THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA: Just minutes after the @AP Twitter handle sent out a (fake) tweet that explosions had occurred at the White House, the DOW plummeted:
1:07 pm: Dow trades at 14,697.79, up 130.6 or 0.9 percent for the day
1:10 pm: Dow hits a low of 14,554.29, a drop of 143.5 points or 0.98 percent from where it was at 13:07 pm
Long slave to the physical demands of picking up a phone, computer, smartphone, or tablet to place an order for food delivery, gamers can now create their own custom Pizza Hut pizzas — and order them — from their Xbox 360 console thanks to a unique partnership between Microsoft and the international chain.
Last Saturday, a destructive earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province, near the epicenter of the devastating 2008 earthquake, damaging thousands of structures and triggering landslides in the mountainous region. As of yesterday, the death toll stood at more than 200, with nearly 12,000 injured, 23 still missing, and tens of thousands made homeless. The quake was measured at magnitude 7.0 by China’s earthquake administration and magnitude of 6.6 by the U.S. Geological Survey. Rescue teams and government aid personnel have struggled to reach the affected area, as many roads were damaged.
This image is a composite of 25 separate images spanning the period of April 16, 2012, to April 15, 2013.
It uses the SDO AIA wavelength of 171 angstroms and reveals the zones on the sun where active regions are most common during this part of the solar cycle.
An argument between a Buddhist couple and the Muslim owners of a gold shop in the Burmese city of Meikhtila escalated into a riot involving hundreds of people last week. The sectarian violence escalated over the weekend and has led to the deaths of dozens of people, the displacement of at least 10,000 more
Monet began his career in the French capital amongst the likes of Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He shunned the typical style of art training and instead of venturing to the Louvre to copy the works of Old Masters, he often set up shop near a window or outdoors to capture what he saw.
According to Kurzweil, by 2029 computers will be powerful enough to simulate the human brain. From his “Law of Accelerated Returns” he estimates that in 25 years we will have technologies billions of times more powerful than we have today. Just think that five years ago social media — today a transformative force in the world — was practically inexistent, or that the biggest computers in the 1970s were a million-times more expensive and a thousand-times less efficient than the chips we have in our smartphones, representing a billion-fold increase in computing efficiency per dollar.
