Lifeboat Foundation

Jon Xavier — Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished men of our time. The relentless inventor — whose credits include the flatbed scanner, optical character resolution and speech-to-text- systems — is also a bestselling author, a successful entrepreneur, and an artificial intelligence pioneer.

His current title at Google, then, always seemed a little puzzling to me — after all, wasn’t he the sort of guy to set his sights on something a little higher than juicing sales of online advertisements at the world’s biggest Web search engine?

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FEBRUARY 14/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Reinventing Social Media: Deep Learning, Predictive Marketing, And Image Recognition Will Change Everything
http://www.businessinsider.com/social-medias-big-data-future…_inn_feb14

EU Rules Mean That ‘Children Can’t Get Life-Saving Cancer Drugs’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/11/eu-rules-children-c…mg00000067

Virgin Atlantic Is Using Google Glass for Faster Check-Ins
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/11/google_gl…s_for.html

Here’s What California’s Historic Drought Will Do To The Economy
http://www.businessinsider.com/california-drought-economy-20…z2t3NVIAyL

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

FEBRUARY 13/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Is your boss watching you? Surveillance device tracks employees’ movements in the office, sends details of conversations and even times their toilet breaks
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2552858/Workp…oilet.html

New software lets you mark places as off-limits for wearable camera gadgets like Google Glass.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523941/not-ok-glass/

Seeing as a Service. Forget Augmented Reality. What About Diminished Reality?
https://medium.com/futures-exchange/403771297f5f

Elon Musk plans to colonise Mars
http://futuretimeline.net/blog/2014/02/4.htm#.UvpE9oWGiHd

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

Figure 25.5 of “Gravitation” – the famous bible of general relativity written in 1973 by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler – shows on page 667 two curves as a function of time, both describing an astronaut in-falling from a stationary outer point onto a black hole. The two time curves at first coincide horizontally on the left. Then the upper one decays essentially exponentially reaching the horizontal x-axis of the horizon only asymptotically after infinite time. The lower curve, after initially coinciding, deviates downwards gently to after picking up speed (in a curve like the frontal part of a shoe’s profile) reach the horizon after 15 days already.

The lower curve is the proper time experienced by an astronaut falling onto a solar-mass black hole – the time it takes on the wristwatch to reach the horizon in free fall from a fixed outer position. The upper curve shows how this same in-falling process looks to an outside observer: infinitely elongated.

I am drawing your attention to this Figure in a famous book co-authored by my late friend John Wheeler because this figure – I claim – illustrates an error made by the whole physics community over many decades – notwithstanding the fact that the Figure is flawless.

Continue reading “An Anomaly in Science” »

By Sam Maggs — Geekosystem


Not content with only building gigantic horror-bots that will one day rule your city with a literal iron fist, DARPA has teamed up with the Pentagon to get a little smaller - implantable-brain-robot smaller. Hopefully, this new project will help treat memory loss in soldiers injured in combat (and not turn them into weird DARPA-slavebots).

Though Medtronic Inc. (MDT) has already created robot brain implants to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s, not much work has gone into using these robots to restore memories lost in traumatic injuries. DARPA is using funding from President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative to develop implantable probes that could apply this same Medtronic science to memory loss.

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FEBRUARY 12/2014 LIST OF UPDATES. By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

X-ray imaging protein molecules at atomic resolution using a graphene cage
http://www.kurzweilai.net/x-ray-imaging-protein-molecules-at…phene-cage

Wearable ‘neurocam’ records scenes when it detects user interest
http://www.kurzweilai.net/wearable-neurocam-records-scenes-w…r-interest

Searching space dust for minute quantities of life’s ingredients
http://www.kurzweilai.net/searching-space-dust-for-minute-qu…ngredients

For landmine detection, Bogota designers think with their feet (1:52)
http://uk.reuters.com/video/2014/02/09/for-landmine-detectio…annel=4000

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

By Christopher Mims — Quartz

Startup Bitcoin Kinetics, which aims to create hardware that can allow vending machines to accept bitcoin, is offering 10 billion shares of common stock on the website Cryptostocks. This isn’t your typical IPO—Cryptostocks, where Bitcoin Kinetics will be “listed,” describes itself as both a crowd funding platform and a place to “buy shares… and earn dividends.” It’s not clear what the legal status of Cryptostocks is, since it’s not licensed or registered as an exchange. One commenter called Cryptostocks “another of the play-pretend Bitcoin financial exchanges.” (We reached out to Cryptostocks for comment, and will update this when we hear back from them.)

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By Zach Schonfeld — Newsweek

Spurred by a host of recent converts to the peer-to-peer digital currency, Newsweek has become the first magazine to accept Bitcoin PR pitches. The digital currency’s visibility in popular retailers remains modest, but its presence in our email inboxes has frankly never been higher.

If the volume of recent press releases is any indication, Newsweek will be shortly accompanied by the first Indian e-Commerce store, Swiss dentist, HFT service provider, and public university to embrace the currency form.

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Jim Edwards, provided by

We were talking recently with an executive in the adtech startup scene and got onto the subject of Bitcoin, and how much money was pouring into — and coming out of — the online cryptocurrency in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley area.

This source told us that he had heard about a guy who had made more than $200,000 from trading Bitcoin, and had used it to charter a rocket into space.

Wait, what?

Turns out, it’s true.
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