Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Biology: “Something That Can Be Digitally Manipulated”
October 2nd, 2019It’s easy to laugh at the barking insanity of these monsters, but at the same time, you probably know someone who spent their hard earned money to buy a “smart speaker” surveillance platform for their home.
Via: CNBC:
Brain inserts and carbon-absorbing bacteria aren’t just the fantasies of Silicon Valley’s richest executives, they’re also a part of a larger hope to advance artificial intelligence and computing efforts.
“Biology will undoubtedly fuel computing” in coming years, former Google CEO and current technical advisor Eric Schmidt said at a conference called SynBioBeta in San Francisco Monday. “Taking biology, which I’d always viewed as squishy and analog, and turning it into something that can be digitally manipulated, is an enormous accelerator.”
Schmidt’s comments come as Silicon Valley’s seeming obsession with biology attempts to move beyond fascinating projects and into more serious investments that could help modernize tech processes.
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“It’s easy to come up with movie recommendations or YouTube recommendations, because we have millions of data points of people like you,” Schmidt said. “We don’t have an analogous amount of data in biology yet.”
Gait Analysis (and Correlation to Video) of Individuals Possible Through Wi-Fi
October 2nd, 2019This is very bad.
Via: TechXplore:
Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.
This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.
More: XModal-ID: Using WiFi for Through-Wall Person Identification from Candidate Video Footage
FAA Allows UPS to Expand Drone Deliveries in U.S.
October 2nd, 2019Via: CBS:
UPS won government approval to operate a nationwide fleet of drones, which will allow the company to expand deliveries on hospital campuses and move it one step closer to making deliveries to consumers.
Many regulatory obstacles remain, however, before UPS — or other operators who are testing drones — can fill the sky over cities and suburbs with drones carrying goods to people’s doorsteps.
United Parcel Service said Tuesday that its drone subsidiary was awarded an airline certificate last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, the first U.S. company to get such a broad approval.
China Displays New Hypersonic Nuclear Missile on 70th Anniversary
October 2nd, 2019Via: Al Jazeera:
China’s military has shown off a new hypersonic ballistic nuclear missile believed capable of breaching all existing anti-missile shields deployed by the United States and its allies.
The vehicle-mounted DF-17 was among weapons displayed on Tuesday in a large military parade led by President Xi Jinping to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Pentagon Official Fired After He Mentioned Billions of Dollars in Waste and Fraud
October 2nd, 2019Via: Yahoo News:
Assad’s aggressive approach to contract negotiations, however, paid off. The Pentagon credited the career civil servant with bringing down the costs of the Apache helicopter, the C-17 transport plane and the F/A-18 fighter, saving taxpayers more than half a billion dollars. And that wasn’t all: A former senior Pentagon official said Assad had over the span of his career “saved the Department of Defense many billions of dollars.”
Trump’s interest in negotiating better prices for the government made it seem like Assad’s work would get White House attention.
Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled.
His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. It was a conflict that ended dramatically, he says, when shortly after he emailed senior Pentagon officials about potential fraud, details about his travel records and his demotion were published in the press.
Assad, who is now retired, says the issues he brought up involved potentially billions of dollars in waste and fraud, and still aren’t being addressed. It’s a claim that’s backed up by multiple interviews conducted by Yahoo News with Assad and those who worked with him at the Pentagon, as well as by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Corrupt Chinese Mayor Had Thirteen Tons of Gold and Billions in Cash in Home
October 2nd, 2019Via: Daily Mail:
A powerful Communist official in China is suspected to have received 13.5 tonnes of gold and £30 billion cash in bribes.
Thousands of golden bars and bricks were discovered at the leader’s home during a raid by corruption inspectors earlier this month.
Their value could be worth up to £520 million, according to international trading prices.
Zhang Qi, 58, who was a top official in the province of Hainan has been sacked.
In addition to the gold, inspectors discovered 268 billion yuan (£30 billion) in suspected bribes on the man’s account, according to reports.
He was also thought to have received multiple luxurious villas as perks.
If Mr Zhang’s alleged corruption turns out to be true, he would have been richer than Jack Ma, the wealthiest man in China worth $37 billion (£30 billion) according to Forbes.
This Robot Can Make 300 Pizzas In An Hour
October 2nd, 2019Via: TribLive:
Watch out pizza world: this pizza robot could shake things up.
Seattle startup Picnic announced Tuesday that it has a developed a unit that can make 300 12-inch pizzas per hour and 180 18-inch pizzas per hour.
While the pizzabot does its share of the work, dough preparation, sauce making and baking are all done by non-robots, aka humans, according to GeekWire.
Related: Yes, Robots Are Hurting Your Pay
Man Spends 30 Years Regenerating Farmland Into Amazing Forest
October 2nd, 2019Via: Happen Films:
Amazon’s Dystopian Plan To Be Anywhere And Everywhere
September 30th, 2019Via: The Week:
When most tech companies host a launch event, it is to unveil one or two major products. Not Amazon. For the past couple of years at its launch events, the company has bombarded tech watchers with a torrent of new products. And so it wasn’t all that surprising when it announced a full 15 new products at a hardware event in Seattle last week. That’s more products than most big tech companies launch all year.
But if the glut of stuff was expected, what was perhaps less predictable was the variety of what was on show: smart night lights, a smart oven, and most surprisingly of all, smart wearable devices like eyeglasses and a ring.
The sheer number of hardware products has in the past made Amazon seem a bit like it was throwing absolutely anything at the wall to see what sticks. And to be sure, there was definitely that feeling this time around. But with an increasing push to get its Alexa voice platform absolutely everywhere, Amazon’s plans finally seem to be coming into focus: The company believes voice will supplant the smartphone as the next big platform.
Artificial Blood Developed for Patients of Any Blood Type
September 30th, 2019Via: Asahi Shimbun:
Japanese researchers said they have developed artificial blood that can be transfused into patients regardless of their blood type and can vastly improve the chances for survival of seriously injured people.
The artificial blood created by a team of scientists primarily from the National Defense Medical College has proved effective in experiments on rabbits.
For possible applications on humans, the artificial blood gets around problems with identifying blood types in emergency situations and overcomes limits on storing real blood from donors.
