Published: Feb 12, 2012
GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking. Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company's fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data -- Web traffic and social network comments, as well as
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Feb 10, 2012
NEW YORK -- If you want to get a finger-tip feel for one of the most important transformations in our world today, read ''The Fear Index,'' Robert Harris's new thriller. Mr. Harris has been widely praised for his adept portrayal of the hedge fund universe in which his novel is set. ''The greatest pleasure of this book is that it gets the finance
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Feb 08, 2012
In the centenary year of his birth, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptanalyst regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, has been denied a formal pardon by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, then a criminal
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Published: Feb 03, 2012
PHILADELPHIA -- Vincent van Gogh was shaken but also calmed by nature. The natural landscape inspired some of his most implacably innovative paintings, roiled of surface, ablaze with color and steeped in feeling. They are blunt, irresistible instruments for seeing. Yet nature -- and its tiniest details in particular -- also sharpened his visual
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Jan 30, 2012
HAT CREEK, Calif. -- E.T. might be phoning, but do we care enough to take the call? Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial
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Published: Jan 29, 2012
CAN film and theater live happily together in the same room? It's not as if they haven't had a long relationship already, with each regularly borrowing stories and stars from the other. But now these separate but equal art forms are attempting to practice cohabitation. As in many relationships, only half of the couple is truly equipped to make the
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Jan 29, 2012
DAVOS, Switzerland IN a filthy Ethiopian prison that is overridden with lice, fleas and huge rats, two Swedes are serving an 11-year prison sentence for committing journalism. Martin Schibbye, 31, and Johan Persson, 29, share a narrow bed, one man's head beside the other's feet. Schibbye once woke up to find a rat mussing his hair. The prison is a
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Published: Jan 27, 2012
Cynthia Nixon's gaze has its own grammar. Playing a terminally ill English professor in the inescapably moving new revival of Margaret Edson's ''Wit,'' the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, Ms. Nixon seems to construct perfectly composed, illuminating and surprising thoughts with her sky-blue eyes -- the kind of thoughts that if you saw them in
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Jan 27, 2012
THE FEAR INDEX By Robert Harris 286 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. The title of Robert Harris's new thriller, ''The Fear Index,'' comes from the volatility index, or VIX -- also known as the ''fear index'' -- which measures expectations of violent swings in the market, as Wall Street watchers know from the harrowing meltdown of 2008. This
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence
Published: Jan 24, 2012
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun wrestling with the changes that would be required in a system created a century ago to meet the challenge of horseless carriages. What happens if a police
Read original article Topics: Artificial-intelligence