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Category: government – Page 181

Poor countries tend to have out one-tenth of the crop yield per hectare compared to the yield from rich countries. Farmers in rich countries are more productive than those in poor countries because they use better technology and infrastructure, and are subject to better government policies.

If all the world’s farmers extracted the maximum potential output from their fields, the gap in yields between rich and poor countries would vanish almost entirely.

So what would it take for the developing world to catch up?

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Reports began surfacing in the media earlier this week that Finland was scrapping its much-discussed basic income experiment. The country began paying 2,000 unemployed Finns a basic income of €560 ($678) a month in January of 2017.

Articles this week ran headlines implying that Finland had decided to halt the experiment, implying that it had become unpopular.” The eagerness of the government is evaporating. They rejected extra funding [for it],” said Olli Kangas, the leader of the research team at Kela (Social Insurance Institution of Finland), told the BBC.

In actual fact, Finland is continuing its basic income plan until the end of 2018, as it had initially planned. Yes, it’s true that it won’t be extended past that date — but there hasn’t been any official word from the Finnish government that the experiment has been a failure. If anything, the government appears to be intent on studying the effects of the two-year program but believe they can only do so after it’s finished.

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1. blame the American public that lost serious interest in science in the 1990’s, And 2. the US government who’s only real interest now is war, and how to spend money on war.

If you want to crunch the world’s biggest problems, head east. According to a newly published ranking, not only is China home to the world’s two fastest supercomputers, it also has 202 of the world’s fastest 500 such devices—more than any other nation. Meanwhile, America’s fastest device limps into fifth place in the charts, and the nation occupies just 144 of the top 500 slots, making it second according to that metric.

The world’s fastest supercomputer is still TaihuLight, housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, and pictured above. Capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, it’s almost three times faster than the second-place Tianhe-2. The Department of Energy’s fifth-placed Titan supercomputer, housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, performs 17.6 quadrillion calculations per second—making it less than a fifth as fast as TaihuLight.

China also beats out all comers on total computational resources, commanding 35.4 percent of the computing power in the list, compared with America’s 29.6 percent. The new list clearly and painfully underscores America’s decline as a supercomputing heavyweight. Indeed, this is the weakest representation by the U.S. since the Top500 supercomputers list started ranking the industry 25 years ago.

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When it comes to pegging the blame for the obesity crisis, farm subsidies are a popular target. Subsidies, the argument goes, encourage farmers to grow less-healthy foods—corn, turned into corn syrup, is the common culprit here—and fewer unsubsidized fruits and vegetables.

Not everyone agrees. Experts caution that cheap corn isn’t the only cause of poor nutrition and that other factors, like technology, are responsible for the low cost of . Still, it’s reasonable to ask: How can subsidies be used to make healthier food options more available?

One answer: by making sure that subsidies take into account consumer welfare as well as farmers’ incomes, suggest UCLA Anderson’s Prashant Chintapalli, a Ph.D student, and Christopher S. Tang. In a working paper examining a type of subsidy called “minimum support ,” or MSPs, the authors suggest that backing a diverse mix of crops—including fruits and vegetables—would give consumers a wider selection and be most effective at raising farmer profits at a lower cost to the government.

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A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

“It was surprising to me that so many fatalities occurred outside the flood zones,” says Sebastiaan Jonkman, a professor at Delft’s Hydraulic Engineering Department who led the new study.

Drowning caused 80% of Harvey deaths, and the research showed that only 22% of fatalities in Houston’s 4,600-square-kilometre district, Harris County, occurred within the 100-year floodplain, a mapped area that is used as the main indicator of flood risk in the US.

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We are now on the brink of a “third revolution in warfare,” heralded by killer robots — the fully autonomous weapons that could decide who to target and kill… without human input.

Over the weekend, experts on military artificial intelligence from more than 80 world governments converged on the U.N. offices in Geneva for the start of a week’s talks on autonomous weapons systems. Many of them fear that after gunpowder and nuclear weapons, we are now on the brink of a “third revolution in warfare,” heralded by killer robots — the fully autonomous weapons that could decide who to target and kill without human input. With autonomous technology already in development in several countries, the talks mark a crucial point for governments and activists who believe the U.N. should play a key role in regulating the technology.

The meeting comes at a critical juncture. In July, Kalashnikov, the main defense contractor of the Russian government, announced it was developing a weapon that uses neural networks to make “shoot-no shoot” decisions. In January 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense released a video showing an autonomous drone swarm of 103 individual robots successfully flying over California. Nobody was in control of the drones; their flight paths were choreographed in real-time by an advanced algorithm. The drones “are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” a spokesman said. The drones in the video were not weaponized — but the technology to do so is rapidly evolving.

This April also marks five years since the launch of the International Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which called for “urgent action to preemptively ban the lethal robot weapons that would be able to select and attack targets without any human intervention.” The 2013 launch letter — signed by a Nobel Peace Laureate and the directors of several NGOs — noted that they could be deployed within the next 20 years and would “give machines the power to decide who lives or dies on the battlefield.”

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Artificial intelligence is being used for a dizzying array of tasks, but one of the most successful is also one of the scariest: automated surveillance. Case in point is Chinese startup SenseTime, which makes AI-powered surveillance software for the country’s police, and which this week received a new round of funding worth $600 million. This funding, led by retailing giant Alibaba, reportedly gives SenseTime a total valuation of more than $4.5 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world, according to analyst firm CB Insights.

This news is significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows how China continues to pour money into artificial intelligence, both through government funding and private investment. Many are watching the competition between China and America to develop cutting-edge AI with great interest, and see investment as an important measure of progress. China has overtaken the US in this regard, although experts are quick to caution that it’s only one metric of success.

Secondly, the investment shows that image analysis is one of the most lucrative commercial applications for AI. SenseTime became profitable in 2017 and claims it has more than 400 clients and partners. It sells its AI-powered services to improve the camera apps of smartphone-makers like OPPO and Vivo; to offer “beautification” effects and AR filters on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo; and to provide identity verification for domestic finance and retail apps like Huanbei and Rong360.

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Investors are sounding the alarm after a little-known U.S. government agency green lit what could be the next trillion-dollar technology.

This tight-lipped agency, known as DARPA, has a history of developing some of the most transformative technologies known to man. But what many don’t realize is that it can PAY to follow DARPA’s biggest projects.

In fact, one DARPA-funded venture was a computer network designed to provide interconnectivity among users – we now call this network the internet.

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Above all, the government needs to understand what AI is and what it will do. Since artificial intelligence is such a complex and fast-moving field, it is especially important for experts to be brought in to brief policymakers and the administration. Without technical acumen, it will be a challenge to act effectively in any area relevant to AI.

Government indifference toward AI could let the US lose ground to rival countries. But what would a good AI plan actually look like?

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