Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: education – Page 137

A pioneer in Emotion AI, Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is on a mission to humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.

At LiveWorx 2020, Rana joined us to share insights from years of research and collaboration with MIT’s Advanced Vehicle Technology group.

Part demo and part presentation, Rana breaks down the facial patterns that cameras can pick up from a tired or rested driver, and observations from the first ever large-scale study looking at driver behavior over time.

Learn how these inferences can be used to change the driving experience ➡️ https://archive.liveworx.com/sessions/artificial-emotional-i…it-matters

Today’s devices work hand-in-hand with humans –at work, home, school and play. Dr. Rana el Kaliouby believes they can do much more. An expert in artificial emotional intelligence, or “Emotion AI,” Dr. el Kaliouby explores the valuable applications of humanized technology in media and advertising, gaming, automotive, robotics, health, education and more. She explains how machine learning works, explores the potential for the development of emotion chips, and addresses the ethics and privacy issues of Emotion AI. In her talks, Dr. el Kaliouby gives participants an inside look at the world’s largest emotion data repositoryresults from her research studying more than 5 million faces around the world, and reveals that the emoji mindset may soon be a thing of the past.

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With moral purity inserted as a component to the internal processes for all academic publications, it will henceforth become impossible to pursue the vital schema of conjecture and refutation.

Shocked that one of their own could express a heterodox opinion on the value of de rigueur equity, diversity and inclusion policies, chemistry professors around the world immediately demanded the paper be retracted. Mob justice was swift. In an open letter to “our community” days after publication, the publisher of Angewandte Chemie announced it had suspended the two senior editors who handled the article, and permanently removed from its list of experts the two peer reviewers involved. The article was also expunged from its website. The publisher then pledged to assemble a “diverse group of external advisers” to thoroughly root out “the potential for discrimination and foster diversity at all levels” of the journal.

Not to be outdone, Brock’s provost also disowned Hudlicky in a press statement, calling his views “utterly at odds with the values” of the university; the school then drew attention to its own efforts to purge unconscious bias from its ranks and to further the goals of “accessibility, reconciliation and decolonization.” (None of which have anything to do with synthetic organic chemistry, by the way.) Brock’s knee-jerk criticism of Hudlicky is now also under review, following a formal complaint by another professor that the provost’s statement violates the school’s commitment to freedom of expression.

Hudlicky — who told Retraction Watch “the witch hunt is on” — clearly had the misfortune to make a few cranky comments at a time when putting heads on pikes is all the rage. But what of the implications his situation entails for the entirety of the peer-review process? Given the scorched earth treatment handed out to the editors and peer reviewers involved at Angewandte Chemie, the new marching orders for academic journals seem perfectly clear — peer reviewers are now expected to vet articles not just for coherence and relevance to the scientific field in question, but also for alignment with whatever political views may currently hold sway with the community-at-large. If a publication-worthy paper comes across your desk that questions or undermines orthodox public opinion in any way — even in a footnote — and you approve it, your job may be forfeit. Conform or disappear.

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Clarke urges other companies to also get ready now by investing in developing a quantum-ready workforce. “Quantum computing requires a specialized workforce, expertise that is pretty rare today,” he says. Clarke also advises companies to work with government agencies that are sponsoring quantum computing experiments and to fund quantum research in universities. He also supports nation-wide initiatives to spread the word all the way down the education system, even to high-school students, “so people aren’t scared or intimidated by the word quantum.”

Intel aims to achieve quantum practicality—commercially-viable quantum computing—by the end of this decade.

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Benjamin Franklin FRS FRSA FRSE (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1706] – April 17, 1790) was an American polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a leading writer, printer, political philosopher, politician, Freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions.[1] He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia’s first fire department,[2] and the University of Pennsylvania.[3]

Franklin earned the title of “The First American” for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity, initially as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies. As the first United States ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation.[4] Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, “In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.”[5] To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.

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Called “Spinnaker3,” this drag sail isn’t the first to be launched into space. But it is among the first to be large enough for deorbiting the upper stage of a launch vehicle. The Firefly Alpha launch will target an orbit altitude of about 200 miles, but the Spinnaker3 drag sail is capable of providing deorbit capability from orbit altitudes of 400 miles or greater.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A rocket is going up into space with a drag sail. The goal? For the drag sail to bring the rocket back to Earth, preventing it from becoming like the thousands of pieces of space junk in Earth’s lower orbit.

The drag sail, developed by Purdue University engineers, will be on board a Firefly Aerospace rocket expected to launch in November from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

This sail and six other “Dedicated Research and Education Accelerator Mission” (DREAM) payloads are flying on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha launch, the first flight for the launch vehicle company.

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“In the 18th century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think along the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think anyone who has pored over the contents of the box he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, the last great mind who looked out at the intellectual and visible world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

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Probably not very many people could identify the author of this passage. In fact it was John Maynard Keynes, writing in an essay from the late 1930s, “Newton the Man”, which was read as a lecture some months after Keynes had died in April 1946 by his brother Geoffrey Keynes. Based on a study of Newton’s papers, which Keynes was the first to see before some were sold in 1936, the 20th century’s greatest economist described the founder of modern science as a magician.

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The MIT-Harvard Medical School Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp brings the rigorous, collaborative, action-learning experience of our in-person Healthcare Innovation Bootcamps online. Over 10 weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to work with a global team of innovators selected by MIT Bootcamps to build the foundations of a new healthcare venture. You will learn principles… See More.

The MIT — Harvard Medical School Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp will be different than most online courses you can take. A combination of live teaching sessions and workshops (which are recorded for your flexibility), office hours, building the foundations of a venture with your global team, and receiving regular team-based coaching, the Bootcamp is a hands-on, immersive, and rigorous learning experience. In 10 weeks, you’ll learn to identify an innovation opportunity, develop a superior solution, and select a business model for the venture you build with your global team. Expect to spend 10–15 hours per week on live sessions, individual, and team work.

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Astronomers have seen what appears to the first light ever detected from a black hole merger.

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. Because black holes do not give off light, these events are not expected to shine with any light waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Graduate Center, CUNY astrophysicists K. E. Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan have posited ways in which a black hole merger might explode with light. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen evidence of one of these light-producing scenarios. Their findings are available in the current issues of Physical Review Letters.

A team consisting of scientists from The Graduate Center, CUNY; Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF); Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC); and The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) spotted what appears to be a flare of light from a pair of coalescing black holes. The event (called S190521g) was first identified by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019. As the black holes merged, jiggling space and time, they sent out gravitational waves. Shortly thereafter, scientists at ZTF — which is located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego — reviewed their recordings of the same the event and spotted what may be a flare of light coming from the coalescing black holes.

“At the center of most galaxies lurks a supermassive black hole. It’s surrounded by a swarm of stars and dead stars, including black holes,” said study coauthor Ford, a professor with the Graduate Center, BMCC and AMNH. “These objects swarm like angry bees around the monstrous queen bee at the center. They can briefly find gravitational partners and pair up but usually lose their partners quickly to the mad dance. But in a supermassive black hole’s disk, the flowing gas converts the mosh pit of the swarm to a classical minuet, organizing the black holes so they can pair up,” she says.

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