Slate

We’ve been promised for years that robots will soon move from factories into our everyday lives (maybe even white-collar offices), and yet so far, the closest thing we have to Rosie Jetson is the Roomba. In addition to dexterity and the ability to walk, one of the biggest hurdles to personal robotics has been human-machine interaction. For a machine to enter human space, it has to understand certain niceties.(You don’t want a robot chef that can’t tell if you gag when you take a bite of its food, do you?)

Have you heard about Minecraft, the computer game that uses virtual building blocks and teems with opportunities for creative problem-solving? Have you yet been swept into the myriad Minecraft conversations by today’s tweens and teens about rocks and minerals, sand and glassmaking, jungles and deserts, urban planning and railroad lines, nighttime zombies and daily survival?

The escalating dependence on drone pilots, as Maj. Dave Blair agonized in the May-June issue of Air & Space Power Journal, is undercutting the ability to award combat medals. “On the current trajectory,” Blair wrote, “the only Air Medals will be the ones in history books.” In 2009, after all, the Air Force was already training more drone pilots than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Blair’s proposal to give drone pilots combat medals—despite the fact that the pilots sit safely thousands of miles away from the battlefield—is revealing.

Matt Romney is back home from his three-country world tour, and the question must be asked: Has any presidential candidate—has any American politician of stature—splashed in so many muddy puddles along the way?

Looking back at the voyage, the “gaffes” in London (which weren’t so much gaffes as revelations of Romney’s character) turned out to be not the afterburn of jetlag, as some of his aides suggested, but rather a preview of coming attractions.

Imagine paying $40 per gallon of gasoline when people in neighboring towns are paying $4. Or paying $8 per kilowatt-hour for electricity when others were paying 8 cents. Unthinkable! But this stark disparity is commonplace when it comes to paying for Internet access in the United States. As the recent report “The Cost of Connectivity” from the New America Foundation (a partner with Slate and Arizona State University in Future Tense) documents, something is fundamentally wrong with our broadband.
 

Mitt Romney’s not-so-excellent adventure abroad (“Romneyshambles,” the Brits are calling it) has been many things: shabby, hilarious, scandalous, an enlivening hoot to a dreary election season. One thing it shouldn’t be, though, is surprising.
 
Charles Krauthammer, the right-wing commentator who usually finds every excuse to attack Barack Obama—he took Obama’s blinking during a tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin as a sign of appeasement—pronounced himself befuddled by the GOP candidate’s flare of incompetence.
 

If you’re reasonably altruistic, it seems you can’t open Twitter without hearing about a new initiative or organization dedicated to leveraging mobile telephony for social good in the developing world. The fruits of these efforts run the gamut from maternal health to banking, and crisis relief. They take the form of apps, SMS-based systems, and information dissemination lists. And they vary dramatically in their thoughtfulness, effectiveness, and ability to involve the communities they’re trying to help.

According to Wikipedia’s 2011 Editor Survey, just 9 percent of Wiki editors are women. While the gender gap is better than it was—in the early ‘00s, it was more like 3 percent—and the proportion of new editors who are women is rising, the site remains a boys’ club.