Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, and Steve Clemons discuss the political limitations of the Internet.

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It's easy to assume that a global Internet, with all its promise of scaled communication and education and democratization, will eventually help to foster democracy. But it's also not entirely accurate to assume that. In a conversation with The Atlantic's Steve Clemons yesterday evening, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen -- co-Googlers and co-authors of The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business -- made a point of emphasizing the limitations of technological innovation. Particularly when it comes to geopolitical change.

Immunostained image of engrafted islet in hydrogel in diabetic mouse. (Red areas are insulin-producing cells. Green areas are blood vessels, and blue areas are

How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?

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In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.

Then, during Reagan’s tenure, the bad news begins to show its face. First, even though productivity and GDP continue their upward arc, median household income starts to level off. That is unsettling, since it suggests that companies can get richer and yet employees can stop benefiting from increasing GDP: what happened to trickle-down? A decade later, in the mid-1990s, more trouble crops up: employment flattens as GDP and productivity continue even faster growth.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that these are signs of a true sea change in the dynamics of productivity and employment. Contrary to popular conceptions that all we need is more technological innovation to increase employment, they argue, technological innovation is itself among the forces behind the change.

The elephant in the room is how robotics will play out for human employment in the long term. New robots will take on advanced manufacturing, tutoring, scheduling, and customer relations. They operate equipment, manage construction, operate backhoes, and yes, even drive tomorrow’s cars.

Take it easy when using social media. The signs of lurking at someone's account are easy to spot

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Just met a really interesting guy or gal? These days, the first thing most people do is turn to social media to find out everything they can about the person. But this can lead to disaster — and quickly get you labeled as a creeper. First date? It's not going to happen if you're sloppy while sleuthing.

When it comes to using social media, consult an expert — also known as a teenager. Our resident teen expert (my daughter Elizabeth) tells TechNewsDaily how to gather information about someone without creeping your crush out.

Instagram has replaced Facebook as the top social network to post photos of your activities, friends and interests. And it's easy to find people on Instagram because searching by real name brings up a person's account even if they use a catchy screen name. But it's easy to slip up.

"Be careful when scrolling through an Instagram profile," 15-year-old Elizabeth said. "It's easy to accidentally double tap [a shortcut to liking a photo], then everyone knows you scrolled all the way down to pictures posted 42 weeks ago." [See also: How to Use Instagram Like a 15-Year-Old Girl ]

Liking a photo on Instagram posts your name in a list and sends a notification to the photo's owner.

To see what people are thinking about, head to Twitter. While favoriting a tweet can be a subtle way to show interest, don't go overboard.

Should social networks filter our streams for us? Are relevance algorithms the way forward or closed loops leading to insular networks?

Enhancing the flow of information through the brain could be crucial to making neuroprosthetics practical.

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The abilities to learn, remember, evaluate, and decide are central to who we are and how we live. Damage to or dysfunction of the brain circuitry that supports these functions can be devastating, leading to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, PTSD, or many other disorders. Current treatments, which are drug-based or behavioral, have limited efficacy in treating these problems. There is a pressing need for something more effective.

One promising approach is to build an interactive device to help the brain learn, remember, evaluate, and decide. One might, for example, construct a system that would identify patterns of brain activity tied to particular experiences and then, when called upon, impose those patterns on the brain. Ted Berger, Sam Deadwyler, Robert Hampsom, and colleagues have used this approach (see “Memory Implants”). They are able to identify and then impose, via electrical stimulation, specific patterns of brain activity that improve a rat’s performance in a memory task. They have also shown that in monkeys stimulation can help the animal perform a task where it must remember a particular item.

Their ability to improve performance is impressive. However, there are fundamental limitations to an approach where the desired neural pattern must be known and then imposed. The animals used in their studies were trained to do a single task for weeks or months and the stimulation was customized to produce the right outcome for that task. This is only feasible for a few well-learned experiences in a predictable and constrained environment.

