Sci/Tech

Part two in this three-part series looks at a few more highlights from South by Southwest Interactive 2011.

Ignite SXSW: 2021 Vision of the Future

The last few years finally saw the arrival of supercomputers capable of petascale performance. In all, seven systems from the US, China, Japan and France achieved the milestone of processing a million billion floating point operations per second (flops) by the end of 2010. But even before this target was reached, computer scientists and engineers were setting their sights on an even loftier goal: Exascale computing.

Last week, my roommate bought a Kindle. Since then, he hasn’t stopped talking about it. Mainly, he’s wanted to get me to borrow it to read Henry Hazlitt‘s book Economics in One Lesson. The book, published in 1946, is an introduction to free market economics, and is a seminal text on economic principles. Tax season being upon us, I filed my taxes last night. Afterwards, I started reading Hazlitt’s book. His “one lesson” seemed pointedly relevant to this time of year.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Matthew Broderick thinking that yelling “Learn!” at a computer will actually make it do so, WarGames is a pretty fantastic movie. Released in 1983, the science-fiction film tells the story of David Lightman, a computer hacker played by Broderick, who accidentally finds his way into a military supercomputer programmed to predict outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets the computer to run a nuclear war simulation, which causes an international nuclear missile scare and almost single-handedly starts World War III.

Scientists are studying human-systems interactions in order to design systems that are compatible with human behavioral limitations in stressful moments. This field of study is called High Velocity Human Factors (HVHF) and it seems that more developments are on the way.

Printer 3D printing technology is maturing and on the verge of radically changing the rules for what, how and where everything is made, as manufacturing literally comes home . Here's how 3D printing works today.

The word derives from the terms “behavioral” and “biometrics”. “Behavioral” refers to the way a human person behaves and “biometrics”, in an information security context, refers to technologies and methods that measure and analyze biological characteristics of the human body for authentication purposes - for example fingerprints, eye retina, DNA and voice patterns.