Tag Archives: mit press

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: America needs a new public data system

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Earlier this month the Trump administration stripped the CDC of its control over the nation’s Coronavirus data. By insisting that all case reporting be funneled through the White House, the administration further undermined public trust in its pandem...

Hitting the Books: Do we really want our robots to have consciousness?

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From Star Trek’s Data and 2001’s HAL to Columbus Day’s Skippy the Magnificent, pop culture is chock full of fully conscious AI who, in many cases, are more human than the humans they serve alongside. But is all that self-actualization really necessar...

Hitting the Books: How to be active on social media and still keep your job

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With large swaths of the country still stifling under quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic, more people than ever are supplementing their meager IRL social interactions with online alternatives. But but doing so can become a proverbial minefield wit...

Hitting the Books: Without glass, we’d have never discovered the electron

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From the dawn on time, humans have manipulated the material world around us to suit our will. We started off banging rocks together before moving on to wielding bronze and then iron tools. We parlayed iron into steel and built an industrialized exist...

Hitting the Books: How ‘universal’ stem cells might fix our brains

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The impact that stem cell therapies could have on the worst diseases known to humanity is hard to overstate. From debilitating genetic disorders to currently incurable maladies like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease — even the ability to restore me...

Hitting the Books: How an attempt at digital allyship fell flat

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Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and...

Hitting the Books: Stop pranking your kids to impress Jimmy Kimmel

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Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and...