Lifeboat Foundation

Anyone wonder why he might end up serving a longer sentence than Elizabeth Holmes?

Former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani will be heading to prison later this month after an appeals court rejected his bid to remain free while he contests his conviction for carrying out a blood-testing hoax with his former boss and lover, Elizabeth Holmes.

Continue reading “Ex-Theranos executive headed to prison after losing appeal” »

By Corrie Pelc — Fact checked by Jessica Beake, Ph.D. The life expectancy of humans on our planet has more than doubled since 1900. Global life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to 73.2 years in 2023, and is expected to further increase to 77.1 years in 2050.

Imperial physicists have performed the double-slit experiment in time, using materials that can change optical properties in femtoseconds, providing insights into the nature of light and paving the way for advanced materials that can control light in both space and time.

Imperial physicists have recreated the famous double-slit experiment, which showed light behaving as particles and a wave, in time rather than space.

In a groundbreaking development, Imperial College London.

Quantum computing promises to be a revolutionary tool, making short work of equations that classical computers would struggle to ever complete. Yet the workhorse of the quantum device, known as a qubit, is a delicate object prone to collapsing.

Keeping enough qubits in their ideal state long enough for computations has so far proved a challenge.

In a new experiment, scientists were able to keep a qubit in that state for twice as long as normal. Along the way, they demonstrated the practicality of quantum error correction (QEC), a process that keeps quantum information intact for longer by introducing room for redundancy and error removal.

An analysis and improvement of the spectral properties of nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond nanostructures paves the way for efficient entanglement generation necessary for many quantum information applications.

Magnetic spin excitations can combine with photons to produce exotic particles that emit laser-like microwaves.

One of the challenges for building systems for quantum computing and communications has been the lack of laser-like microwave sources that produce sufficient power but don’t require extreme cooling. Now a research team has demonstrated a new room-temperature technique for making coherent microwave radiation—the kind that comes from a laser [1]. The device exploits the interaction of a magnetic material with electromagnetic fields. The researchers expect that the work will lead to microwave sources that can be built into chips employed in future quantum devices.

The devices that store quantum bits for quantum computers often require microwave signals to input and retrieve data, so lasers operating at microwave frequencies (masers)—and other sources of coherent microwaves—could be very useful. But even though masers were invented before lasers, most maser technologies work only at ultracold temperatures. A 2018 design works at room temperature but doesn’t produce very much power [2].

People around the globe are so dependent on the internet to exercise socioeconomic human rights such as education, health care, work, and housing that online access must now be considered a basic human right, a new study reveals.

Particularly in developing countries, internet access can make the difference between people receiving an education, staying healthy, finding a home, and securing employment—or not.

Even if people have offline opportunities, such as accessing social security schemes or finding housing, they are at a comparative disadvantage to those with Internet access.

Quick pulse check on Google’s Bard: according to a report from CNBC, the whole project is a total and complete mess — and no one seems to know what to actually do with the tech.

To recap, Bard is Google’s search-integrated, AI-powered chatbot, which was billed as a competitor to Microsft’s OpenAI tech-powered Bing Search just a few weeks ago.

But Google seriously fumbled the feature’s launch, with the bot’s first advertisement accidentally showcasing the bot’s inability to find and present accurate information to users. Google’s stock nosedived as a result, leading the company to lose $100 billion in a day.

Why do AI ethics conferences fail? They fail because they don’t have a metatheory to explain how it is possible for ethical disagreements to emerge from phenomenologically different worlds, how those are revealed to us, and how shifts between them have shaped the development of Western civilization for the last several thousand years from the Greeks and Romans, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

So perhaps we’ve given up on the ethics hand-wringing a bit too early. Or more precisely, a third nonzero sum approach that combines ethics and reciprocal accountability is available that actually does explain this. But first, let’s consider the flaw in simple reciprocal accountability. Yes, right now we can use chatGPT to catch Chat-GPT cheats, and provide many other balancing feedbacks. But as has been noted above with reference to the colonization of Indigenous nations, once the technological/ developmental gap is sufficiently large those dynamics which operate largely under our control and in our favor can quickly change, and the former allies become the new masters.

Continue reading “The only way out of the AI dilemma” »