Google, Intel and Sony are working on Google TV, a platform and service that will funnel search, video, Twitter and other Web applications through set-top boxes and onto televisions. Google TV will leverage a version of the Google Chrome Web browser, letting users search through the Web and video content just as if they were accessing the Web from their desktops and mobile phones. Google applications would be paired with Google’s stock-in-trade digital ads. Twitter, Facebook and associated gaming applications would be fair game for this service. Google, Intel and Sony are working on Google TV, a platform and service that will funnel search, video, Twitter and other Web applications through set-top boxes and onto televisions, according to The New York Times. The report comes days after eWEEK reported that Google was testing a TV service to run TV, Web video from YouTube and other applications from a set-top box based on Google’s Android operating system. Google has made a prototype set-top box to test the service, powered by Intel’s Atom processors and tested on televisions made by Sony, the Times said, noting that Intel and Sony are hiring programmers who have experience writing software for Android. […]
XI’AN, China — For years, many of China’s best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction. Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays. In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders’ meeting in Xi’an. It is hardly alone. Companies – and their engineers – are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. A few American companies are even making deals with Chinese companies to license Chinese technology. The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding […]
Human behaviors are often explained as hard-wired evolutionary leftovers of life on the savannah or during the Stone Age. But a study of one very modern behavior, fairness toward total strangers one will never meet again, suggests it evolved recently, and is rooted in culture rather than biology. In a series of three behavioral tests given to 2,100 people in societies around the world, an innate sense of fairness dovetailed with participation in markets and major religions. Generally speaking, these use social norms and informal institutions to promote fairness, which allow societies to become larger and more complex. Biologically speaking, people in the study weren’t fundamentally different from their circa-200,000 B.C. ancestors, or from each other. What differed was their cultural DNA. ‘You can’t get the effects we’re seeing from genes,’ said Joe Henrich, a University of British Columbia evolutionary psychologist and co-author of the study.’ These are things you learn as a consequence of growing up in a particular place. The study was published March 18 in Science. Kindness towards strangers is a baffling human trait, given that strangers appear to have been treated with suspicion and violence for most of human history. Some analyses […]
The ‘tea party’ movement was in the news again Tuesday as some 1,000 followers came to Washington to oppose Democrats’ final effort to pass healthcare reform. Since last summer, when the group gained recognition for its vocal opposition to healthcare reform in town halls, it has become a fixture on the national political scene. Yet questions remain: Just who, exactly, are the tea party faithful? The disgruntled remains of the Ron Paul movement? Fired-up elements of the Christian right? The seeds of a GOP populist movement? Patchwork Nation has something of an answer. Using a collection of online directories from one of the biggest tea-party groups, we have mapped and sorted a large number of members into the 12 Patchwork Nation county types. That breakdown shows tea party members are, as members suggest, scattered around the country. But there are concentrations in some particular kinds of places: agricultural ‘Tractor Country, the ‘Military Bastions located near defense installations, and ‘Mormon Outposts heavy with adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It also suggests that the official tea party organizations, while by no means small, are probably not an army of tens of millions […]
Last Friday night a New York Times headline underwent an online transformation. The article formerly known as ‘A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics’ acquired a new billing: ‘A Dispute on using the Koran as a Path to Jesus.’ For my money this was a big improvement, and explaining what I mean will illuminate a dirty little secret: some American Christians are fostering religious strife abroad. They mean well, but the damage they’re doing can be seen all the way from Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims are killing each other, to Malaysia, where Muslims are trying to keep Christians from using the term ‘Allah’ for God. The Times story is about an outreach technique that some Baptist missionaries use with Muslims. It involves stressing commonalities between the Koran and the Bible and affirming that the Allah of the Koran and the God of the Bible are one and the same. You can see how a headline writer might call this an ‘overture.’ And certainly the Christians who deploy the technique see it in sunny terms. Their name for it – the ‘Camel Method’ – comes from the acronym for Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life. But […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