Daily Mail
Russian billionaire reveals real-life 'avatar' plan - and says he will upload ...

By Mike WallSpace.com Huge numbers of people on Earth are keen to leave the planet forever and seek a new life homesteading on Mars.

The computer scientist Jaron Lanier provides insights on technology in his new book, “Who Owns the Future?”

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As its title indicates, Jaron Lanier’s new tech manifesto asks, “Who owns the future?” But for many of those who will be captivated by Mr. Lanier’s daringly original insights, another question comes first: Who is Jaron Lanier? He is a mega-wizard in futurist circles. He is the father of virtual reality in the gaudy, reputation-burnishing way that Michael Jackson was the king of pop. Mr. Lanier would undoubtedly be more of a household name if he were not a large, dreadlocked, anything but telegenic figure with facial hair called “mossy” in a 2011 profile in The New Yorker. While working on “intriguing unannounced projects” for Microsoft Research — “a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft” and a speculative strategy for “repositioning earthquakes” — Mr. Lanier found time to follow up on his first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010). That was a feisty, brilliant, predictive work, and the new volume is just as exciting. Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models.

The rhetoric Schmidt and his co-author Jared Cohen employ in their new book is clever but misleading.

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A new book by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen plots out the future of digital technology, with an emphasis on global affairs. The New Digital Age foresees, in the not too distant future that, though wars may become more common as the costs to engage decrease, death tolls will fall as robot soldiers take to the battlefield. The book envisions whole governments being backed up in the online cloud where data becomes less vulnerable to physical disaster. Other chapters from the book consider the evolution of citizenship, states, revolution, terrorism, and foreign aid as impacted by digital technologies. The authors conclude that the new digital age is unpredictable, but that on the whole, it will be a brighter place because of electronic technology.

That the book delves so deeply into technology's impact on the world stage is no surprise given the authors' other interests. Cohen was an adviser to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton at the State Department, and Schmidt seems to be embracing a role as corporate statesman, having just made high-profile trips to North Korea and Myanmar.

D-Wave One computers (credit: D-Wave) Is the world’s only commercial quantum computer really a quantum device, or a just regular computer in disguise?

Researchers may have found the body’s “fountain of aging”: the brain region known as the hypothalamus.

Arrays of tree-like nanowires consisting of Si trunks and TiO2 branches facilitate solar water-splitting in a fully integrated artificial photosynthesis system

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have developed the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis,  in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels.

“Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research.

“To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire  heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest.

“In natural photosynthesis, the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast,” Yang says. “We’ve integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future.”

A far-flung team is trying to build the first digital lifeform to work out the basic principles of the brain.

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For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. 

And yet, these are exciting times for "executable biology," an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year, Markus Covert's Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. To do so, they had to compile information from 900 scientific publications. An editorial that accompanied the study in the journal Cell was titled, "The Dawn of Virtual Cell Biology."

In January of this year, the one-billion euro Human Brain Project received a decade's worth of backing from the European Union to simulate a human brain in a supercomputer. It joins Blue Brain, an eight-year-old collaboration between IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, in this quest. In an optimistic moment in 2009, Blue Brain's director claimed such a model was possible by 2019. And last month, President Obama unveiled a $100 million BRAIN Initiative to give "scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action." An entire field, connectomics, has emerged to create wiring diagrams of the connections between neurons ("connectomes"), which is a necessary first step in building a realistic simulation of a nervous system. In short, brains are hot, especially efforts to model them in silico.

Google, in partnership with NASA and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), has launched an initiative to investigate how quantum computing might lead to breakthroughs in machine learning, a branch of AI that focuses on construction and study of systems that learn from data..

The new lab will use the D-Wave Two quantum computer.A recent study (see “Which is faster: conventional or quantum computer?“) confirmed the D-Wave One quantum computer was much faster than conventional machines at specific problems.

