IT Insights Blog — Cool Tech

Probably almost everyone who has ever been to Yellowstone National Park in (mostly) Wyoming knows about the Old Faithful Geyser. Millions of visitors have stood and waited for one of its frequent eruptions to spew boiling water more than 100 feet into the air. Old Faithful blows its stack at regular intervals of between 44 minutes and 2 hours, and has done so for decades. The carefully managed area around the geyser's mouth might be the most visited spot in the entire park.

Some readers of the IT Insights Blog may recall being young (or at least younger) and watching the old Inspector Gadget cartoon series. At the start of each episode, the ever-intrepid Gadget would receive his instructions from Chief Quimby in the form of a note programmed — Can you program a piece of paper? Maybe we should just say booby-trapped? — to "self-destruct" after he read it.

The Information Age gives us something new to marvel over on such a regular basis that it's starting to feel like there's no problem in the world such that the right application of IT ingeniousness can't provide a solution. Self-driving cars are already on the road, if not yet performing in such a way that they are fully ready to be left to their own devices.

If you’re a sports fan and a stats geek, then you need to hop on a plane and get to the 12th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC) in Boston this weekend. The SSAC is the premier venue for discussing sports analytics, technical advances, statistical analysis and businesses. It’s also the largest student-run conference in the world, bringing together super-smart students from more than 170 different schools, as well as representatives from more than 80 professional sports teams in the MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, and Premier League.