Sci and Tech
Think about your high school. No matter what city or town it was in, it likely grouped students by age. And offered an eerily similar menu of subjects — biology, math, history, Spanish — which met for 45 minutes or an hour. But why? Sal Khan has been asking some tough questions about education, and he's bent on re-inventing our system, one student at a time. Read more...
Innovation Hub's gadget guru Ben Saren joined us with suggestions on how to rev up your down time. (Not that there's anything wrong with binge-watching your favorite television show.) Check out his picks for the best diversions and distractions, from a personal flying drone to an addictive app for your phone. Read more...
We're looking in the U.S. at an aging population - the baby boomers are rapidly turning 65, and the demand for people to help care for those who are getting older is only going to rise. Kara Miller chatted with WGBH Morning Edition host Bob Seay about amazing advances in technology - particularly in robotics - that may fundamentally change what life is like for us as we age.
Time for a little experiment. Open a new tab in your browser and type in the URL “Relentless.com.” It’ll take you to a surprising and probably familiar place: the homepage of Amazon.com. As Brad Stone, author of the new and controversial book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” notes, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos considered “relentless” a fair characterization of the company he wanted to build. But, truth be told, it’s also a fair characterization of the man behind the company.
If you’ve ever sat behind the wheel of a car – especially between, say, the hours of 6 to 9 in the morning, or 4 to 6 at night – you’ll know exactly what Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell means when he says he’s fed up with traffic. “What frustrates me,” Rendell says, “is traffic delays because we haven’t kept up with capacity.” Since 1980, the number of vehicles on the road has increased by 104%, while lane capacity has inched forward by only 4%. So Rendell decided to do something about it.
If you’ve ever been to a foreign country, you know that one of the most terrifying parts of travel is being surrounded by a language you don’t understand. Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, might be able to change all that (and drastically reduce the amount of time you spend furrowing your brows and squinting at that French menu). Lee and his colleagues have created technology that can translate from language to language in real time, and he discusses it with us, along with other with up-and-coming technology that could change our lives.
In the summer of 2012, the San Francisco tech start-up Gild offered a job to 26-year-old Jade Dominguez. Dominguez didn’t have a college degree — and he hadn’t even applied for a job with the company. Why did Gild make him an offer? The company harnesses big data to look for the Internet’s most qualified workers, rather than relying on resumes, outdated credentials, or a human resources department. As it turns out, big data thought Dominguez was the best man for the job.
In one of the latest installments of NOVA's "Making Stuff" series, host David Pogue went on a test-drive that was a little out of the ordinary: it didn't involve an actual driver. That's because he was taking a spin in Shelly, a self-driving racecar developed at Stanford which can navigate twists and turns at breakneck speed all on its own.
Now, we turn from Anita Elberse's take on the blockbuster in entertainment to the gadgets that entertain us. David Pogue of WGBH's NOVA spends his time thinking about the race to make phones ever slimmer, their cameras just a bit better, and our watches a little smarter. We chatted about his predictions for the latest and greatest breakthroughs in technology.
If you were to travel back in time 20 or 30 years and tell the first person you saw that machines in the future could read your checks, deposit them, and dispense exactly the amount of money you needed whenever you needed it, you probably would get a few raised eyebrows. Yet, how many times have you visited an ATM in the past month instead of a human bank teller? In a new controversial study from Oxford University, researchers Michael Osborne and Carl Frey argue that this kind of automation is only the beginning. They predict that in the next twenty years an astounding 47 percent of American jobs may become automated.
