Tag Archives: hittingthebooks

Hitting the Books: Why Travis Kalanick got Uber into the self-driving car game

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If you thought rocket science was hard, try training a computer to safely change lanes while behind the wheel of a full-size SUV in heavy drivetime traffic. Autonomous vehicle developers have faced myriad similar challenged over the past three decade...

Hitting the Books: Kenya’s digital divide is hampering its mobile money revolution

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While mobile money apps have been slow to gain acceptance in the US, they’ve taken other nations like Sweden, China and especially Kenya by storm, enabling people for whom conventional banking has remained out of reach new ways to send, receive and i...

Hitting the Books: The continuing controversies surrounding e-cig safety

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Though more than a billion people worldwide still smoke cigarettes, folks who are looking to kick the habit have an ever-widening wide array of modern assistive techniques and technologies at their disposal. However, among the talk therapies and tran...

Hitting the Books: AI doctors and the dangers tiered medical care

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Healthcare is a human right, however, nobody said all coverage is created equal. Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are already making impressive inroads into the myriad fields of medicine — from IBM’s Watson: Hospital Edition and A...

Hitting the Books: Smaller cameras and projectors helped the Allies win WWII

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Modern cameras exist in high definition ubiquity — they’re in our laptops and phones; strapped onto our helmets and dangling from our drones — heck, you’d be hard pressed to find someone on the street without a video capture-capable device in their p...

Hitting the Books: How Bell Labs jump-started the multimedia art movement

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The modern world would be a pale shade of itself if not for the myriad foundational technologies developed at the Bell Telephone Labs. Its engineers invented the transistor and photovoltaic cell, charge-coupled devices, frickin’ lasers — even Unix an...

Hitting the Books: How autonomous EVs could help solve climate change

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Climate change is far and away the greatest threat of the modern human era — a crisis that will only get worse the longer we dither — with American car culture as a major contributor to the nation’s greenhouse emissions. But carbon-neutralizing energ...

Hitting the Books: How NYC’s iconic subway system shaped the city

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New York’s subway system is an intrinsic aspect of the city’s identity, as much so as the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building. New York simply wouldn’t be New York without its trains, a critical connective infrastructure that moved approximately...