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That’s why, next week, I’ll travel to Austin, Texas, to visit South by Southwest. It’s an annual gathering of some of our most creative thinkers, coders, makers, and entrepreneurs from across the country. And while I’m there, I’m going to ask everyone for ideas and technologies that can help update our government and our democracy to be as modern and dynamic as America itself. This has been a goal of mine since before I was President. On my campaign in 2008, we saw how technology could bring people together and help them engage as citizens in their own communities. So...

In the closing weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign, it would have been hard to find anyone more vocally critical of Ronald Reagan than AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. As a surrogate for President Jimmy Carter, Kirkland attacked Reagan as "displaying colossal ignorance" in his criticism of the President's plan to create a nation Industrial Development Authority that would have allowed labor more liberal access to its members' pension funds. Thirty-five years later, labor has gotten smarter. Infiltration has replaced the frontal attack. Unless, you want to believe that Donald Trump and current AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka really are collaborating. In...

SIDNEY -- We've seen some truly eye-popping developments with 3D printers and medicine lately -- cells from an eye that were inkjet printed, for example; prosthetic ears that look real; complex silicon pathways used to stimulate nerves to grow and repair themselves -- just to name a few of the marvels. But medicine is not the only arena where 3D printing offers eye-popping possibility for the future. With the advent of cheaper and cheaper printers and better and better materials -- some of them approaching metallic strengths -- 3D printers could one day be as common a tool on the...

Users who download the app will be sending data to scientists when an earthquake as small as a magnitude 5 hits. By harvesting information from hundreds of phones closest to the earthquake, scientists will be able to test a computer system that could, in the future, dispatch early warnings that shaking is seconds or minutes away to people farther away from the earthquake’s origin. For instance, if a quake started in San Bernardino, cell phones there could register the quake and quickly help send warnings to smartphone users in Los Angeles. "This is a citizen science project," said Richard Allen,...

Are there any memories you'd like to permanently remove from your head? Or what if you could alter unpleasant memories so they're no longer upsetting? Or create entirely new memories of events that never occurred? It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but according to a new documentary that premiered in the US this week, scientists have discovered how to do just that - and more.

Machines could put more than half the world’s population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence’s threat to the economy should not be understated. Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task.

Welcome to Infomercial America, or, if you prefer, the United States of Spam. Whenever political conspiracy theories break out into the open, pundits and intellectuals name-check the brilliant but flawed essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter. Under President George W. Bush, the "9/11 Truthers" were the poster boys and girls of the paranoid style. Others hinted that the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina might have been deliberate. Under President Obama, it was the "Birthers." A related theory was that Obama is a secret Muslim. A generation before that, it was the John Birch Society...

'People speak to machines differently than how they speak to people,' says language technology expert Alan Black. It was a simple enough question, at least in this part of the world. "How can we mosey on down to the rodeo?" my friend Ben Crook drawled, sat in a rocking chair on his front porch, a can of Lone Star beer in his left hand on a humid night in Houston. Only one thing jarred with this otherwise stereotypical Texas scene: Crook was asking Siri, the voice-activated digital personal assistant on his iPhone, rather than, say, a passing sheriff on horseback...

Built by Arctech Helsinki for the Russian Ministry of Transport, the Icebreaking Multipurpose Emergency and Rescue Vessel Baltika is a first-of-its-kind icebreaker built with an asymmetrical hull allowing for not only ahead and astern icebreaking, but also “oblique” icebreaking for a greater angle of attack.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that military units were put on combat alert early Monday, marking the launch of the exercise that involves troops of the Southern Military District. The district includes troops stationed in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, as well as forces in the North Caucasus and southwestern regions near the border with Ukraine. ... According to Shoigu, who spoke at a meeting with the top military brass, the war games would include redeployment of air force units to advance air bases and bombing runs at shooting ranges. The maneuvers will...

Do you remember how much stocks went down when the first dot-com bubble burst? Well, it is happening again, and tech stocks are already down more than half a trillion dollars since the middle of 2015. On Friday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped to its lowest level in more than 15 months, and it has now fallen more than 16 percent from the peak of the market. But of course some of the biggest names have fallen much more than that. Netflix is down 37 percent, Yahoo is down 39 percent, LinkedIn is down 60 percent, and Twitter is down more...

Company Developing ‘Tech Tattoos’ That Track Medical, Financial Info « CBS New York http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/01/29/tech-tattoos-chaotic-moon/

If you've been keeping up with 3D printing news at all, you're probably pretty familiar with metal 3D printing by now. It's one of the fastest-growing sectors in the industry; just about every major 3D printer manufacturer is scrambling to keep up with the rapidly developing metal technology. Not only is it becoming less expensive and more accessible, but material capabilities keep expanding, with new metals and alloys being introduced on what seems like a weekly basis by certain companies. Even if you have only a basic knowledge of metal 3D printing, you probably know that it's done with powder...

On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft. It's been an eventful couple of years. Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more. But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

If you've ever wondered whether the grass would be greener — or if you literally make more green — by moving to another state or working in tech, we have your answer. We've ranked the average salary of tech workers in all 50 states, using the latest data from a new survey conducted by Dice.com. While you'll need the necessary skills to get your foot in the door of a tech job, this roundup gives you the chance to at least see how your state, and those across the country, stack up. Here's how every state ranks, from those with...

With the internet age and its endless possibilities in the realms of publishing, communication, and collaboration, opportunities have never been so widely accessible for creators. But how has our new digital world affected the pathways to invention? In Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, out today, journalist Pagan Kennedy offers a fresh take on how the digital era has upended the traditional pathways for creation. When Kennedy began writing about inventors for The New York Times, she soon "would marvel at how few of the people were professional inventors, designers, in corporate innovation labs." It led...

Actually that's not the title of yesterday's blockbuster report in the Wall Street Journal. Here's the WSJ title: "Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba." "An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe (Spain) for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014," continues the WSJ, "a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind. The unintended delivery of the missile to Cuba has confounded investigators and experts who work in a regulatory system designed to prevent precisely such equipment from falling into the wrong hands… Investigators are unclear if the...

resident Obama is the top recipient in campaign cash from the "smart gun" manufacturing industry, which stands to benefit from his executive action calling for more research into the technology. The National Institute of Justice, a research, development, and evaluation agency of the Department of Justice, released a report in 2013 consisting of a review of the smart gun industry. The report identified ten companies that focus exclusively on smart gun technology.Of the smart gun companies that made political contributions, Obama was the top recipient of campaign funds in 2008 and 2012, according to campaign finance data.The president ordered the...

Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English. It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations. But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications or murky instructions, that is something else. For example, like all sorts of other devices, computers and computerized products and services have to be turned on and off. And everybody knows what the words "on" and "off" mean. But how often have you seen a computer or a computerized product or service that used the words "on" or "off"? These simple...

If you read Stephen Moore's column, he noted how the consensus over oil is wrong. We're not running out of oil. In fact, many have been saying we're going to run out since the 1930s: These stupid predictions of the end of oil have been going on for most of the last century. Just over 100 years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Mines estimated total future production at 6 billion barrels, yet we've produced more than 20times that amount. In 1939 the Department of the Interior predicted U.S. oil supplies would last 13 years. I could go on. The folks...