'According to Kurz, technological moguls have long seen themselves as superior beings whose natural role is to shape society - so they have no problem disrupting the institution of democracy.' 'According to Kurz, technological moguls have long seen themselves as superior beings whose natural role is to shape society - so they have no problem disrupting the institution of democracy.' 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech, power hoarding and democracy T he billionaires of today are unusually aggressive in their hoarding of cultural and technological influence, according to Mordecai Kurz, a Stanford economist whose research connects monopoly power with political and economic inequality. In his new book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline, publishing 19 May, he argues the US is living through an extreme version of a pattern that has repeated itself since industrialization: technological power concentrating in the hands of a few, which is eroding democracy. According to Kurz, technological moguls have long seen themselves as superior beings whose natural role is to shape society - so they have no problem disrupting the institution of democracy.

This is the sixth in a seven-part series introducing the new class of The Brandery, an Over-the-Rhine seed-stage startup accelerator. Each day this week, we'll focus on one startup or business selected to participate in this year's program. CINCINNATI -- Small business owners typically don't have the time or money to spend on marketing their business via social media. But they also know it's something that needs to be done. That's the problem that James Hassett and Tanja Mimica hope to solve with Martin, which uses artificial intelligence to advise business owners about digital marketing.

A drone was faster at getting to a person's house than an ambulance, according to test runs conducted by Swedish researchers. A drone was faster at getting to a person's house than an ambulance, according to test runs conducted by Swedish researchers. Drones could soon be dropping off packages at customers' doors. But researchers in Sweden have drones in mind for a different, potentially life-saving delivery: automated external defibrillators, or AEDs. Using drones to carry AEDs to people who are in cardiac arrest could reduce the time that elapses between when people go into cardiac arrest and when they receive the first shock from an AED, the researchers say.

Consider a situation with n agents or players, where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not (losing). A simple game can be viewed as a monotone boolean function. The dimension of a simple game is the smallest positive integer d such that the simple game can be expressed as the intersection of d threshold functions, where each threshold function uses a threshold and n weights. Taylor and Zwicker have shown that d is bounded from above by the number of maximal losing coalitions. We present two new upper bounds both containing the Taylor-Zwicker bound as a special case. The Taylor-Zwicker bound implies an upper bound of (n choose n/2). We improve this upper bound significantly by showing constructively that d is bounded from above by the cardinality of any binary covering code with length n and covering radius 1. This result supplements a recent result where Olsen et al. showed how to construct simple games with dimension |C| for any binary constant weight SECDED code C with length n. Our result represents a major step in the attempt to close the dimensionality gap for simple games.