Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snake...

"Multitasking means screwing up several things at once," somebody once said, wrongly. In fact, we don't do many things at once, ever. We do many things in quick succession. And some of us are very good at it.Nagy-Bagoly Arpad/ShutterstockEverybody multitasks. We have conversations while driving. We answer email while browsing the Web. It's hard to imagine living any other way. What would be the alternative, removing the seats from your car to ensure you only drive alone? Block every website not named Gmail? A world of constant single-tasking is too absurd to contemplate.But science suggests th...

Today’s biggest trends — the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time — are changing the landscape for business. Consumers are connecting with one another, and in the process they’re becoming increasingly empowered and influential.How these connected consumers discover, share, and communicate is different than the way they used to. This change requires businesses to rethink their approach. Organizations need to examine the impact of technology on consumer behavior and understand how connected consumers make decisions and influence the decisions of their pee...

An interdisciplinary, interuniversity group of scientists from Vanderbilt, Cornell, and CFD Research Corporation have created an artificial intelligence capable of solving complex scientific problems from scratch. The AI, called ABE (Automated Biology Explorer), “discovered” how glycolysis produces energy in a living cell by looking at a set of data and then squeezing it into a mathematical formula, just like a human biology researcher.ABE is powered by the freeware Eureqa software, and before tackling a task the only functions it can perform are addition, subtraction, multipl...

In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning. She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, ofBedford Stuyvesant Prep; Sade Washington, of the Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem; S...

According to Sina Tech, Research firm Berg Insight latest report shows that the global NFC smartphone sales increased by 300% to 140 million units in 2012.The report said that the compound annual growth rate of NFC smartphones sales will reach 48.2% in next few years, and in 2017 the number of smartphones sold will reach 1 billion units.NFC is widely used in mobile phones began in 2011, In 2012, the top ten mobile phone manufacturers launched nearly 100 models of NFC mobile phones. In addition to Apple's iPhone, Samsung and other manufacturers are all promoting NFC.Also applications depending ...

When Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010, I bought one immediately. I didn’t know what I’d use it for, but I was sure that I would find some use for it. I never did. I played around with it, wrote some code for it, but eventually stopped using it. I would pick it up from time to time to read something or watch a YouTube movie, but even that was a rare occurrence. I have since picked up an iPad 2, and I’m using it a lot more than the first iPad, but again, I’m pretty much only using it to consume content.I suspect that most people use their iPads similarly: to su...

The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn't mean I won't read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my "system". It means I no longer think about any of that stuff as having anything to do with productivity.Productivity is what happens when you're doing work. Enhancing your productivity is what happens when you do a lot of work, for long enough to get better at it.Look, throw all your stuff in Dropbox, live your life out of plain text files, use gmail to communicate, turn off tasks and chat, leave things in their de...