Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology
Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually…
Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually…
MIT Technology Review
Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology
Two books on Chinese writing illustrate how tumultuous technological evolution can be.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Andrew Ng’s new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the…
AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has…
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week, we’re acknowledging a special birthday. It’s 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person’s brain. The finding was revolutionary.…
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the…
In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among…
Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth’s surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn’t really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever…
When Chad Syverson loads the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website these days looking for the latest data on productivity, he does so with a sense of optimism that he hasn’t felt in ages. The numbers for the last year or so have been generally strong for various financial and business reasons, rebounding from the…
Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today’s organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay—2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications to…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands…
