Gadget Blog

Mobile devices, including tablet computers and smartphones are rapidly becoming the computing and communications device platform of choice for consumers and business users. Messaging, gaming, engaging friends on social media, web surfing, reading e-books, and making payments (m-commerce) are just a few of the activities that consumers are doing on their mobile devices, for work and leisure. Just as the world wide web transformed travel distribution forever back in the late 1990s by enabling consumer-direct...

Natural Language Processing lies at the  intersection of linguistics  and computer science,  and promises to change  the way we interact with  computers. Forever. What is Natural Language Processing? Natural language, or the language spoken by humans the world over, is  a fascinating construct. Not only does  each language have its own set of rules  concerning grammar and semantics,  but over time these languages spawn  dialects that modify these...

Agent 001 goes on a mission to uncover the truth  behind brain training. Is it  truly effective? I landed myself a rather cushy task this month which involved  spending most of my time in the  offce with a steaming mug of coffee  rather than hunting for a very specifc  motherboard on Lamington Road in a heavy downpour. It all started when my Digit friends came across this brain  training website/app called Lumosity. Lumosity’s gamifed training program  promises...

The fear that our devices are somehow altering our brains might seem exclusively modern. But in 1931, Technology Review published  “Machine-Made Minds: the Psychological effects of Modern technology,” in which John Bakeless explored how machines had transformed the very nature of human thought. here’s what he had to say: It is a curious fact that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important efect of all—its profound...

A venture capital frm throws out intuition and uses computer models to determine investments. Aldea Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing an emergency treatment for alcohol poisoning, seemed like an attractive investment to venture capitalist David Coats. But he didn’t rely on a hunch—he consulted the computer model he’d built. Wenjin yang is research vice president at aldea pharmaceuticals, which got funding thanks to software suggesting that its method for speeding up alcohol metabolism was...

Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of  humans, robots, and algorithms. In his new book Automate This, Christopher Steiner tells the story of stockbroker Thomas Peterfy, the creator of the frst automated Wall Street trading system. Using a computer to execute trades, without humans entering them manually on a keyboard, was controversial in 1987—so controversial that Nasdaq pressured him to unplug from its network. Then, with a wink, Peterfy built an automated machine...

A biotech company is pursuing an approach that could redefne infectious medicine. For some infectious diseases, traditional  vaccines just don’t cut it. Microbes that  hide inside human cells and cause chronic  illness aren’t stymied by the antibody response  generated by the kinds of vaccines available at  the doctor’s ofce. T-cell vaccines, which acti- vate a diferent type of immune response, could  in theory ofer a better way to prevent or control such infections,...