Welcome to Reading List, a weekly collection of great tech reads from around the web. This week, we’ve got stories about the casino entrepreneur who wants to make you immortal, the NSA’s ‘Google For Voice’, a dive into Mars colonization, and more!
Glenn Straub, an “independently wealthy 68-year-old industrialist, itinerant polo player, and pugnacious real estate developer”, has bought up a virtually brand-new hotel in Atlantic City. He plans to turn it into a casino combined with a futuristic medical facility, so that you can live (and gamble) forever. [Bloomberg]
When we talk about colonizing Mars, it’s normally the technical issues being discussed. But should we want to go there in the first place; and if so, who should be on the front line? [Fusion]
The NSA doesn’t need to just collect all of our phone calls: it needs some way of mining the information, too. Rather than having humans sift through, the NSA developed a program for speech recognition, using machines to spit out rough transcripts of calls, and then keyword-mining, a program dubbed ‘Google For Voice’. [The Intercept]
It used to be you couldn’t go three clicks on the internet without a pastel-colored infographic trying to teach you something. But in the last few years, infographics have been on the downswing. And it’s not because data visualization is past its prime — rather, corporations have snapped up all the good designers. [Fast Company]
Don’t panic, but the United States is “in the midst of a slow-motion disease disaster”. This isn’t Ebola 2.0; rather, it’s the spread of avian influenza, and it’s wreaking havoc among poultry farms. [National Geographic]
Against the background of national discontent with our police force, there’s one glimmer of hope: Fresno, California, where a long-running community policing initiative has been paying dividends. The Washington Post profiles an alternative, friendlier way to keep gangs off the streets. [Washington Post]
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