Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: mobile phones – Page 181

“Although smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, many of the companies that make our everyday consumer products still rely on paper trails and manually updated spreadsheets to keep track of their production processes and delivery schedules,” says Leyuan Shi, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That’s what she hopes to change with a research idea she first published almost two decades ago.

During the past 16 years, Shi has visited more than 400 companies in the United States, China, Europe, and Japan to personally observe their production processes. “And I have used that insight to develop tools that can make these processes run much more smoothly,” she says.

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We are now a connected global community where many digital natives cannot remember a time before the iPhone. The rise of smart homes means that we are increasingly attaching our lighting, door locks, cameras, thermostats, and even toasters to our home networks. Managing our home automation through mobile apps or our voice illustrates how far we have evolved over the last few years.

However, in our quest for the cool and convenient, many have not stopped to consider their cybersecurity responsibilities. The device with the weakest security could allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities on our network and access our home. But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Businesses and even governments are starting to face up to the vulnerabilities of everything being online. Sophisticated and disruptive cyberattacks are continuing to increase in complexity and scale across multiple industries. Areas of our critical infrastructure such as energy, nuclear, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing have vulnerabilities that make them a target for cybercriminals and even a state-sponsored attack.

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In summary — “I am cautiously optimistic about the promise of tDCS; cognitive training paired with tDCS specifically could lead to improvements in attention and memory for people of all ages and make some huge changes in society. Maybe we could help to stave off cognitive decline in older adults or enhance cognitive skills, such as focus, in people such as airline pilots or soldiers, who need it the most. Still, I am happy to report that we have at least moved on from torpedo fish” smile

In 47 CE, Scri­bo­nius Largus, court physi­cian to the Roman emper­or Claudius, described in his Com­po­si­tiones a method for treat­ing chron­ic migraines: place tor­pe­do fish on the scalps of patients to ease their pain with elec­tric shocks. Largus was on the right path; our brains are com­prised of elec­tri­cal sig­nals that influ­ence how brain cells com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and in turn affect cog­ni­tive process­es such as mem­o­ry, emo­tion and attention.

The sci­ence of brain stim­u­la­tion – alter­ing elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the brain – has, need­less to say, changed in the past 2,000 years. Today we have a hand­ful of tran­scra­nial direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion (tDCS) devices that deliv­er con­stant, low cur­rent to spe­cif­ic regions of the brain through elec­trodes on the scalp, for users rang­ing from online video-gamers to pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes and peo­ple with depres­sion. Yet cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists are still work­ing to under­stand just how much we can influ­ence brain sig­nals and improve cog­ni­tion with these techniques.

Brain stim­u­la­tion by tDCS is non-inva­sive and inex­pen­sive. Some sci­en­tists think it increas­es the like­li­hood that neu­rons will fire, alter­ing neur­al con­nec­tions and poten­tial­ly improv­ing the cog­ni­tive skills asso­ci­at­ed with spe­cif­ic brain regions. Neur­al net­works asso­ci­at­ed with atten­tion con­trol can be tar­get­ed to improve focus in peo­ple with atten­tion deficit-hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der (ADHD). Or peo­ple who have a hard time remem­ber­ing shop­ping lists and phone num­bers might like to tar­get brain areas asso­ci­at­ed with short-term (also known as work­ing) mem­o­ry in order to enhance this cog­ni­tive process. How­ev­er, the effects of tDCS are incon­clu­sive across a wide body of peer-reviewed stud­ies, par­tic­u­lar­ly after a sin­gle ses­sion. In fact, some experts ques­tion whether enough elec­tri­cal stim­u­la­tion from the tech­nique is pass­ing through the scalp into the brain to alter con­nec­tions between brain cells at all.

Continue reading “Research trend: Combining brain stimulation with cognitive training to enhance attention and memory” | >

Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone. High-tech systems like the one used by Amazon Go completely automate the checkout process. China, which has its own ambitious e-commerce companies, is emerging as an especially fertile place for these retail experiments.

But the opening of Amazon Go in January was alarming for many retailers, who saw a sudden willingness by Amazon to wield its technology power in new ways. Hundreds of cameras near the ceiling and sensors in the shelves help automatically tally the cookies, chips and soda that shoppers remove and put into their bags. Shoppers’ accounts are charged as they walk out the doors.

Amazon is now looking to expand Go to new areas. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on its expansion plans, but the company has a job posting for a senior real estate manager who will be responsible for “site selection and acquisition” and field tours of “potential locations” for new Go stores.

“Unanimously, there was an element of embarrassment because here is an online retailer showing us how to do brick and mortar, and frankly doing it amazingly well,” said Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, a company that makes inventory management robots that Walmart and others are testing.

Continue reading “Retailers Race Against Amazon to Automate Stores” | >

O n the outskirts of Beijing, a policeman peers over his glasses at a driver stopped at a motorway checkpoint. As he looks at the man’s face, a tiny camera in one of the lenses of his glasses records his features and checks them with a national database.

The artificial intelligence-powered glasses are what Chinese citizens refer to as “black tech”, because they spot delinquents on the country’s “blacklist”. Other examples include robots for crowd control, drones that hover over the country’s borders, and intelligent systems to track behaviour online. Some reports claim the government has installed scanners that can forcibly read information from smartphones.

In the last two weeks, Facebook has been mired in a privacy storm in the UK and US over potential misuse of personal data. But such an event might baffle many in China, where the country’s surveillance culture eclipses anything Facebook has done.

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I was on a panel at a recent conference when the moderator asked audience and panel members what they thought of UBI. The overwhelming consensus of the 500 or so people in the room appeared to be “we’re skeptical, but should experiment.” UBI sounds like a good or not-so-good idea to different constituents because we have so little understanding of either how we would do it, or how people would react. None of us really knows what we’re talking about when it comes to UBI, akin to being in a drunken bar argument before there were smartphones and Wikipedia. But there are a few basic principles and pieces of research that can help.

Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway.

Author: Joi Ito BY

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Considering how often lasers show up in science fiction, it’s interesting that the concept of “talking lasers” might show up in reality before eventually finding their way into sci-fi.

But the United States’ military Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is getting close to creating one, according to a new report in Defense One. The device in question will soon be capable of reproducing human speech as a means of scaring off trespassers or enemies, making announcements, or just sending discrete messages to somebody who dropped their phone or walkie talkie.

It’s not quite there yet, because while it does sound like a garbled human speaking, it still speaks only gibberish for now. See it below, but don’t turn up your headphones too loud, for reasons that will immediately become clear — like many people who speak gibberish, the laser speaks loudly:

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Speaking at London’s British Library, Dorsey said; ‘The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency.

‘And I believe that it will be bBtcoin’, he said.

The Twitter founder’s talk was centred around Dorsey’s new payments firm, Square, which allows merchants to take payments via smartphones and tablets.

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