Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining.
In the real world, there’s no textbook or curriculum. There’s no way to practice. There’s no source of continuous feedback. There are no teachers — it’s just you and whoever you can convince to help you. So how do you learn something no one can teach you? How do you become a world-class expert on something few…
Specifically, the number of Americans engaged in R&D has jumped by more than twentyfold since 1930 while their collective productivity has dropped by a factor of 41. “It’s getting harder and harder to make new ideas, and the economy is more or less compensating for that,” Bloom said. “The only way we’ve been able to…
Fact checking has its origin in the early 20th century when magazines began to verify statements made in non-fictional texts prior to publication. But the impact of fake news has soared in recent years. This means that ordinary people are increasingly skeptical of what they read online and hear from others. So in the…
But when he started to get into specifics, I noticed that other people were pulling out their laptops and notepads. I knew I had better take notes, so I reached for my phone. That’s what I like to use. The next presentation was even more intense and detailed, and I typed out as much as…
When a student tweets at their school’s Twitter handle, chances are they don’t expect a response–it’s like tweeting at Starbucks, or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—you feel like you’re talking to an entity that’s far too busy and important to ever respond to you. That’s why students in Georgia’s Cherokee County School…
It’s true: programmers think differently than everyone else. Not to say that programmers are necessarily smarter, more logical, or more rational than everyone else, as is commonly said. But scientists have recently started studying the brains of programmers and have come to some interesting conclusions. Source: How Programming Affects Your Brain: 3 Big Truths According to…