Lifeboat Foundation

by Mariella Moon — Endgadget

It looks like Iron Man’s arm, but it’s actually a fully-functioning bionic prosthetic for a seven-year-old kid. Electronically wired and capable of moving, it can, for instance, open and close its hand if the user flexes their bicep. The limb was created by Limbitless Solutions, a non-profit made up of engineering students from the University of Central Florida, using donations and money they saved by sacrificing coffee. They specialize in designing 3D-printed limbs for children, because kids will quickly outgrow more expensive bionic limbs. Sure, their creations don’t have the sense of touch and can’t be controlled by thoughts, but kids will definitely appreciate looking like their favorite robot or superhero.
Read more

Intel — Wired

Passwords, as they exist now, don’t work. They are the keys with which we lock up everything from our gaming profiles to our personal documents and financial access, and the truth is they just aren’t that secure. For starters, humans are terrible at choosing passwords. “Password” and “123456” were still the two most common passwords used in 2014—despite years of warnings against precisely that.

To force us to use more unique, less obvious keys, many of the sites we frequent make us choose passwords that combine letters and numbers, and sometimes even special characters (such as ! or @). But that raises another issue—complexity. With dozens of online accounts per person, it’s hard to keep track of all the different variations of passwords needed to access them. No wonder too many people (55 percent of adults, according to a study from the UK’s Ofcom) still reuse the same password between most, if not all, of the sites they visit.
Read more

Davey Alba — Wired

A little while back, we started to hear a few voices speaking up against the drumbeat of doom. No, PCs weren’t dead. They were maybe even coming back.

Well, they’re not.

Market research outfit IDC has revised its prediction of PC shipments in 2015 downward. It’s projecting a drop of nearly 5 percent this year, worse than its earlier forecast of a 3.3 percent decline. In all, IDC expects 293.1 million PC units to ship this year.
Read more

By Darlene Damm - SigularityHub

The ethics of robot cars has been a hot topic recently. In particular, if a robot car encounters a situation where it is forced to hit one person or another—which should it choose and how does it make that choice? It’s a modern version of the trolley problem, which many have studied in introductory philosophy classes.

Imagine a robot car is driving along when two people run out onto the road, and the car cannot avoid hitting one or the other. Assume neither person can get away, and the car cannot detect them in advance. Various thinkers have suggested how to make an ethical decision about who the car should hit:

• The robot car could run code to make a random decision.

• The robot car could hand off control to a human passenger.

• The robot car could make a decision based on a set of pre-programmed values by the car’s designers or a set of values programmed by the owner.

The last of these deserves a little more detail. What would these values be like?

Read more

By Jason Dorrier — SingulartityHub

There’s a story about Napoleon that goes something like this: At a state dinner, he gave his soldiers silver utensils and his court gold. But the guest of honor, the king of Siam, was given utensils of—aluminum.

Was it a not-so-subtle slight to the king? Not at all. Despite its relative abundance, aluminum was one of the rarest elements on Earth because it was hard to extract.

Fast forward a few decades, and a new extraction process using electrolysis had made aluminum abundant and cheap. Today, we use it everywhere. We cover takeout food in foil and toss it away without a thought.

Read more

Victoria Turk — Motherboard

As our devices get ever smaller, so do the materials we use to make them. And that means you have to get really close to see them. Really close. A new electron microscope unveiled at the UK’s national SuperST​EM facility images objects at an unprecedented resolution, right down to the individual atoms.

SuperSTEM is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and has three electron microscopes that UK scientists can use. The newest was unveiled last m​onth: a £3.7 million ($5.5 million) Nion Hermes Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope that EPSRC says is one of only three in the world. It can image objects a million times smaller than a human hair.

Read more

By SHELLEY PODOLNY — The New York Times

LET me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you’re reading. Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. Perhaps you should ask me to confirm it the way your computer does when it demands that you type those letters and numbers crammed like abstract art into that annoying little box.

Because, these days, a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn’t all have been created by people bent over their laptops.

Read more

Quoted: “DNotes can best be characterized, as a second generation Bitcoin alternative digital currency. It objectively studied Bitcoin’s strengths and weaknesses as well as threats and opportunities. DNotes was created on February 18, 2014 with an objective to meet the full functions of fiat currency as a unit of account, store of value and medium of exchange within three years. It decided to take a very different path since day one in building a trustworthy stable digital currency with reliable long term appreciation.

Central to DNotes long term strategic plan is the creation of highly scalable building blocks, as the foundation of its own ecosystem. Those strategic building blocks include CryptoMoms; a currency neutral site dedicated to encourage women participation, DNotesVault; a free secure storage for DNotes’ stakeholders with 100% deposit guarantee with verifiable funds, and CRISPs; a family of Cryptocurrency Investment Savings Plans for everyone worldwide. The core mission of CRISP is to make the savings opportunity available to everyone; from the unborn to the most senior; from the unbanked to the super rich. The opportunity for anyone to participate irrespective of financial standing, coupled with combined charity efforts will bring about much needed financial freedom for millions worldwide.”

Read more here > http://www.pressreleaserocket.net/bitcoin-alternative-dnotes…ce/109719/

In a recent feature article at The clubof.info Blog called “Striving to be Snowdenlike”, I look at the example of Edward Snowden and use his precedent to make a prediction about “transhumans”, the first people who will pioneer our evolution into a posthuman form, and the political upheaval this will necessarily cause.

Transhumanism makes a prediction that people will obtain greater personal abilities as a result of technology. The investment of more political power (potentially) in a single person’s hand’s has been the inexorable result of advancing technology throughout history.

Politically, transhumanism (not as a movement but as a form of sociocultural evolution) would be radically different from other forms of technological change, because it can produce heightened intellect, strength and capability. Many have assumed that these changes would only reinforce existing inequality and the power of the state, but they are wrong. They have failed to note the political disconnect between current government authority figures and political classes, and those people actually involved in engineering, medicine, military trials, and the sciences. Transhumanism will never serve to reinforce the existing political order or make it easier for states to govern and repress their people. On the contrary, transhumanism can only be highly disruptive to the authorities. In fact, it will be more disruptive to current liberal democratic governments than any other challenge they have witnessed before.

There are several realities to this disruption that will convey a profound political change, and would do so whether or not transhumanism pursued political power in the form of the Transhumanist Parties (I still support those parties wholeheartedly due to their ability to raise awareness of transhumanism as a concept and an observation by futurists) or took a political stance for or against these realities. I would narrow the disruption down to these very compelling points of political significance. Please advise any more that you would like to bring to my attention:

Continue reading “The wars of one: transhumans will finish what hackers and whistleblowers started” »