Engine Tests Underway for DARPA ‘Phantom Express’ Spaceplane Program
July 9th, 2018Via: Space News:
A space shuttle-era main engine is undergoing a series of daily test firings to demonstrate its suitability for use on a reusable spaceplane under development.
The Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine is in the midst of a series of 10 100-second engine firings over the course of 10 days at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. As of July 2 the company has completed six such tests and was on track to complete the rest on schedule.
The engine is a version of the Space Shuttle Main Engine with only minor modifications, said Jeff Haynes, AR-22 program manager at Aerojet, in a July 2 interview. “We’re not designing or building any new hardware for this engine,” he said. “We’re taking and making use of existing hardware, most of it being flight proven.”
One minor difference in the engine, he said, is using a new flight controller, or computer system, from the updated version of the RS-25 engine intended for use on NASA’s Space Launch System. “The rest of it is not new technology,” he said.
The purpose of the test series is to demonstrate that the engine can be used 10 times in 10 days. That is a major requirement of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Experimental Spaceplane program, for which the AR-22 will power Boeing’s Phantom Express vehicle.
Although the AR-22 and its shuttle-era predecessors have decades of experience, the same engine has never been tested so frequently. Haynes said that there was only one case where the same engine was fired one day apart. “We’ve already far exceeded that in this series,” he said.
Wealthy Worried About Keeping Control of Their Minions After “The Event”
July 6th, 2018
Via: Medium:
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers?—?if that technology could be developed in time.
U.S.-China Trade War Underway
July 6th, 2018Via: Guardian:
A long-threatened trade war between the US and China has got under way after the world’s two largest economies imposed tariffs on each other. The US implemented tariffs on $34bn in Chinese goods, to which Beijing responded with levies on a similar quantity of US imports.
Minutes after the US tariffs went into effect at 12.01am on Friday US time, a spokesperson for China’s ministry of commerce said, “China promised not to fire the first shot, but in order to safeguard the country’s core interests as well as that of the people, it is forced to fight back,” according to Xinhua. The ministry stopped short of saying China had implemented its retaliatory duties.
Later on Friday, a spokesman for the ministry of foreign affairs said after the US tariffs kicked in, Chinese tariffs on US goods had immediately gone into effect.
Ahead of the tariffs, Chinese state media published a series of editorials criticising the US and emphasising the country’s readiness for a trade war. Chinese companies and investors girded for the worst, while economists cautioned any impact on the economy would be minimal.
Self-Driving Cars Are Headed Toward an AI Roadblock
July 4th, 2018Via: The Verge:
If you believe the CEOs, a fully autonomous car could be only months away. In 2015, Elon Musk predicted a fully autonomous Tesla by 2018; so did Google. Delphi and MobileEye’s Level 4 system is currently slated for 2019, the same year Nutonomy plans to deploy thousands of driverless taxis on the streets of Singapore. GM will put a fully autonomous car into production in 2019, with no steering wheel or ability for drivers to intervene. There’s real money behind these predictions, bets made on the assumption that the software will be able to catch up to the hype.
On its face, full autonomy seems closer than ever. Waymo is already testing cars on limited-but-public roads in Arizona. Tesla and a host of other imitators already sell a limited form of Autopilot, counting on drivers to intervene if anything unexpected happens. There have been a few crashes, some deadly, but as long as the systems keep improving, the logic goes, we can’t be that far from not having to intervene at all.
But the dream of a fully autonomous car may be further than we realize. There’s growing concern among AI experts that it may be years, if not decades, before self-driving systems can reliably avoid accidents. As self-trained systems grapple with the chaos of the real world, experts like NYU’s Gary Marcus are bracing for a painful recalibration in expectations, a correction sometimes called “AI winter.” That delay could have disastrous consequences for companies banking on self-driving technology, putting full autonomy out of reach for an entire generation.
China: 3 Year Old High End Villas
July 2nd, 2018Winston and C-Milk are great. I’ve been watching both of them for about a year. They have both lived in China for over a decade, have Chinese wives and speak the language.
Their individual channels are:
Their partnership “Adventure” channel is: advchina
Very interesting viewing!
Via: Advchina:
More States Opting to ‘Robo-Grade’ Student Essays by Computer
July 2nd, 2018Via: NPR:
Department Of Education Deputy Commissioner Jeff Wulfson cited “huge advances in artificial intelligence in the last few years” and cracked, “I asked Alexa whether she thought we’d ever be able to use computers to reliably score tests, and she said absolutely.”
California: The Poverty Capital of the U.S.
July 1st, 2018Via: City Journal:
California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when the state’s per-capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).
It’s not as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now. Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.
Tesla and PG&E Are Working on a Massive ‘Up to 1.1 GWh’ Powerpack Battery System
June 30th, 2018Via: Electrek:
Tesla would be providing the battery packs for the giant project, which would be able to output 182.5 MW of power for 4 hours, which represents 730 MWh of energy capacity or over 3,000 Tesla Powerpack 2s.
PG&E also has the option to increase the capacity to 6 hours for a total of 1.1 GWh.
Earlier this month, Tesla CTO JB Straubel announced that the company has deployed over 1 GWh of energy storage – a capacity that he says is “undeniably making an impact.”
If this new project is approved and deployed to its full potential, it would represent more energy capacity in a single project than what Tesla Energy deployed since its inception 3 years ago.
There Are Now Barely Two Workers Per Senior in Most Developed Economies
June 30th, 2018Via: The Sounding Line:
For every American 65 years of age or older, there are now barely three people working and paying into the country’s safety-net, Social Security, and Medicare programs. In France there are barely two workers per senior. In Japan there are slightly less than two. In Italy and Greece there are barely more than 1.5 workers per senior, less than half the ratio in the 1960s. In each case, the definition of a ‘worker’ includes anyone working as little as one hour a week.
At the same time, government entitlement spending is surging in virtually every developed economy. In the US, a full 73% of government revenues are already being spent on entitlement programs and over 60% of those entitlements go to senior citizens via Social Security and Medicare. With the bulk of the baby-boomer generation reaching retirement age right now, the problem is only going to get worse.
With fewer and fewer workers per retiree, with entitlement spending already consuming the vast majority of tax revenues across the developed world, with governments already running large perennial deficits, with most developed world governments already weighted down with over 100% debt-to-GDP, and with interest rates set to rise, there is a funding crisis coming to governments across the developed world.
In many of these same countries, whatever tax revenue is not being spent on entitlement programs is already being spent servicing huge national debts.
DARPA Backing Development of ‘Silicon Compiler’
June 29th, 2018Via: EETimes:
The U.S. will pour $100 million into two research programs over the next four years to create the equivalent of a silicon compiler aimed at significantly lowering the barriers to design chips. The programs, involving 15 companies and more than 200 researchers, were described for the first time in a talk at the Design Automation Conference here.
…
With $100 million in finding, the IDEAS and POSH programs represent “one of the biggest EDA research programs ever,” said Andreas Olofsson, who manages the two programs.
Together, they aim to combat the growing complexity and cost of designing chips, now approaching $500 million for a bleeding-edge SoC. Essentially, POSH aims to create an open-source library of silicon blocks, and IDEAS hopes to spawn a variety of open-source and commercial tools to automate testing of those blocks and knitting them into SoCs and printed circuit boards.
