Lifeboat Foundation

Most people might not drool over Oppo phones, but they’re going to get a feature that might get those salivary glands pumping. This morning at Mobile World Congress, the company showed off its new SuperVOOC quick-charging technology. If real-world results are as promising as they say, Oppo fans will be able to fully charge some of their devices in 15 minutes. No, seriously.

Oppo says that’s about how much time it’ll take to charge a dead 2,500mAh battery to 100 percent, and that the technology will work over traditional micro-USB and USB Type-C cables. That’s even faster than what we’ve seen out of Qualcomm’s most recent Quick Charge 3.0 demos — the fast-charging technology baked into chipsets like the Snapdragon 820 can get a smartphone from bone-dry to 80 percent in around 35 minutes. Of course, it’s sort of no surprise that Oppo can squeeze better performance out of their system — it’s more or less proprietary Oppo, so the company has full control over the battery, silicon and software involved. That’s the sort of end-to-end control that helped Huawei figure out how to supercharge smartphones, too.

In some cases, you’ll be able to get a full charge in less than 15 minutes. An Oppo hype man plugged a metal-encased reference device into a charger and continued his spiel in Mandarin. Less than ten minutes later — after he discussed an algorithm that varies current to maximize charging efficiency while keeping temperatures low — the phone was back up to 100 percent. Our natural skeptics can’t help suspect this was just a staged demo for the show, so here’s hoping we soon get to test a SuperVOOC phone for ourselves.

MIT has used machine learning to create video from still images, and the results are pretty impressive. As you can see from the above image, there’s a lot of natural form to the movement in the videos.

The system “learns” types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing…) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos. So the beach video looks like it has crashing waves, for instance.

But like other machine-generated images, these have limitations. The first is size: what you see above is the extent to which the program can render its video. Length is also an issue: only about a second of video gets produced.

Continue reading “Machine-Learning Algorithm Generates Videos From Stills” »

Brain is the new product from Jerry Yue which is based on Advanced algorithm. According to Yue, Brain will work as a personal virtual assistant for each user by having users input not just a profile of who they are, but what they do, and what they want to do in the future.

“Fifty years after the show aired, Star Trek’s fictional tricorder is far from becoming a reality. But a $10 million prize from the XPRIZE Foundation is hoping to motivate inventors to create one quickly.”

Read more

Feynman told us clearly: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Check anything from first principles and experience, ignoring no logical holes, and that is science. Cargo Cult Science arises when the opposing arguments aren’t emphasized. Experts then form and pass down firm beliefs that are delusions. Cargo Cult science is like a perfect replica radio made all of wood: it may have all the trappings of degrees and chairs and journals, but it is missing the key ingredient and won’t function.[1][2]

Vaccine science is cargo cult science according to Feynman’s definition. There are a ton of peer reviewed papers demonstrating that vaccine aluminum is damaging, that vaccines are full of contaminants, that they can disrupt brain and immune system development, that the smallpox vaccine was ineffective, the polio vaccine is of questionable utility, other vaccines’ immunity wanes after only a few years. They never rebut as you can easily verify yourself by examining the citation list here for opposition and then searching the vaccine survey pdfs for the cites. They just ignore it.[3][4][5]

Climate science is cargo cult science. Climate “scientists” have been known to “hide” their own most interesting data, the data contradicting the prevailing theory which is what Feynman said a scientist should emphasize most prominently[6][7]. Alternative theories and methodological objections are ignored or white washed. (Search the IPCC reports for discussion of the opposition.) To say a science is cargo cult science is not to say that there are no papers published in it that are science, but it is to say one should repose zero or negative confidence in any pronouncement one has not personally verified from first principles.

http://TruthSift.com supports Feynman’s model of science applied to everything. Just as in mathematical practice, you can post proofs and refutations. But nothing is considered established unless every proposed refutation has an established counter-refutation. No proposed refutation can be ducked, and anybody who believes they have a rational objection may post it (and see the establishment statuses reflect the objection in real time). Try it out. Check out (and please contribute to) the ongoing diagrammings of the vaccine/climate science etc literatures. When they have passed through true logical review, confronting all the opposing arguments, what remains will be a genuine science.

[1] Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968) http://www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/diaz/img_diaz/feynman…nce_68.pdf
[2] Richard P Feynman, CARGO CULT SCIENCE (adapted from Caltech Commencement Address 1974) https://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
[3] Eric Baum The Top Ten Reasons I Believe Vaccine Safety Is an Epic Mass Delusion (2016) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-beli…s-delusion
[4] TruthSift Topic: Are Vaccines Safe? (2016) http://truthsift.com/search_view?statement=Vaccines-are-Safe…p;nid=4083
[5] TruthSift Topic: The Evidence is Weak Vaccines Have Saved More Lives than They Have Cost (2016), http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=The-Evidence-Is-Weak-…amp;id=520
[6] Climate data hidden both early (data showing very rapid rise before 1500) and in 20th century (showing decline): https://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/
[7] More data contradicting theory hidden. https://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but for one contest the beholders are AI. Beauty.AI used 5 robots to judge 6,000 selfies and choose winners for an international beauty contest.

In 1935, physicists published two papers introducing key concepts on the theoretical understanding of the universe: wormholes and quantum entanglement.

But, what if these two separately described phenomena were actually the same thing?

Continue reading “Physicist proposes new equation that could transform physics” »

Blended Reality is a versatile concept that can be extended from the physical and digital worlds to the chemical and biological world. In the convergence of healthcare diagnostics and digital health, it can play a fundamental role: the transformation of human biology, real-world parameters into digital data to obtain contextual health information and enable personalized drug treatments. The fusion of microfluidics, edge computing and commercial mobility with diagnostics, digital health, big data, precision medicine, and theranostics will disrupt existing, established structures in our healthcare system. This will allow new models of partnerships among technology and pharmaceutical industries (see fig. 1).

From the very beginning of mankind, healthcare was purely empirical and mostly a combination of empirical and spiritual skills. While access to cures was exclusive and very limited, the success rate was not very high in most cases. During the Renaissance a systematic exploration of natural phenomena and physiology laid the scientific foundation of modern medicine. A real breakthrough in quality and access to healthcare services has taken place in the past 150 years as an aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. It brought significant advances in science as well as societal changes: expanding government-granted access to the establishing working classes as the main human capital of the industrialization process in the Western Hemisphere. Keeping a business employees healthy became an indispensable prerequisite to increasing the national economic output and well-being on a societal level.

Google’s artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind is exploring whether its technology could be used to identify early signs of eye diseases that ophthalmologists might not spot.

DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, has struck an agreement with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London that gives it access to about a million anonymous retinal scans, which it will feed into its artificial intelligence software.

Continue reading “Could an algorithm help to save people’s eyesight? Google thinks so” »