Lifeboat Foundation

I think we should approach from two angles: 1. encourage and fund through government to have everyone who can to put solar on their home/building/whatever. 2. Also have the massive sites dedicated to solar and wind harvesting. Seems we could be totally solar by mid 2030s.

Rooftop solar panels are up to 79% cheaper than they were in 2010. These plummeting costs have made rooftop solar photovoltaics even more attractive to households and businesses who want to reduce their reliance on electricity grids while reducing their carbon footprints.

But are there enough rooftop surfaces for this technology to generate affordable, low-carbon energy for everyone who needs it? After all, it’s not just people who own their own houses and want to cut their bills who are in need of solutions like this. Around 800 million people globally go without proper access to electricity.

Continue reading “Solar panels on half the world’s roofs could meet its entire electricity demand — new research” »

Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) has inked a partnership with Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics to identify uses cases involving legged robots for security, defence, and humanitarian applications. They will look to test and develop mobile robotic systems, as well as the associated technology enablers, that can be deployed in challenging urban terrain and harsh environments.

The collaboration also would see robots from Ghost Robotics paired with DSTA’s robotics command, control, and communications (C3) system, the two partners said in a joint statement released Thursday.

The Singapore government agency said its C3 capabilities were the “nerve centre” of military platforms and command centres, tapping data analytics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision technologies to facilitate “tighter coordination” and effectiveness during military and other contingency operations.

German air taxi manufacturer Volocopter launched a self-developed heavy-duty drone in public for the first time on Tuesday at the ITS World Congress in Hamburg.

In cooperation with German logistics provider DB Schenker, the company demonstrated the integration of the VoloDrone into logistics supply chains.

The test flight, which lasted about three minutes, took place around the harbor area of the city in northern Germany. The ITS congress is an international digital transport event.

In 2,019 a survey from the Center for Digital Government (CDG), the National Association of Chief Information Officers and IBM found that just 13 percent of state governments reported using artificial intelligence in some non-core part of their operations. Three years later, the same survey yielded very different results.

At the NASCIO annual confference in Seattle this week, Joe Morris with CDG presented some of the study’s 2021 findings, and it was clear that the COVID-19 pandemic changed how state and local government are thinking about AI. This year, 60 percent of respondents reported AI is currently in use in their enterprise; 6.7 percent said the tech is widely used across the state, up from just 1 percent in 2019.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Can Improve How People Use Tech” »

Ray Kurzweil — Singularitarian Immortalist, Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mind http://GF2045.com/speakers/.

A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, “the restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon’s #1 book in science and philosophy.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045” »

Lebanon’s entire electric grid collapsed on Saturday when the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel.

For months, the country had been providing citizens with a few hours of electricity a day, according to The Washington Post. Then yesterday, Lebanon’s state-owned power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel leaving the entire country with no electricity. The outage is expected to last days.

To solve the situation, the Lebanese government is attempting to get emergency fuel from the army and other sources until the country receives and distributes a shipment of oil from Iraq.

Creating and building a “Secure Smart City” requires strong Private Public Partnerships that incorporate people, policies, processes and technology from both government and industry into the overall strategy process.

This week, The European Parliament, the body responsible for adopting European Union (EU) legislation, passed a non-binding resolution calling for a ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in public places. The resolution, which also proposes a moratorium on the deployment of predictive policing software, would restrict the use of remote biometric identification unless it’s to fight “serious” crime, such as kidnapping and terrorism.

The approach stands in contrast to that of U.S. agencies, which continue to embrace facial recognition even in light of studies showing the potential for ethnic, racial, and gender bias. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 10 branches including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security plan to expand their use of facial recognition between 2020 and 2023 as they implement as many as 17 different facial recognition systems.

Commercial face-analyzing systems have been critiqued by scholars and activists alike throughout the past decade, if not longer. The technology and techniques — everything from sepia-tinged film to low-contrast digital cameras — often favor lighter skin, encoding racial bias in algorithms. Indeed, independent benchmarks of vendors’ systems by the Gender Shades project and others have revealed that facial recognition technologies are susceptible to a range of prejudices exacerbated by misuse in the field. For example, a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology details how police feed facial recognition software flawed data, including composite sketches and pictures of celebrities who share physical features with suspects.

Taiwan’s TSMC and Japan’s Sony Group Corp are considering jointly building a chip factory in Japan, with the government ready to pay for some of the investment of about 800 billion yen ($7.15 billion), the Nikkei reported on Friday, October 8 2021. (

WORLD’S LARGEST CHIPMAKER TO RAISE PRICES, THREATENING COSTLIER ELECTRONICS

Both Sony and TSMC declined to comment. But TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and major Apple Inc supplier had said in July that it was reviewing a plan to set up production in Japan.