Tag Archives: web
#431817 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
BITCOIN
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the WorldDerek Thompson | The Atlantic“What seems most certain is that the future of money will test our conventional definitions—of currencies, of bubbles, and of initial offerings. What’s happening this month with bitcoin feels like an unsustainable paroxysm. But it’s foolish to try to develop rational models for when such a market will correct itself. Prices, like currencies, are collective illusions.”
SPACE
This Engineer Is Building a DIY Mars Habitat in His BackyardDaniel Oberhaus | Motherboard“For over a year, Raymond and his wife have been running a fully operational, self-sustaining ‘Mars habitat’ in their backyard. They’ve personally sunk around $200,000 into the project and anticipate spending several thousand more before they’re finished. The habitat is the subject of a popularYouTube channel maintained by Raymond, where he essentiallyLARPs the 2015 Matt Damon film The Martian for an audience of over 20,000 loyal followers.”
INTERNET
The FCC Just Voted to Repeal Its Net Neutrality Rules, in a Sweeping Act of DeregulationBrian Fung | The Washington Post“The 3-2 vote, which was along party lines, enabled the FCC’s Republican chairman, AjitPai, to follow through on his promise to repeal the government’s 2015 net neutrality rules, which required Internet providers to treat all websites, large and small, equally.”
GENDER EQUALITY
Sexism’s National Reckoning and the Tech Women Who Blazed the TrailTekla S. Perry | IEEE Spectrum“Cassidy and other women in tech who spoke during the one-day event stressed that the watershed came not because women finally broke the silence about sexual harassment, whatever Time’s editors may believe. The change came because the women were finally listened to and the bad actors faced repercussions.”
FUTURE
These Technologies Will Shape the Future, According to One of Silicon Valley’s Top VC FirmsDaniel Terdiman | Fast Company“The question then, is what are the technologies that are going to drive the future. At Andreessen Horowitz, a picture of that future, at least the next 10 years or so, is coming into focus.During a recent firm summit, Evans laid out his vision for the most significant tech opportunities of the next decade.On the surface, the four areas he identifies–autonomy, mixed-reality, cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence–aren’t entirely surprises.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#431678 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?Cliff Kuang | New York Times“Kosinski’s results suggested something stranger: that artificial intelligences often excel by developing whole new ways of seeing, or even thinking, that are inscrutable to us. It’s a more profound version of what’s often called the ‘black box’ problem—the inability to discern exactly what machines are doing when they’re teaching themselves novel skills—and it has become a central concern in artificial-intelligence research.”
BIOTECH
Semi-Synthetic Life Form Now Fully Armed and OperationalAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review “By this year, the team had devised a more stable bacterium. But it wasn’t enough to endow the germ with a partly alien code—it needed to use that code to make a partly alien protein. That’s what Romesberg’s team, reporting today in the journal Nature, says it has done.”
COMPUTING
4 Strange New Ways to ComputeSamuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum “With Moore’s Law slowing, engineers have been taking a cold hard look at what will keep computing going when it’s gone…What follows includes a taste of both the strange and the potentially impactful.”
INNOVATION
Google X and the Science of Radical CreativityDerek Thompson | The Atlantic “But what X is attempting is nonetheless audacious. It is investing in both invention and innovation. Its founders hope to demystify and routinize the entire process of making a technological breakthrough—to nurture each moonshot, from question to idea to discovery to product—and, in so doing, to write an operator’s manual for radical creativity.”
PRIVACY AND SECURITY
Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million PeopleEric Newcomer | Bloomberg “Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing firm ousted its chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#431553 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
ROBOTS
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It’s Full-Tilt InsaneMatt Simon | Wired “To be clear: Humanoids aren’t supposed to be able to do this. It’s extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move effectively, much less kick off a tumbling routine.”
TRANSPORTATION
This Is the Tesla Semi TruckZac Estrada | The Verge“What Tesla has done today is shown that it wants to invigorate a segment, rather than just make something to comply with more stringent emissions regulations… And in the process, it’s trying to do for heavy-duty commercial vehicles what it did for luxury cars—plough forward in its own lane.”
PRIVACY AND SECURITY
Should Facebook Notify Readers When They’ve Been Fed Disinformation?Austin Carr | Fast Company “It would be, Reed suggested, the social network equivalent of a newspaper correction—only one that, with the tech companies’ expansive data, could actually reach its intended audience, like, say, the 250,000-plus Facebook users who shared the debunked YourNewsWire.com story.”
