The pandemic has shown how difficult it can be for the US to succeed with major technology projects. We asked leading thinkers what they would do to change that.

There are a number of reasons people are seeking a change, in what some economists have dubbed the ‘Great Resignation’. For some workers, the pandemic precipitated a shift in priorities, encouraging them to pursue a ‘dream job’, or transition to being a stay-at-home parent. But for many, many others, the decision to leave came as a result of the way their employer treated them during the pandemic.

Psychologists have now tested the influence of personality on people’s mental health during the pandemic – and their results suggest that introverts found it much harder to cope with the isolation than many had expected. Besides highlighting some common misconceptions about different personality types and their need to socialise, the insights from these studies can help us all to navigate life post-lockdown

The Mathematical Laboratory’s first computers, EDSAC and EDSAC 2, were made available to researchers elsewhere at the university who wrote programs that were punched out on paper tape and fed into the machine.

At the computing center, these paper tapes were clipped to a clothesline and executed one after the other during business hours. This line of pending programs became known as the “job queue,” a term that remains in use to describe far more sophisticated means of organizing computing tasks.

Cyber insurance isn't exactly driving organisations to improve their infosec practices, a think-tank has warned – and some insurers are thinking of giving up thanks to the impact of ransomware.

We know alternatives are possible, because we used to have them. Before private commercial platforms definitively took over, online public-interest projects briefly flourished. Some of the fruits of that moment live on. In 2002, the Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig helped create the Creative Commons license, allowing programmers to make their inventions available to anyone online; Wikipedia—which for all the mockery once directed its way has emerged as a widely used and mostly unbiased source of information—still operates under one. Wikipedia is a glimpse of the internet that might have been: a not-for-profit, collaborative space where disparate people follow a common set of norms as to what constitutes evidence and truth, helped along by public-spirited moderators.

I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.

I’ve recently been using FreeBSD a lot at work. We have a lot of servers and embedded boards running it, and I was given the option of installing anything I wanted on my workstation. I chose FreeBSD to maintain a separation of BSDs between my work and home life ;)

I thought I’d write a little bit about some differences that stand out to me. Since everyone that knows me well knows that typical use cases like web hosting aren’t really my jam, and I’m more of an embedded, audio, and graphics person, maybe I can offer a more uncommon perspective.

The Durgod Fusion has a 65% layout, comes in navy blue and beige; beige and orange; or beige, red and black—mmmmm, beige— and connects via USB-C, Bluetooth 5.0 or an included wireless dongle. It is $160.

Hello, gorgeous!

Most important, though, is restoring an appreciation for the importance of interoperability in preventing monopolies and promoting technological self-determination for communities and individuals.

Because such a sensibility can escape the legislative world and be enacted via fast-moving, easier-to-use policy tools. For example, we could (should!) make interop a feature of all government procurement rules.

No school district should buy devices for students without securing the right to sideload the apps they need on them – imagine buying 50,000 Ipads at public expense and then having Apple boot the app you rely on out of the App Store!

Likewise, no district should buy Google Classroom without securing a legally binding guarantee not to block interoperators who want to integrate other ed-tech services into the curriculum, with or without Google's cooperation.

Many puzzles (including that one) did have alternate solutions. But a player base consisting almost entirely of university hackers expected challenging problems: too simple, and they would have stopped playing. Today's games are made for broader audiences used to far less friction.

But there are easy ways to avoid the intensity and minimise the inevitable lethargy, he says. These include reducing the size of the video chat window and not using full screen, and using an external keyboard to create greater distance between oneself and the grid of prying faces.

Crucially, Zoom users can also diverge from the default settings and use the hide self-view button, or even periodically turn their camera off altogether if feasible, “to give oneself a brief nonverbal rest”, Bailenson writes.

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.

The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.

In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces.

Now a new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent.

We love the nostalgia and sense of discovery in this story of found paper airplanes. From the New Yorker Magazine, we read about Harry Everett Smith, a painter, filmmaker and collector. His paper airplane collection became thing of legend over the years, particularly because of his passion and interest in tracking down new ones. Jumping out into moving traffic, grabbing an airplane before it dived into a gutter, Smith put pride into his saving of these throwaway relics.

Collected between 1961 and 1983, a box of 250 planes was donated to the Smithsonian after his death, just a fraction of his total collection, but a fascinating time capsule nonetheless.

Today, the LEGO Group is launching LEGO® White Noise, a new playlist designed to help listeners find a moment of relaxation in their busy lives. The playlist is composed of a series of audio tracks created using nothing but the iconic sounds that the LEGO brick makes, sounds that are recognised by generations all over the world.

Each LEGO element makes a unique noise, which is why designers experimented with over 10,000 in their quest for the perfect soothing sounds. The result is a soundscape that includes tracks such as ‘It All Clicks’ which perfectly captures the joyous sound of two LEGO elements joining together, and ‘The Waterfall’ created by pouring thousands of LEGO bricks on top of each other.

In 2017, somewhere between getting my office and my website off-the-grid, I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros.

If my 2006 laptop lasts as long as my other machines – if it runs for another 1.7 years – it will have cost me only 26 euros per year. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my previous laptops. In this article, I explain my motivations for not buying new laptops, and how you could do the same.

A new report in MIT Technology Review looks at why, almost a year into the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seemed totally unprepared for actually getting shots into people’s arms.

According to Technology Review, the agency knew it needed a robust, one-stop shop that could be used by patients, clinics, employers, and government officials. But instead, the CDC spent $44 million on something called the Vaccine Administration Management System —-VAMS— built by consulting firm Deloitte (via no-bid contracts) which was so inadequate that it has driven some states to try to patch together their own vaccine distribution systems instead.

Dark Patterns at Scale is a thorough collection of the high-pressure and deceptive tricks used on websites to get you to do things you didn't intend.

During the pandemic, musical artists have raised the bar on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. Because they can't actually perform from Bob Boilen's "tiny desk" in NPR's music office, they've been given carte blanche to imagine outside the box. The performances themselves are what you'd expect from these artists — terrific — it's the sets that they're having fun with.

Back in August, Billie Eilish and FINNEAS performed in front of a realistic cardboard cutout of Bob Boilen's desk. Then, in September, Phoebe Bridgers used a green-screen to make it out like she and her band were playing from the Oval Office.

Enter Miley Cyrus. For her concert, she not only embraces the concept of "tiny" but makes her backdrop a personal statement.