Lifeboat Foundation

Georgia Institute of Technology developed a control algorithm that ‘taught’ 3-ft, 48lb rally cars how to plan and execute optimal handling decisions in real-time while on rough terrain.

“So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.
Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[’s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition…Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.“
–Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968)[1]

TruthSift.com is a platform designed to support and guide individuals or crowds to rationality, and make them smarter collectively than any unaided individual or group. (Free) Members use TruthSift to establish what can be established, refute what can’t be, and to transparently publish the demonstrations. Anyone can browse the demonstrations and learn what is actually known and how it was established. If they have a rational objection, they can post it and have it answered.

Whether in scientific fields such as climate change or medical practice, or within the corporate world or political or government debate, or on day to day factual questions, humanity hasn’t had a good method for establishing rational truth. You can see this from consequences we often fail to perceive:
Peer reviewed surveys agree: A landslide majority of medical practice is *not* supported by science [2,3,4]. Scientists are often confused about the established facts in their own field [5]. Within fields like climate science and vaccines, that badly desire consensus, no true consensus can be reached because skeptics raise issues that the majority brush aside without an established answer (exactly what Le Bon warned of more than 100 years ago[6]). Widely consulted sources like Wikipedia are reported to be largely paid propaganda on many important subjects [7], or the most popular answer rather than an established one [8]. Quora shows you the most popular individual answer, generated with little or no collaboration, and often there is little documentation of why you should believe it. Existing systems for crowd sourced wisdom largely compound group think, rather than addressing it. Existing websites for fact checking give you someone’s point of view.

Corporate or government planning is no better. Within large organizations, where there is inevitably systemic motivation to not pass bad news up, leadership needs active measures to avoid becoming clueless as to the real problems [9]. Corporate or government plans are subject to group think, or takeover by employee or other interests competing with the mission. Individuals who perceive mistakes have no recourse capable of rationally pursuading the majority, and may anyway be discouraged from speaking up by various consequences[6].

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MIT biological engineers have developed an algorithm for building DNA nanoparticles automatically, paving the way to many more applications for “DNA origami.”

Perhaps it’s serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet. Think satellites that automatically detect drought patterns, tractors that eyeball plants and kill the sick ones, and an AI-powered smartphone app that can tell a farmer what disease has crippled their crop.

Forget scarecrows. The future of agriculture is in the hands of the machines.

A Digital Green Thumb

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A modified version of the Drake Equation, and what it tells us.

Math isn’t everyone’s strong suit, especially those who haven’t stretched that part of their brain since college. Thanks to the wonders of image recognition technology, we now have Mathpix, an iOS app that lets you point your phone camera at a problem and calculates solutions in seconds.

The interface looks like any standard camera app: simply drag the on-screen reticle over the equation and the app solves it and provides graph answers where appropriate. More useful is a step-by-step guide offering multiple methods to reach a solution, making this a bona fide educational tool. It uses image recognition to process problems and pings its servers to do the mathematical heavy lifting, so it likely requires an internet connection to work.

Mathpix was envisioned by Stanford PhD student Nico Jimenez, who was advised by Stanford grad Paul Ferrell. The app’s other developers are high schoolers Michael Lee and August Trollback, which is impressive for an app that claims to be the first to visually recognize and solve handwritten math problems.

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New spin on all things that are Singular. Hmmm — so if Singularity becomes a religion; is Ray Kurzweil its God?

A colleague forwarded John Horgan’s recent Scientific American article, “The Singularity and the Neural Code.” Horgan argues that the intelligence augmentation and mind uploading that would lead to a technological singularity depend upon cracking the neural code. The problem is that we don’t understand our neural code, the software or algorithms that transform neurophysiology into the stuff of minds like perceptions, memories, and meanings. In other words, we know very little about how brains make minds.

I am glad that D. Whyte recognizes “If quantum computers are developed faster than anticipated, certification would mandate insecure modules, given the time to approve and implement new quantum resistant algorithms. Worse, it is conceivable that data encrypted by a certified module is more vulnerable than data encrypted by a non-certified module that has the option of using a quantum-safe encryption algorithm.”

Because many of us who are researching and developing in this space have seen the development pace accelerated this year and what was looking like we’re 10 years away is now looking like we’re less than 7 years.

Dr. William Whyte, Chief Scientist for Security Innovation, a cybersecurity provider and leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Awareness Training, will be presenting at the Fourth International Cryptographic Module Conference in Ottawa, Ontario.

Australian physicists’ team has developed a new research assistant to carry out experiments in quantum mechanics in an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm form, which quickly took control of the experiment, learned the job tasks and even innovated. In a statement, co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Physics and Engineering, said he didn’t expect that the machine would be able to conduct the experiment itself from scratch within an hour.

He added that in case a simple computer program had been used, it would have taken much more time than the age of the universe to go through all the combinations and work on it.

Scientists were looking forward to reconstruct an experiment that was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which included very cold gas trapped in a laser beam called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

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