Month: February 2011

This presentation, prepared for one of our Ideas Economy events, examines the variation in economic opportunities for women around the world, using data compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Opportunity is defined as a combination of prevailing labour policies, access to finance, education and training, and legal and social status. One surprising finding: under communism … Read more

To make a true apostate you need a religious community that has, among other things, obvious insiders and outsiders. In the United States, with our promiscuous spiritual questing, many of us are never exclusively in one religion enough to one day find ourselves out of it. To leave some religious groups is to apostatize, while … Read more

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author … Read more