Month: December 2013

Business Environmental

Power play: why your electric bill may be changing soon

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As reported on The Verge. By Adrianne Jeffries In the near future, power companies may have to decouple electricity use from prices Americans are buying bigger homes, using more appliances, and firing up more data centers than ever before. You’d expect electricity demand to skyrocket accordingly, but the trend is actually the opposite. Total electricity use in the US has actually declined in the past four out of five years, according to a new government study, and…

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News

The Year in Review: the biggest stories of 2013

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As reported on The Verge. By Verge Staff The news that mattered, disappointments that didn’t, essential products, and what to look forward to in 2014   What a year you were, 2013. Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks turned up the heat on a cauldron of privacy concerns that’s sure to boil over in the next year. Drones expanded from killing machines to potential package-delivery robots. The US government shut itself down and revealed a disheartening lack of…

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Culture

These Apps Will Help You Make 2014 Less Filthy

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Catherine Shu This year, several notable apps that connect users with house cleaners have launched or gained traction. These include Homejoy,Exec and laundry service Prim. There are a lot of benefits to hiring a professional cleaning service but, unfortunately, I live outside the area covered by these apps. Letting people I don’t know into my apartment also makes me feel exposed. I just don’t like having strangers judge my lovingly curated collections of masking…

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Business

HP woes continue as 5,000 more employees face the axe

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As reported on Engadget. BY MARIELLA MOON It certainly won’t be a happy new year for thousands of HP employees — not when the company has increased its layoff numbers yet again. Hewlett-Packard alreadyadjusted the number of people it needed to let go from 27,000 to 29,000 a year ago, but it’s now added another 5,000 to the total. According to HP’s new SEC 10-K filing, cutting off 34,000 positions will save the ailing firm $4.1 billion per fiscal year.…

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Culture Science

Study suggests we’re all susceptible to false memories

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As reported on The Verge. By T.C. Sottek Researchers from UC Irvine have found that people with extraordinarily accurate memory are as vulnerable to the inception of fake memories as others, indicating that perhaps nobody is protected from memory distortion. The study, published last month inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), who are able to recall highly specific facts about their lives, like what they ate for lunch, going…

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Tech

What Makes Girls Fall In Love With Computers And Code?

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Colleen Taylor he perennial discussion about women in technology is in high gear once again, this time after remarks made by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about the relative dearth of female tech founders and the perks of starting to code at a young age in an interviewwith The Information were picked up byValleywag. Discussions about career, gender and age with a dash of the inherent class associations that often accompany them are always dicey topics, so it…

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Government Security

New Leaks Detail How The NSA’s ‘TAO’ And ‘ANT’ Units Spy On Devices, Global Networks

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Colleen Taylo New leaks emerged today in Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper about the scope of electronic surveillance conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency. In short, it looks like the agency has even more access to personal data than we already thought. Der Spiegel says it has obtained documents detailing the depth and breadth of access that the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, an elite group within the NSA that’s reportedly tasked with gaining access to foreign…

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Engineering

Samsung’s new chip could put 4GB of memory in your next smartphone

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As reported on Engadget. BY JON FINGAS Think the 3GB of RAM in the Galaxy Note 3 was a lot? Samsung was only getting started. The company has just unveiled the first 8-gigabit (1GB) low-power DDR4 memory chip, which could lead to 4GB of RAM in a multi-layered, mobile-sized package. Moving to the higher-bandwidth (3.1Gbps) DDR standard should also provide a hefty 50 percent speed boost over existing DDR3-based chips, even though the new silicon uses 40 percent less power than…

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Android Automotive

Google, Audi to announce in-car Android plans next week, says WSJ

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT Google has big plans to put Android in cars, and will start by announcing a tie-up with Audi at CES 2014 next week, according to the WSJ. Its sources said that Android will power an in-car entertainment system for that automaker, which will run on hardware built directly into the car rather than your smartphone. The collaboration will also involve NVIDIA, and such a system would give you access to the same…

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Art

Bah, Humbug: Holiday Specials for People Who Hate the Holidays

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As reported on Wired. BY RACHEL EDIDIN Are you a Christmas Person? Do you spend the last five months of every year in breathless anticipation, stockpiling decorations and preparing holiday playlists in October so you’ll have them on hand the moment the clock ticks past midnight after Thanksgiving Day? Go away. This isn’t for you. This one’s for the rest of us: the ones for whom Christmas is frustrating and fraught and painful. It’s for the…

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