Category: Internet

  • No algorithm for serendipity

    What do Mister Rogers and artificial intelligence have to do with each other?  This is a column about the nature of human expertise. That sounds like airy philosophy, but it’s actually an urgent practical question facing us as a species today because of the pressure that algorithms (artificial intelligences and machine learning) put on what we…

  • Analog Pleasures in a Digital World

    At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…

  • The Flip

    It may be the most heartbreaking half hour ever seen on television. “Time Enough at Last,” a 1959 episode of the legendary anthology series The Twilight Zone, features Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a thick-glasses-wearing bank teller who loves nothing more than reading, but whose wife, boss, and other circumstances interfere with his ability to…

  • All the news that’s fit to ignore

    I missed the mid-terms last week. It was great. Don’t get me wrong: I voted early by mail, so I did my civic duty. It’s what happened after I dropped my ballot that’s interesting. Due to travel in the wilderness and no access to the internet or other media, on Tuesday, November 6, I didn’t…

  • 2023: Why Comcast should worry

    For years I’ve thought that—while Comcast’s cable television business had a future that made polar bears wince in sympathy—its lock on the cable internet business made the company invulnerable. Sure, cord-cutting and cord-shaving are eroding cable TV. Younger people in particular, unless they are big sports fans, don’t bother to subscribe (cord-nevers). However, Comcast still…

  • Beware the “Words with Friends” scammers

    New predators are stalking older women via chat in online games. Here’s how to protect yourself and your family. My mother is nobody’s fool. She is also such a fan of the online Scrabble knockoff “Words with Friends” (WWF) that I might use the word addiction to describe her relationship with the game and only be…

  • Paging Dr. Alexa

    Two personal events over the summer made me realize that one of the most compelling use cases for digital assistants concerns senior citizens. I was primed to think this because this week the Center has released a mini-report — Sharpest Edge: Digital Assistants — that explores how programs like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Eva, and…

  • Why the NRA should worry about “ghost guns”

    Whatever your politics and however you feel about private gun ownership, the “ghost gun” debate that has emerged over the last few weeks has implications for every kind of business in the digital age. What is a ghost gun? In brief, activist Cody Wilson won a round in his long-running legal action against the Federal…

  • Streaming superheroes and the DC Universe

    DC Entertainment — home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and a part of the recent AT&T acquisition of Time Warner — has announced a new streaming video on demand service called DC Universe that will premiere in 2019. The service is a competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other Over…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…