November 16, 2010
The rise of the Internet has sparked a fascination with what The New Yorker’s financial writer James Surowiecki called, in a book of the same name, “the wisdom of crowds”: the idea that aggregating or averaging the imperfect, distributed knowledge of a large group of people can often yield bett
September 9, 2010
In the last 10 years, the possibility of using wireless connections to deduce mobile devices’ locations has been a hot research topic in industry and academia. GPS systems frequently fail in large buildings, and even when they don’t, they’re not very precise.
August 25, 2010
Across science and engineering, computers are often enlisted to find patterns in data. The data might be genetic information about a population, and the pattern could be which gene variants predispose people to asthma.
January 29, 2010
If an airplane is cruising along and raises the flaps on its wings a degree or two, it will tilt upward. If it raises the flaps twice as much, it will tilt upward about twice as much.