The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

“We hope it helps researchers construct more efficient and more accurate models for everything from speech recognition, to web search, to protein folding,” said Hartmut Neven, Google director of engineering.

Hybrid solutions

“Machine learning is highly difficult. It’s what mathematicians call an ‘NP-hard’ problem,” he said. “Classical computers aren’t well suited to these types of creative problems. Solving such problems can be imagined as trying to find the lowest point on a surface covered in hills and valleys.

“Classical computing might use what’s called a ‘gradient descent’: start at a random spot on the surface, look around for a lower spot to walk down to, and repeat until you can’t walk downhill anymore. But all too often that gets you stuck in a “local minimum” — a valley that isn’t the very lowest point on the surface.

“That’s where quantum computing comes in. It lets you cheat a little, giving you some chance to ‘tunnel’ through a ridge to see if there’s a lower valley hidden beyond it. This gives you a much better shot at finding the true lowest point — the optimal solution.”

Google has already developed some quantum machine-learning algorithms, Neven said. “One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world. And we’ve learned some useful principles: e.g., you get the best results not with pure quantum computing, but by mixing quantum and classical computing.”

Using analog computation circuits, MIT engineers design cells that can compute logarithms, divide and take square roots.

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MIT engineers have transformed bacterial cells into living calculators that can compute logarithms, divide, and take square roots, using three or fewer genetic parts.

Inspired by how analog electronic circuits function, the researchers created synthetic computation circuits by combining existing genetic “parts,” or engineered genes, in novel ways.

The circuits perform those calculations in an analog fashion by exploiting natural biochemical functions that are already present in the cell rather than by reinventing them with digital logic, thus making them more efficient than the digital circuits pursued by most synthetic biologists, according to Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy Lu, the two senior authors on the paper, describing the circuits in the May 15 online edition of Nature.

(Phys.org) —A computer science professor at Amherst College who recently devised and conducted experiments to test the speed of a quantum computing system against conventional computing methods will soon be presenting a paper with her verdict: quantum...

We may soon reap the benefits of quantum computing now that a D-Wave quantum device has beaten a regular PC in a number-crunching face-off

Neurogaming is riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other.

Gaming as a hobby evokes images of lethargic teenagers huddled over their controllers, submerged in their couch surrounded by candy bar wrappers. This image should soon hit the reset button since a more exciting version of gaming is coming. It’s called neurogaming, and it’s riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other. Many of these were on display recently in San Francisco at the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo; a first-of-its-kind conference whose existence alone signals an inflection point in the industry.

Conference founder, Zack Lynch, summarized neurogaming to those of us in attendance as the interface, “where the mind and body meet to play games.”

British scientists at a research centre in Cambridge say they have developed a new type of wheat which could increase productivity by 30%.

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The Cambridge-based National Institute of Agricultural Botany has combined an ancient ancestor of wheat with a modern variety to produce a new strain.

In early trials, the resulting crop seemed bigger and stronger than the current modern wheat varieties.

It will take at least five years of tests and regulatory approval before it is harvested by farmers.

Some farmers, however, are urging new initiatives between the food industry, scientists and government.

They believe the regulatory process needs to be speeded up to ensure that the global food security demands of the next few decades can be met, says the BBC's Tom Heap.

Lydia Nicholas: Planning for the future predicted by our current data leaves us vulnerable to unexpected derailments.-

Prediction can feel like shining a torch forward into the terrifying, dark unknown. The narrower and more focused the beam, the brighter the light, and the more detail can be perceived – but only along that one thin pathway. The light may help you prepare for tricky patches ahead, but it cannot reveal or protect you from everything. Unforeseen obstacles or events may force you to take an alternative route and encounter dangers in the surrounding dark. With an unfocused wider torch beam, you'll see less detail about any particular area, but will be able to see the dangers and advantages of a wider range of paths. Perhaps you would even have the chance to make an informed choice about which way to move forward?