Posted inEditor's Pick

How Oregon’s Second Largest City Vanished in a Day

Intended as temporary solution for Portland’s wartime housing shortage, Vanport housed 40,000 residents at its height, making it the second largest city in Oregon. In a few short years the community went from a shining example of American innovation to a crime-laden slum, largely due to discriminatory housing policies. Ultimately, a natural disaster would spell […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

What Happens When We Run Out of Jobs?

After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse. For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

Technology, Privacy, and Searchable Text

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s. What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds. In a brief […]

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