Sales of Blu-ray players should peak this year – be done in a few years

The sale of Blu-ray players is going to peak this year or next, Roku CEO Anthony Wood predicted at the TV of Tomorrow show in San Francisco Wednesday. “Will people use Blu-ray players in four years? I don’t think so,” he said, adding that the streaming performance on Blu-ray players doesn’t compare to the experience …

Nate Silver predicts our next President – by keeping a running forecast

If you haven’t heard of Nate Silver then you are in for a ride. Nate is very, very famous in two distinct areas, baseball and politics, for his ability to predict things. For baseball he developed, PECOTA, a system for predicting future performance of baseball players, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus in 2003. From …

Yellowstone – new government petascale supercomputer – to attack chaos theory in climate change

This month, on a barren Wyoming landscape dotted with gopher holes and hay bales, the federal government is assembling a supercomputer 10 years in the making, one of the fastest computers ever built and the largest ever devoted to the study of atmospheric science. The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone, …

Talk is cheap…so make a Long Bet (for charity) to prove your prediction

Pronouncements about the future come easy. Even when made with an air of authority, they’re usually just cheap talk, rarely revisited. Only the tiny fraction that have proven correct tend to be remembered, when their authors want to take credit. But what if there were some cash at stake? The Long Bets Foundation, a new …

Feeling Sick? Google “Flu Trends” Tool Smarter Than The CDC

A new study in Clinical Infectious Diseases shows that Google Flu Trends can predict surges in hospital flu visits more than a week before the Center for Disease Control (CDC). For the study, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researchers compared Baltimore-specific data from the Google Flu Trends website, which estimates influenza outbreaks based on online searches for flu information, to ED crowding and laboratory …

Feeling Sick? Google "Flu Trends" Tool Smarter Than The CDC

A new study in Clinical Infectious Diseases shows that Google Flu Trends can predict surges in hospital flu visits more than a week before the Center for Disease Control (CDC). For the study, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researchers compared Baltimore-specific data from the Google Flu Trends website, which estimates influenza outbreaks based on online searches for flu information, to ED crowding and laboratory …

Is the future of television paying by the channel? This venture capitalist thinks so

John Backus, managing partner of New Atlantic Ventures, discusses the future of television: Take a look at some major developments so far this year: – Netflix was once viewed as an invincible Wall Street darling and the stock has nearly fallen off a cliff as it struggles to evolve its business model. But it realizes …