The National Interest had an article by Rajan Menon called the Indian Myth. The India Myth is that the ubiquitous reports of India’s emergence as a great power are bogus. The road is long, the advance slow and the arrival date uncertain. Rajan Menon is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at …
If China and the USA each adopted a ‘best of the two’ practice in electricity production, industry, buildings and transport they would reap huge benefits. If they did this, in relative terms, China could reduce emissions from its current policy projections by 1.2% in 2020 and 20% in 2030 – and 3.2% and 16% for …
Military interest in bicycles arose in the 1890s, and the French army and others deployed folding bikes for bicycle infantry use. In 1900, Mikael Pedersen developed a folding version of his Pedersen bicycle for the British army that weighed 15 pounds and had 24 inch wheels. It included a rifle rack and was used in …
The Manhattan Project employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2014 dollars). Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissile materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across …
Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Their first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network. Vicarious was founded by …
China has about 6000 miles of high speed rail and this amount should double by the end of 2015. China is spending US$100 billion in 2014 on its high speed rail network. China is building a 120 mph high speed rail to Laos which is to be completed by 2019 Starting from Kunming in Southwest …
Canada will have urban home delivery of mail phased out over the next five years. Starting March 31, the cost of a stamp to mail a standard-size first-class letter will increase to 85 cents if bought in a pack, up from 63 cents. Individual stamps will cost a dollar. Canada Post said that over the …
Jonah Goldberg has an article about the replacement of waiters and wattresses with tablets for ordering food at Applebees and other chain restaurants. In 2011, Annie Lowrey wrote about the burgeoning tablet-as-waiter business. She focused on a startup firm called E La Carte, which makes a table tablet called Presto. “Each console goes for $100 …
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully completed its first geostationary transfer mission, delivering the SES-8 satellite to its targeted 295 x 80,000 km orbit. Falcon 9 executed a picture-perfect flight, meeting 100% of mission objectives. Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at 5:41 PM Eastern Time. Approximately 185 seconds into flight, Falcon …
A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale. NEIL leverages recent advances in computer …
The Economist Intelligence Unit has forecasted the world economy and countries and regions out to 2018. The expectation is for world GDP growth to be about 3.6-4.0% per year. This is about 80% of the 4.5-5.2% GDP growth that was seen in pre-financial crisis period of 2003-2006. If this is correct the world economy will …