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Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal - Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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The New York Observer calls him, "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." Madrigal co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.

He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).

Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
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Sentence of the Day: Clay Shirky on Google's Algorithm

By Alexis Madrigal

Nov 9 2010, 2:26 PM ET Comment

When a guy as smart as NYU media theorist Clay Shirky doesn't know exactly what to say about something technological, you know it's a key issue. Still, Shirky manages to cut right to the heart of why Google's algorithm is hard to interpret culturally. We've created something that no one quite understands, but everyone depends on.

There is human intelligence behind the search engine, of course, but it is made unintelligible by the scale and complexity of the algorithm.

Read the full story at Kommons.

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