In one corner you have the heavyweight, Google Maps, with a seven-year head start and a vast amount of data. In the other corner you have the underdog with a very big bank account, Apple Maps. Round one begins with the iPhone 5 – loaded with iOS 6 – removing all traces of Google Maps and …
Author Archives: robotchampion
Amazon restarts the serial novel genre – with Charles Dickens and a Yoga murder mystery
I love that Amazon is rekindling the newspaper subscription through the e-reader. It invokes an image of reading the newspaper in the morning, with my coffee and family at the table. But replace the newspaper with a Kindle and does it still work? If you’re a digital geek of course. And the beauty of online …
ESPN launches first hackathon app – SportsCenter Feed Beta
For the past two years ESPN has held internal hackathons. And while they keep saying that these hacker creations “have been incorporated across the ESPN ecosystem, SC Feed is the first to emerge largely unchanged from the concept stage.” And it looks perfect. Modeled after the Twitter apps on iPhone and iPad – and using the …
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3rd warmest summer for United States and the planet – nearly 2 degrees warmer worldwide
If you thought this summer was warm, so did everybody else, from USA Today: While the USA sweated through one of its warmest summers on record, so, too, did the rest of the globe. “Considering global land surfaces only, June – Aug. 2012 was record warm, at 1.85 degrees above average.” Only the summers of …
11 more billionaires agree to give money away – read their pledge letters
From The Wall Street Journal: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have persuaded 11 more of their billionaire peers to promise to give away half of their wealth, including tech luminaries Gordon Moore (co-founder Intel) and Reed Hastings (co-founder Netflix). The new 11 will join the Giving Pledge, a campaign Gates and Buffett launched in 2010 …
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Video: North Pole shrinks to record levels, could be gone in 4 years
This animation shows the 2012 time-series of ice extent. The black area represents the daily average (median) sea ice from 1979-2000. Layered over are the daily satellite measurements from January 1 — September 14, 2012. A rapid melt begins in July, whereby the 2012 ice extents fall far below the historical average. This …
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Europe – much that could have gone wrong, suddenly seems to be going right
From The Economist: Pinch yourself. Much that could have gone wrong in the euro zone suddenly seems to be going right. Germany’s constitutional court in Karlsruhe has given the go-ahead for a new rescue fund. A banking union is taking shape…this builds on a recent pledge from the European Central Bank (ECB) to act to …
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How does water get to my house?
Through a series of pumps and electricity, from the USGS Water Science School: Let’s assume that you get your water from the local water department through pipes buried below the streets. In other words, you don’t have your own well in your back yard. Chances are that you get your water through gravity and pumps. …
The EPA is screwing up the discussion on global warming
The EPA is reporting the wrong information on global warming and I want them to get it right. The information they publish becomes the gold standard and is reported in the media, covered on TV, and published all across the web. It reaches the eyes and ears of a majority of Americans, and so why are they …
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DNA analysis can generate a picture of your face – unless you’ve been punched in the face
In the future, we will all need to be punched in the face. And not because people in the future are really annoying. From Dvice: The physical structure of your body is defined almost entirely by your genes. There will be some variation, of course, depending on your age, your weight, how well you take …