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Feb 27, 2015

How to Keep a Piece of the Pie After the Robots Take Our Jobs

Posted by in categories: automation, business, economics, robotics/AI

Written by Victoria Turk — Motherboard

In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of U​S jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they’ve made similar predicti​ons for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk.

So what will our future economy look like?

“My predictions have enormously high variance,” Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. “I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they’re only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine.”
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Feb 26, 2015

What happens when computers, not teachers, pick what students learn?

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI

By — Slate
Students in teacher Cynthia McClellan's eighth grade social science and history class at the Blake Middle School use their iPads during class.

NEW YORK—Teacher John Garuccio wrote a multiplication problem on a digital whiteboard in a corner of an unusually large classroom at David A. Boody Intermediate School in Brooklyn.

About 150 sixth-graders are in this math class—yes, 150—but Garuccio’s task was to help just 20 of them, with a lesson tailored to their needs. He asked, “Where does the decimal point go in the product?” After several minutes of false starts, a boy offered the correct answer. Garuccio praised him, but did not stop there.

“Come on, you know the answer, tell me why,” Garuccio said. “It’s good to have the right answer, but you need to know why.”
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Feb 26, 2015

Science becomes Misosophy

Posted by in categories: existential risks, particle physics

Most of physical science is nice and non-fraudulent. But cosmologists and particle physicists have lost contact to reality and defend superstition in a criminal fashion.

This was my friend Benoit Mandelbrot’s experience in 2000, because he had explained the Kepler-Olbers paradox (“Why is the night sky dark?”) in a non-expansionist way. Before him, Fritz Zwicky had become ostracized for making such a proposal.

The Zwicky-Mandelbrot result has since been proved and explained with publications starting in 2003. But there is no response to the two independent proofs offered (a statistical mechanics of mutually attractive particles; a demonstration that Einstein’s constant c in the vacuum is a global and not just a local constant of nature everywhere).

So the standard cosmology as defined in any school text is based, not on ignorance but on lies? One could go so far as say so, although of course most of the worshipers of the disproved gospel never heard of its demise since the leading journals and media suppress the dogma-defying results.

Continue reading “Science becomes Misosophy” »

Feb 26, 2015

The Social Science Behind Online Shareablity

Posted by in category: internet

Laura Bliss — CityLab
Image Flickr/mkhmarketing
Judging from some of Facebook’s most viral images in history—textbooks wrapped in paper bags, futuristic beach houses, Barack and Michelle mid-hug—it seems safe to say that, content-wise, a mix of nostalgia and aspiration makes ‘book users click, like, comment, and share. On Flickr, it’s cool nature shots. Instagram loves the Kardashians.

But favorite subjects come and go, while the viral cycle lives on. What if you could predict the kinds of photos most likely to strike a nerve? Given the incredible amount of data available on how online users engage with images, is there a way to measure the objective qualities of an image’s shareability?
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Feb 25, 2015

Researchers generate a reference map of the human epigenome

Posted by in categories: DNA, genetics

Helen Knight | MIT News correspondent
Manolis Kellis
The sequencing of the human genome laid the foundation for the study of genetic variation and its links to a wide range of diseases. But the genome itself is only part of the story, as genes can be switched on and off by a range of chemical modifications, known as “epigenetic marks.”

Now, a decade after the human genome was sequenced, the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium has created a similar map of the human epigenome.
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Feb 25, 2015

Lifeboat Foundation — Futurism Update — Feb/26/2015

Posted by in category: futurism

Lifeboat Foundation — Futurism Update — Feb/26/2015

POINT OF CONTACT:

https://www.AMAZON.com/author/agostini

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini

https://AGO26.blogspot.com

Continue reading “Lifeboat Foundation — Futurism Update — Feb/26/2015” »

Feb 25, 2015

Slice and Carve: The Next Wave in Computer-Aided Creativity

Posted by in category: 3D printing

Feb 24, 2015

Meet The Robots That Are Taking Over Japan

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Adele Peters — Fast Company


In another Tokyo suburb, a cartoonesque robot named Pepper, the first robot designed to respond to human emotions, is joking with customers at a store selling mobile phones.

While Japan has been a robot-friendly place for a long time, the number of robots is now booming, even as its human population is not. In the next five years, the country hopes to build 20 times more of them. One industry leader suggests that the country should invest in 30 million robots—nearly the same population as greater Tokyo—as part of a plan to regain a spot as the world leader in manufacturing.

“What you’re seeing in Japan is a much more aggressive approach to purchasing robots,” says Mike Zinser, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, and co-author of a new study about how robotics will transform manufacturing. “They’ve got a real potential to see significant cost savings, and also an improvement in competitiveness relative to other countries over the next decade.“
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Feb 24, 2015

Why big Progress is virtually Thwarted

Posted by in category: physics

I have two examples to offer: c-global and cryodynamics.

c-global is based on overcoming an oversight Einstein had made in December of 1907. He assumed c to be reduced in proportion to his newly discovered gravitational redshift valid downstairs, while in reality an optically masked size increase occurs down there. The newly reconstituted c-global rules out cosmic expansion.

Cryodynamics is the new sister discipline to thermodynamics. It governs gases made up from mutually attractive particles. It explains the observed cosmological redshift without expansion.

Although both findings are in the literature for years, it is impossible to evoke any response. This despite the fact that cryodynamics promises limitless free energy. There is no support for its aficionados anywhere.

Continue reading “Why big Progress is virtually Thwarted” »

Feb 24, 2015

AI: Artificial Imagination?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Margaret Boden — IA News
Margaret Boden
Most of us are fascinated by creativity. New ideas in science and art are often hugely exciting – and, paradoxically, sometimes seemingly “obvious” once they’ve arrived. But how can that be? Many people, perhaps most of us, think there’s no hope of an answer. Creativity is deeply mysterious, indeed almost magical. Any suggestion that there might be a scientific theory of creativity strikes such people as absurd. And as for computer models of creativity, those are felt to be utterly impossible.

But they aren’t. Scientific psychology has identified three different ways in which new, surprising, and valuable ideas – that is, creative ideas – can arise in people’s minds. These involve combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. The information processes involved can be understood in terms of concepts drawn from Artificial Intelligence (AI). They can even be modelled by computers using AI techniques.
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