What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spiritKing of hell no quarrel have I left thee
No lovely maid who gleaned in fields or skies
One pair of lines above is the work of Shakespeare. The other was written by a computer. Can you tell which is which?
Posted on August 30, 2016 - 12:54pm
Emily Burns was driving north from the Bay Area one day, idly woolgathering, when it hit her.
“Western sword ferns,” she recalls thinking. “They’re twice as big in the northern end of their range as in the southern end. And it struck me that it had to be due to water availability. The fact that it’s wetter in Redwood National Park in Humboldt County than, say, Lime Kiln Creek on the Big Sur coast translates as larger ferns in the north. It all seems obvious now, but there was nothing in the literature on it.”
Posted on August 24, 2016 - 2:50pm
Venezuela, whose citizenry and economy have both been unhealthy, is enduring yet another economic collapse, which has triggered yet another outbreak of disease. This time, it’s malaria. During the first six months of this year, 125,000 cases have been reported—a health crisis the government has tried to minimize, if not repudiate, and not for the first time.
Posted on August 22, 2016 - 5:15pm
Girls matter. That’s the philosophy behind a successful secondary school in Tanzania that is educating the perennially poor in a country where only one in four females continues past seventh grade.
Posted on August 9, 2016 - 1:25pm
Drone use has taken off in recent years for landscape and environmental photography, and it has photo-enthusiasts aflutter with the question: Will drones knock kite aerial photography (KAP) off the map? For Charles Benton, a UC Berkeley architecture professor known for making KAP into a well-respected (if niche) art form, the answer is: nah.
Posted on August 3, 2016 - 12:57pm
Moore’s Law—as first put forth in 1965 by Berkeley alum and Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Gordon E. Moore—postulates that the number of circuits on an integrated circuit will double every two years. Amazingly, the prediction (initially just an observation) has held up in the decades since, leading to computers that are ever smaller and ever more powerful.
But Moore’s Law is now running up against hard limits, due to the physical properties of silicon, the semiconducting material used in computer chips.
Posted on July 18, 2016 - 12:05pm
Nairobi is a tough town, and there’s no place in Nairobi that’s tougher than Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Maybe a half-million people live there, maybe a million. No one’s really counting. But virtually everyone is desperately poor, with per capita earnings averaging about a dollar a day. Rape, assault, and murder are simple facts of daily life. The streets are paved with rotting garbage, sewage flows in the gutters, disease is rampant, and city services are largely nonexistent.
While the new Bay Bridge is finally functional, it stands more as a symbol of dysfunction than anything else. From the start it seemed born under a bad sign, down since it began to crawl—like, if it wasn’t for bad luck, it wouldn’t have no luck at all.
Posted on June 21, 2016 - 10:38am
Remember pneumatic tubes, those compressed-air pipelines that whisked plastic canisters from basement mailrooms to penthouse boardrooms? Imagine being in one, traveling at more than 700 mph. You could make the round-trip from San Francisco to LA in a little over an hour. That may sound like science fiction, but it could one day be a reality thanks to the efforts of engineering students at UC Berkeley and elsewhere.
The grim reports of mass shootings just keep coming—the Orlando massacre followed all-too-similar tragedies we’ve come to know as shorthand for senseless violence: San Bernardino. Umpqua. Sandy Hook.
Posted on June 20, 2016 - 7:29am
Posted on June 1, 2016 - 4:47pm
People aren’t products. Or are they? We’re in the age of the “personal brand,” after all—where your online persona effects your reputation, the bonds you form with others, your career. And now, your dating life.
Posted on May 31, 2016 - 10:18pm
Ever see the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal? Contestants are given a choice of three doors and told that behind one of them is a shiny new sports car. If they pick door No. 1, the host may open door No. 2 to reveal that there’s nothing behind it. Then he asks if they want to stick with door No. 1 or switch to door No. 3. What’s the best move?
Posted on April 26, 2016 - 7:13am
Joshua Miele has been blind ever since a violent acid attack took away his vision before his 5th birthday. But he says he no longer spends time wishing he could see. Instead, from his office at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, he dreams up new technologies for the blind, and helps turn those visions into reality: maps that can talk, YouTube videos that can speak, electronic gloves that can text.
Posted on April 20, 2016 - 5:41pm
A popular opinion on the Internet lately is that the members of the Supreme Court are a bit superannuated. You know: supremely old, dated, over the Capitol Hill, if you will. The presumption seems to be that with our geriatric justices aged to imperfection, they’re not only physically impaired, but technologically impaired as well.
Posted on April 7, 2016 - 5:44pm
