Lifeboat Foundation

In terms of moral, social, and philosophical uprightness, isn’t it striking to have the technology to provide a free education to all the world’s people (i.e. the Internet and cheap computers) and not do it? Isn’t it classist and backward to have the ability to teach the world yet still deny millions of people that opportunity due to location and finances? Isn’t that immoral? Isn’t it patently unjust? Should it not be a universal human goal to enable everyone to learn whatever they want, as much as they want, whenever they want, entirely for free if our technology permits it? These questions become particularly deep if we consider teaching, learning, and education to be sacred enterprises.

When we as a global community confront the truly difficult question of considering what is really worth devoting our limited time and resources to in an era marked by global catastrophe, I always find my mind returning to what the Internet hasn’t really been used for yet — and what was rumored from its inception that it should ultimately provide — an utterly and entirely free education for all the world’s people.

In regard to such a concept, Bill Gates said in 2010:

Continue reading “A Free Education for All the World’s People Will Save our Species” »

Google sister company Calico and drug giant AbbVie are chipping in another $1 billion to cure diseases associated with aging, the companies said Tuesday.

Driven by the needs of the financial industry, researchers are working on ways to manage vast computer systems down to 100 billionths of a second.

For something that supposedly takes up 80 percent of the total mass of the universe, we don’t know a whole lot about dark matter. Sometimes the lightless stuff reveals hints about its shape; other times it completely thwarts any evidence supporting its existence. Since we can’t observe it first-hand, we rely on indirect means to suss out information about it, like watching the interactions between other forms of matter. Now, scientists have developed a new “test” to make those investigations more definitive, leading us closer to answering the question: Is dark matter even real? And if it’s not, then is everything we know about gravity wrong?

In a study, published Monday in Physical Review Letters, a team of scientists from the University of Bonn that also includes Hubble Fellow Marcel S. Pawlowski, Ph.D. of the University of California, Irvine, introduce a computer model that can simulate how certain small galaxies should move if dark matter exists. Though dark matter does not absorb or emit light, it still interacts with visible matter through gravity, so it’s expected to make the stars around galaxies move in specific ways.

Pawlowski explains to Inverse in an email that within the little galaxies in question — satellite “dwarf” galaxies, crowding around the edges of big galaxies like the Milky Way — the acceleration of stars speeding around the galaxy’s center is described by a term called the radial acceleration relation, or RAR. “With the new study, we simulate such dwarf galaxies under the assumption of the ‘standard’ dark matter model, [to] determine what kind of behavior would be expected for the dwarfs,” he says. “We find that the simulated dwarf galaxies largely continue the RAR to lower accelerations.” Now that they know how those dwarf galaxies are supposed to move if dark matter exists, they can compare the simulations to real-life data on the movement of those galaxies.

Continue reading “Dark Matter ‘Test’ Will Either Prove Its Existence or Modify Gravity” »

Recommended Books ➤

📖 Life 3.0 — http://azon.ly/ij9u
📖 The Master Algorithm — http://azon.ly/excm
📖 Superintelligence — http://azon.ly/v8uf

Continue reading “Ubiquitous Computing (The Future of Computing)” »

ELON MUSK wants to plump humans on Mars by 2024 and the first batch of settlers could live in 3D-printed home pods that pack hologram computers.

You’ll be able to tour the Red Planet habitat in virtual reality and view a scale model of the sci-fi living space at the Goodwood Festival of Speed next month.

China has issued the first national guidelines to enforce academic integrity in scientific research and vowed to punish academics and institutes for misconduct such as plagiarism and fabrication of data.

Researchers and institutes involved in misconduct including plagiarism, fabrication of data and research conclusions, ghostwriting and peer review manipulation will face severe punishments, Xinhua reported.

Scandals involving plagiarism and fabrication of research findings have become more prevalent in recent years. Springer Nature last year retracted 107 papers published in Tumor Biology between 2012 and 2017 after an investigation found the authors had supplied the journal’s editors with made-up contact information for third-party reviewers.

Continue reading “China to crack down on fraud in scandal-hit scientific research amid ZTE wrangle” »

A good intro to QUANTUM COMPUTERS, at 5 levels of explanations — from kid-level to expert.

WIRED has challenged IBM’s Dr. Talia Gershon (Senior Manager, Quantum Research) to explain quantum computing to 5 different people; a child, teen, a college student, a grad student and a professional.

Continue reading “Quantum Computing Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty” »

Researchers at MIT, who last year designed a tiny computer chip tailored to help honeybee-sized drones navigate, have now shrunk their chip design even further, in both size and power consumption.

The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built a fully customized chip from the ground up, with a focus on reducing power consumption and size while also increasing processing speed.

The new computer chip, named “Navion,” which they are presenting this week at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, is just 20 square millimeters—about the size of a LEGO minifigure’s footprint—and consumes just 24 milliwatts of power, or about one-thousandth the energy required to power a lightbulb.