BRAIN HEALTH
Brain Implant Boosts Memory for First Time EverKristin Houser | NBC News “Once implanted in the volunteers, Song’s device could collect data on their brain activity during tests designed to stimulate either short-term memory or working memory. The researchers then determined the pattern associated with optimal memory performance and used the device’s electrodes to stimulate the brain following that pattern during later tests.”
COMPUTING
Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum ComputerCade Metz | New York Times “Though Quantum Circuits is using the same quantum method as its bigger competitors, Mr. Schoelkopf argued that his company has an edge because it is tackling the problem differently. Rather than building one large quantum machine, it is constructing a series of tiny machines that can be networked together. He said this will make it easier to correct errors in quantum calculations—one of the main difficulties in building one of these complex machines.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#431414 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
QUANTUM COMPUTING IBM Raises the Bar With a 50-Qubit Quantum ComputerWill Knight | MIT Technology Review “50 qubits is a significant landmark in progress toward practical quantum computers. Other systems built so far have had limited capabilities and could perform only calculations that could also be done on a conventional supercomputer. A 50-qubit machine can do things that are extremely difficult to simulate without quantum technology.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI Startup Embodied Intelligence Wants Robots to Learn From Humans in Virtual RealityEvan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum “This is a defining problem for robotics right now: Robots can do anything you want, as long as you tell them exactly what that is, every single time… This week, Abbeel and several of his colleagues from UC Berkeley and OpenAI are announcing a new startup (with US $7 million in seed funding) called Embodied Intelligence, which will ‘enable industrial robot arms to perceive and act like humans instead of just strictly following pre-programmed trajectories.’”
TRANSPORTATION Uber’s Plan to Launch Flying Cars in LA by 2020 Really Could Take OffJack Stewart | Wired“After grabbing an elevator, passengers will tap their phones to pass through a turnstile and access the roof. Presumably they’ve been prescreened, because there’s no airport-style security in evidence. An agent in an orange vest takes a group of four passengers out to the waiting aircraft. There’s a pilot up front, and a small overhead display with the estimated arrival time.”
ROBOTICS This Robot Swarm Finishes Your Grocery Shopping in MinutesJesus Diaz | Fast Company “At an Ocado warehouse in the English town of Andover, a swarm of 1,000 robots races over a grid the size of a soccer field, filling orders and replacing stock. The new system, which went live earlier this year, can fulfill a 50-item order in under five minutes—something that used to take about two hours at human-only facilities. It’s been so successful that Ocado is now building a new warehouse that’s three times larger in Erith, southeast of London.”
BIOTECH Meet the Scientists Building a Library of Designer DrugsAngela Chen | The Verge“One of the most prominent categories of designer drugs are those intended to mimic marijuana, called synthetic cannabinoids. Marijuana, or cannabis, is widely considered one of the safest drugs, but synthetic cannabinoids are some of the most dangerous synthetic drugs.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#431368 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
INTERNET OF THINGSAmazon Key Is a New Service That Lets Couriers Unlock Your Front DoorBen Popper | The Verge“When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a request to Amazon’s cloud. If everything checks out, the cloud grants permission by sending a message back to the camera, which starts recording. The courier then gets a prompt on their app, swipes the screen, and voilà, your door unlocks.”
ROBOTICSWatch Yamaha’s Humanoid Robot Ride a Motorcycle Around a RacetrackPhilip E. Ross | IEEE Spectrum“What’s striking is that the bike is unmodified: the robot is a hunched-over form on top. It senses the environment, calculates what to do, keeps the bike stable, manages acceleration and deceleration—all while factoring in road conditions, air resistance, and engine braking.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCETech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. TalentCade Metz | The New York Times“Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.”
HEALTH This Doctor Diagnosed His Own Cancer With an iPhone UltrasoundAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review“The device he used, called the Butterfly IQ, is the first solid-state ultrasound machine to reach the market in the U.S. Ultrasound works by shooting sound into the body and capturing the echoes. Usually, the sound waves are generated by a vibrating crystal. But Butterfly’s machine instead uses 9,000 tiny drums etched onto a semiconductor chip.”
ENTREPRENEURSHIPWeWork: A $20 Billion Startup Fueled by Silicon Valley Pixie DustEliot Brown | Wall Street Journal“WeWork’s strategy carries the costs and risks associated with traditional real estate. Its client list is heavily weighted toward startups that may or may not be around for long. WeWork is on the hook for long-term leases, and it doesn’t own its own buildings. Vacancy rates have risen recently, and the company is increasing incentives to draw tenants… The model has proved popular, with 150,000 individuals renting space in more than 170 locations globally.”
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Posted in Human Robots