The blockchain is an even more potent technology. In essence it is a shared, trusted, public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls. The participants in a blockchain system collectively keep the ledger up to date: it can be amended only according to strict rules and by general agreement. Bitcoin’s blockchain ledger prevents double-spending and keeps track of transactions continuously. It is what makes possible a currency without a central bank.

But most unfair of all is that bitcoin’s shady image causes people to overlook the extraordinary potential of the “blockchain”, the technology that underpins it. This innovation carries a significance stretching far beyond cryptocurrency. The blockchain lets people who have no particular confidence in each other collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority. Simply put, it is a machine for creating trust.

Instead, we need to fix our own broken processes. We need to question our own assumptions. We need to fix ourselves, our communities, our society. We need to be proactive in digging out the roots of the problem right here, in our own world.

Every aspect of our lives is open for scrutiny. Every aspect of our political system is open for scrutiny. Every aspect of our socio-economic system is open for scrutiny. We are responsible for that task.THAT is our job. We don’t need to “help” people of color. They neither need nor want our “help.”

12% of college graduates with STEM degrees are people of color.12%This means more than 1 in 10 resumes that cross your desk should be from a person of color. This means more than 1 in 10 people you interview for jobs should be people of color. This means more than 1 in 10 people you hire should be people of color.This means if you are not seeing those numbers in your organization, something is very wrong with the way you hire people.

It is not sufficient to be “good.” It is not sufficient to want to “help.” We can’t “go there” and “help them” to make things better. Because the problem isn’t “there” with “them.” It is here with us.What we need is to look for the roots of inequality that emerge in our own lives, and eradicate them.

My friend also told me that when he removed PowerPoint from lecture theatres, his students demanded it back, because without it they had to organise their own notes.

Not for nothing did Brigadier General McMaster, of the US military, subsequently liken the proliferation of PP presentation in the military to an “internal threat”, saying: “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems are not bullet-izable.”

Through PowerPoint, everything has a tendency to resemble a pitch rather than a discussion

There is a lot of evidence that quite subtle changes to user interfaces can have dramatic effects on how the interfaces are used. For example, the size of a search box or the text that accompanies it can considerably influence the queries that people submit.

The whole gendered usage of hearts seems to have escaped Twitter. So does the fact that people fave (with stars) in complex ways - they are bookmarks, they are likes, they are nods of the head. But they are not indicators of love. I feel very weird loving tweets by random men I've only just started a conversation with. Not that there's anything wrong with feminine. But women - and men, in their own ways - are well-aware of how feminized visual signals get read by others, and in an identity space like Twitter, I suspect that will really minimize usage. Or at least until we all get used to it.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress issues new rules on Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. Acting Librarian David Mao, in an order (PDF) released Tuesday, authorized the public to tinker with software in vehicles for "good faith security research" and for "lawful modification." The decision comes in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, in which the German automaker baked bogus code into its software that enabled the automaker's diesel vehicles to reduce pollutants below acceptable levels during emissions tests.

In a sense, employers and employees used to be married to each other, and there was a sense of commitment and a joined destiny. Now, employers just want a bunch of one-night stands with their employees, a promiscuousness that promises to be not only fleeting but destabilizing to the broader macroeconomy. Set to replace the crumbling New Deal society is a darker world in which wealthy and powerful economic elite are collaborating with their political cronies to erect the policy edifice that allows them to mold their proprietary workforce into one composed of a disjointed collection of 1099 employees.

While the thinkers are arguing, textbook publishers are acting. With their traditional business models under pressure, they’ve begun to reinvent themselves as educational technology companies. They’re selling schools and colleges on a new generation of digital courseware—ALEKS is just one example—that takes on much of the work that teachers used to do. The software isn’t meant to replace teachers, they insist. Rather, it’s meant to free them to focus on the sort of high-level, conceptual instruction that only a human can provide.

Justin Reich argues in a blog post for Education Week, computers “are good at assessing the kinds of things—quantitative things, computational things—that computers are good at doing. Which is to say that they are good at assessing things that we no longer need humans to do anymore.” The implication is that adaptive software might prove effective at training children to pass standardized tests. But it won’t teach them the underlying skills that they’ll need to tackle complex, real-world problems. And it won’t prepare them for a future in which rote jobs are increasingly automated.

But the collaboration between university and for-profit startup raised some troubling questions about just who owned all the data that flowed from students’ use of the software—and what they might ultimately do with it. Knewton’s Ferreira says he envisions a future in which students’ educational records added up to much more than a series of letter grades that make up traditional transcripts. By tracking everything they read, every problem they solve, every concept they master, Knewton could compile a “psychometric profile” on each student that includes not only what she learned but how readily she learned it, and at what sorts of problem-solving she struggled and exceled. That sort of data could be of great interest to admission committees and employers. It could also, in theory, erode the privacy that has traditionally surrounded young people’s schoolwork.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.

"It's intriguing that you've got general relativity predicting these paradoxes, but then you consider them in quantum mechanical terms and the paradoxes go away," says University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph. "It makes you wonder whether this is important in terms of formulating a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics."