Day: June 17, 2010

Peter Tyack of Woods Hole talks about a hidden wonder of the sea: underwater sound. Onstage at Mission Blue, he explains the amazing ways whales use sound and song to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean. Link

Getting to play one of the nastiest little girls to ever make people want to hurl things at their televisions wasn’t just fun, it was therapy for Alison Arngrim, who channeled the anger and hurt she felt at being physically and sexually abused into playing Nellie Oleson, the villainous rival to Laura Ingalls in the … Read more

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution ­”natural language,” as computer scientists call it – and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than … Read more

Emanuel Derman, a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs & Co, is a professor in Columbia University’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is the author of My Life As A Quant. Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years … Read more