Ms. Powell does not have any easy or obvious ideas for how to address tech’s monoculture. She thinks of her book as starting a conversation. But any solution, she said, will involve “a fundamental, bottoms-up cultural change” — and one that we should not expect to see overnight.
In a satirical new novel, a former Google executive identifies the technology industry’s chief issue: its narrow engineering-focused bubble.
The behemoths’ annual conferences, held to announce new tools, features, and acquisitions, always “send shock waves of fear through entrepreneurs”, says Mike Driscoll, a partner at Data Collective, an investment firm. “Venture capitalists attend to see which of their companies are going to get killed next.” But anxiety about the tech giants on the part of startups and their investors goes much deeper than such events. Venture capitalists, such as Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, who was an early investor in Twitter, now talk of a “kill-zone” around the giants. Once a young firm enters, it can be extremely difficult to survive. Tech giants try to squash startups by copying them, or they pay to scoop them up early to eliminate a threat.
Big, rich and paranoid, they have reams of data to help them spot and buy young firms that might challenge them.
Posted in futurism
Speaking from beyond the grave, Professor Stephen Hawking has told a new generation growing up in an increasingly insular world: ‘Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.’
The eminent cosmologist, who had motor neurone disease and died in March, had his final public thoughts broadcast at a special event to launch his last book, Brief Answers To The Big Questions.
Prof Hawking’s words of advice and defiance, echoing from an Imax screen at London’s Science Museum, brought tears to the eyes of his daughter Lucy.
According to Einstein’s General Relativity, gravity travels at the speed of light. Proving it is far from simple, though: unlike light, gravity can’t simply be switched on and off, and is also extremely weak.
Over the years, various attempts have been made to measure the speed using studies of astronomical phenomena, such as the time delay of light as it passes through the huge gravitational field of Jupiter. While the results have been broadly in line with Einstein’s prediction, they’ve lacked the precision needed for compelling evidence. That’s now been provided by the celebrated detection of gravitational waves. Analysis of the signals picked up by the two giant LIGO instruments in the US has confirmed that gravity does indeed travel through space at the speed of light.
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Developers testing an earthquake early warning system for the West Coast say its automated alerts are ready to be used more broadly, but not for mass public notification.
U.S. Geological Survey official Doug Given told reporters Wednesday at California Institute of Technology that the ShakeAlert system has transitioned from a production prototype to operational mode.
The system built for California, Oregon and Washington detects an earthquake is occurring and send out alerts that may give warnings of few seconds to perhaps a minute before shaking arrives at locations away from the epicenter.
