Multimedia 15.0 Alan Turing, Military Intelligence, and Intelligent Machines 15.1 Thinking About Thinking Machines 15.2 Natural-Language Communication 15.5 Question-Answering Machines 15.6 The Robot Revolution 4.4 The User Interface: The Human-Machine Connection 4.7 Inventing the Future: Tomorrow's User Interfaces I 5.4 Beyond the Printed Page 8.5 Interpersonal Computing: From Communication to Communities 9.3 Internet Issues: Ethical and Political Dilemmas
Conversations with Robots
Be careful–you may be falling in love with a software robot. This episode of Radiolab—NPR’s clever and entertaining broadcast/podcast—explores many ways people talk to machines, including those alluring bots that populate online dating sites. Eliza, Furbie, Clever Bot, Bina—they’re all talking to us, and we’re listening. Radiolab puts it all in perspective in this fascinating program.
This summer some consumers will be able to pay for some of their purchases by waving their phones instead of swiping their cards. Google Wallet is an Android App that uses near-field communication technology to send transaction information from phone to merchant terminal. This kind of technology could eventually change the way we do most of our face-to-face shopping.
This New York Times article includes a demo video.
Many of the greatest works of art are inaccessible to most of the world’s population. In this short TED talk, Google’s Amid Sood demonstrates Art Project, a multimedia web gateway to many of world’s foremost art museums and the treasures they hold.
[ted id=1144]