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by Brian Barrett @ wired.com
LAST OCTOBER, 11-YEAR-OLD Evan Spisak wandered down to his father’s basement workshop to help out on a weekend project, a time-honored tradition in homes across the country. But Evan’s father, Mike, is an IBM master inventor. And what they came up with was no birdhouse or pinewood derby car. It was Havyn, a homegrown voice assistant that taps into IBM’s enormous cybersecurity infrastructure, putting Watson’s AI smarts at their literal beck and call.
And while Havyn may have started as spare-time tinkering, a dozen analysts at IBM’s X-Force Command Centers—the G.I. Joe name the company gives its security operations hubs—in Atlanta, Boulder, Poland, and Costa Rica are already testing it in the real world.
by Gary Younge @ theguardian.com
To celebrate its 225th anniversary, the US Mint and Treasury last week unveiled plans to issue a 24-carat commemorative coin depicting Lady Liberty as an African-American woman. With full lips and braided hair tied back in a bun, her gold-embossed profile is framed by the words “LIBERTY” above and “In God We Trust” below. “As we as a nation continue to evolve,” said Elisa Basnight, the Mint’s chief of staff, “so does Liberty’s representation.”
Sadly, the representation is evolving far faster than the nation. The coin is worth $100 (£80); in 2010 the median net wealth for women of colour was calculated at just $5. Black women now earn 65 cents for every $1 made by a white man – the same gap as 20 years ago. So the Treasury has produced a coin in these women’s image that most cannot afford – because the economy is producing low-wage jobs that leave them with liberty without equality.
SiliconValley.com has this article on what it’s like inside the extremely wired homes of the rich. Start planning for your future home’s Head End – the control room housing those floor-to-ceiling banks of servers, routers, computers and other requisite gadgets for the ultimate wired home. Aside from the basic distributed audio/video, master control system for heat, lights and security, integrated computer and communications system – some even added a custom “aroma system” that pumps one of six fragrances into selected rooms with a tap on the touch pad. • Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” showed a future that seemed distant enough to give us time to invent it. ZDNet’s eWEEK Labs examines 12 technologies that corporate IT must watch in 2001 in their Tech 2001 article.
