Lifeboat Foundation

“Ruth Porat has taken an unusual path to the tech world. Before becoming the chief financial officer at Google in May 2015 (and then at Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, a few months later), she held the same post at Morgan Stanley, where among other roles she worked closely with the U.S. government to sort out the troubles at the insurance corporation AIG and the mortgage-financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 financial crisis.”

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A fun story:

Advances in artificial intelligence have raised the question of a supercomputer running for office.

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The lack of collaboration on cyber security between the senior levels of business is leaving UK firms exposed to fines and reputational damage, a study has revealed.

One in 10 C-level respondents to a survey by Palo Alto Networks said they “kind of” understand what defines an online security risk, but admitted they “still have to use Google to help explain it”.

This finding suggests that the lack of consensus on where the responsibility for cyber security lies could stem from some lack of cyber security understanding at the leadership level.

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A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones.

It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying.

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The real question waiting to be address is how do we manage the technology to keep people safe without restricting businesses and technology progress efforts to make people’s lives better.

We look at how drones are revolutionizing the skies, and how this technology has so quickly moved from science fiction to ubiquitous reality. Airs in place of Insight on Monday, Feb 15 at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.

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Here is a thought — we’re already seeing criminals using drones for smuggling and hackers are enjoying holding data for ransom; what is going to happen when we add self driving cars, robots, etc. to this ever growing Cyber risks? Will we see a day that we have to register our drones and other robots with a national register and do a background check on owners because these things can be used as weapons?

“In Latin America drones are being used as part of the War on Drugs as both regional governments and the US are using surveillance drones to monitor drug trafficking and find smuggling routes. However, as drones are increasingly being used by drug cartels themselves to transport drugs between countries, could Latin America find itself at the forefront of emerging drone countermeasures?”

Source: From surveillance to smuggling: Drones in the War on Drugs | Remote Control Project Blog.

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“Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology say that while there may not be one specific manual, robots might benefit by reading stories and books about successful ways to act in society.”

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I learned something new today; the first fax machine was built in 1860; and using the Nodal Clock for more accurate timestamping of real-time media IP signals and future event handling.

When transmitting an image from a sender to a receiver some notion of synchronization is required. In the 1860s Giovanni Caselli invented the Pantelegraph (a fax) that used a pendulum clock to regulate the transmitter’s scanning stylus and the receiver’s writing stylus.

In our day, “black-burst sync” and “tri-level sync” were used to align video signals in a facility. Now with Ethernet/IP taking the reins, synchronization may be achieved with common nodal clocks. The essence is for a “slave node” to lock its clock to a “master node” clock. Common node clocks can be used to create sync as will be shown. The SMPTE ST 2059 family of standards and the IEEE-1588 V2 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) standard are the basis for facility clocking and signal synchronization using IP networks.

Continue reading “Time Transfer in Networked Systems” »