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Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness. The first aliens that human beings encounter will probably not be from some other planet, but of our own creation. We cannot assume that they will contact us first. If
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Cryptography pioneers receive ACM A.M. Turing award In "New Directions in Cryptography," Diffie and Hellman presented an algorithm that showed that asymmetric or public-key cryptography was possible. In Diffie and Hellman's invention, a public key, which is not secret and can be freely distributed, is
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How I know I’ve moved and settled into a new place is if I get a haircut in that place. A haircut, to me, is a form of acceptance, of allowing that pithy activity to take precedence over bigger problems (if any), to punctuate my medium-term routine and, finally,
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Bad journalism: A Hindustan Times report on March 2 claims a high-schooler from West Bengal won a "prestigious" scholarship sponsored by NASA to study at Oxford University, having been selected on the back of a theory she had developed on blackholes. The piece was one-sided. Avoidable journalism: The
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An updated version of this article was published in The Wire, March 3, 2016. I smell bullshit. Ref: The Times of India report. High-school girl from West Bengal. Claims she bumped into NASA scientists on random social media groups – who in turn "hugely appreciated" her ideas on "
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The unwavering intensity of his writing, and of his commitment to seem to be chronicling something as opposed to be vainly conjecturing something, is what made his fiction worth committing to.
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Developments I’d have liked to cover but haven’t been able to for lack of time.
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Developments I'd have liked to cover but haven't been able to for lack of time.
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AR Rahman is masterful at combining lyrical traditions with those forms of music in which they've seldom existed, and achieves that seamless weave with subtle, well-crafted interventions.
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Although homeopathy has been widely drubbed as possessing zero curative potential, it continues to have an existence ranging from undemonstrative to unrestrained in many countries.
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A new thesis suggests that the star may not have been fading in brightness over the last century – but remains mum on what could be causing the erratic flux at all.
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Do you just wait for your writers' block to fade or do you have a remedy for it?