British science-fiction writer Alastair Reynolds Photo by SFX Magazine/Getty Images
Listen to Stranger Than Fiction No. 4 with Tim Wu and Alastair Reynolds by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
Welcome to Stranger Than Fiction, a new six-episode podcast from Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. Each week, Tim Wu?a Future Tense fellow at New America, the author of The Master Switch, and a professor at Columbia Law School?talks to a contemporary science fiction writer about whether we?re living in the future.
This week, Tim speaks with Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series, Blue Remembered Earth, and Doctor Who: Harvest of Time, which is set in the era of Jon Pertwee?s Doctor and will be released June 4. Reynolds, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and previously worked for the European Space Agency, talks about interstellar travel, whether we need to invest more money in finding extraterrestrials, and more.?
Check back on Monday for the next two weeks for a new Stranger Than Fiction episode, as Tim Wu speaks to Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert Sawyer.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=da68e0088dcb5651a7091b36c6f8d4f8
Freeh Report direct tv wimbledon ray allen Savages Home Run Derby 2012 San Diego fireworks
TechStars, the popular startup accelerator with locations in Boston, Boulder, New York, Seattle, London, and more, has today announced an expansion to Austin, Texas – a city TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen refers to as the “natural next stop for us” in this morning’s announcement about the new location. The program will launch its first program this August, and is accepting applications now. TechStars Austin will operate?out of?Capital Factory?in downtown Austin, and will be managed by?Jason Seats, who sold his company Slicehost to Rackspace in 2008, making him VP of Engineering there. Seats has worked with the TechStars organization since 2011, serving as Managing Director of TechStars Cloud. He’ll now be relocating from San Antonio to Austin with his new position. Cohen also notes that Austin has been named the “number one boomtown” and best place for your startup by folks like Forbes and Bloomberg, and recently became the second city chosen to receive Google Fiber. It’s also already home to a number of growing startups, as you probably know. Austin’s Chamber of Commerce named 28 companies to its “A-List” showcase, its annual list which now includes startups like?Spredfast,?MassRelevance,?Sparefoot, and?MapMyFitness?(to cite those Cohen pointed out), as well as others like?myEDU,?Uship,?InfoChimps,?Socialware,?Emmoco, and many, many more. There’s also Indeed, HomeAway, Bazaarvoice, Spiceworks, and the 150+ others can pull up here in CrunchBase. As with TechStars’ other locations, TechStars Austin won’t focus on any particular vertical, but is generally just looking for disruptive Internet?companies backed by strong teams. Mentors and investors involved in the new program include:?Brett Hurt?(Bazaarvoice),?Tom Ball?and?Mike Dodd?(Austin Ventures),?Sam Decker?(Mass Relevance),?Jeff Dachis?(Dachis Group),?Kip McClanahan?and?Morgan Flager?(Silverton),?Josh Baer?and?Bill Boebel?(Capital Factory),?Ned Hill?and?Aziz Gilani?(Mercury Fund),?Rony Kahan?(Indeed),?Rob Taylor?(Black Locus)?Lori Knowlton?(HomeAway), and more. Austin’s scene is so hot right now that TechCrunch is even taking a roadtrip to that city this month?(May 30th), kicking off the?TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off series, our 60-second pitch competition. First prize winners receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013, ?while second and third place winners will receive tickets. (Those event details are here.)
In the interest of protecting children, a new iOS application called AppCertain has debuted a monitoring application aimed at parents. The app, whose goal is to alert parents about the nature of the applications their kids are downloading, involves the use of a “configuration profile” – special software Apple originally intended for enterprise use, not consumer-facing apps sold through its App Store marketplace. But Apple reviewed the application – for longer than most, founder and CEO Spencer Whitman tells us – and subsequently approved it. For how long that will remain the case, however, is unknown. “We?think we are on a gray line with respect to Apple, but we don’t really know,” Whitman admits. Configuration profiles, for those unfamiliar, were designed for the enterprise environment, allowing I.T. departments to manage the iPhones and iPads used by a company’s employees. They’re typically employed by Mobile Device Management solutions which use the software to configure, track and/or restrict a number of system-level settings like Wi-Fi, VPNs, app settings, permissions, and more. But more recently, a handful of startups have started using these same profiles to work around Apple’s App Store’s restrictions in order to accomplish tasks which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Apple is aware this is happening, and seems to be handling each app submission on a one-off basis for now. We’ve seen mobile data compression utilities like Onavo and Snappli take advantage of the technology to intercept, re-route, and compress web data in order to save users’ bandwidth, for instance. Social search engine Wajam also uses a configuration profile to inject its own search results into Safari, though this is done outside of the Apple App Store. Onavo is still live on the Apple App Store today, though Snappli has since disappeared. (We reached out to the company for details, but have yet to hear back. It’s possible that Apple simply didn’t care for the fact that Snappli had publicly shared data showing how iOS users were dumping the then newly-launched Apple Maps application.) But frankly, it seems odd that Apple would knowingly ever let these types of applications into its consumer-facing app store in the first place, given the security risks they could pose. If used unscrupulously, a malicious configuration profile could remote control a user’s device, manipulate user activity, and hijack their sessions, or so explained?security researchers at Skycure?back in March. AppCertain isn’t a malicious developer, though, and its
Need a little weekend reading? We?ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes a look at what happens over the course of a day on the internet, 10 social media personality types, a new Twitter-based sensor for diaper changing, a study which reveals how moms are using social media and thoughts on whether social media marketing has lost its way.