Lifeboat Foundation

YouTube is the world’s biggest video platform, and its most popular content is still relatively short video clips. But over the last year Robert Kyncl, the service’s chief business officer, has begun to lay the groundwork for a new era of YouTube. He led the launch of YouTube Red, a subscription service that eliminates ads and brings a bunch of premium features to customers. He’s also created separate apps for YouTube’s three most popular verticals: gaming, kids, and music.

We sat down for a chat with Kyncl at CES. He gave a keynote speech earlier in the week, and one major focus was music. Despite being a video service, YouTube’s massive scale means it’s also the world’s most popular platform for streaming music. The new Music app is optimized for that experience, adding features like offline playlists and background play. We chatted about MTV and why YouTube has the ability to be many different things to different people all at once.

Continue reading “YouTube’s money man says the future is live virtual reality” »

“Clive Cookson introduces a special issue looking at the places where science and photography meet, from the intimate observation of illness to the quiet machinery of surveillance”

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“Patrick Hayes’s “Human 2.0? Life-Writing in the Digital Age” provides a defense of autobiography as it comes through Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, blogging and the rest.”

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“Do some people have a special talent for serendipity? And if so, why?”

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Mark Zuckerberg wants to live a bit more like Tony Stark. In a post on Facebook this afternoon, Zuckerberg wrote that he intends to build an AI that can run his home and present him with virtual reality visualizations of his work. “You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man,” Zuckerberg writes.

Zuckerberg’s vision starts basic but gets a lot more ambitious. “I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there,” he writes. That should be able to handle his initial goals, like controlling “music, lights, temperature, and so on.” He also wants this system to recognize when friends are at the front door and let them in, alert him if his newborn daughter needs attention, and to do all of this only when it recognizes the person speaking. For the most part, that’s all doable even for the non-billionaire home builder. Zuckerberg has already found one product that he likes: “For just music, the Amazon Echo is pretty great. It’s been very useful for controlling music with my voice while both hands are occupied taking care of Max.”

The more challenging aspects of the project include making it work without direct input by him or Priscilla Chan, his wife. “I’m very interested in using voice and face recognition to set lights and temperature as well depending on who is in what rooms, etc,” he writes. “For example, I like rooms colder than Cilla, and but it’s possible to just see who is in what room and adjust the temperatures automatically.”

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https://soundcloud.com/kelly-tang-9/sets/nasa-sounds-of-earth

“Programming ‘indestructible’ bacteria to write poetry.”

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“[Dave Valeza] captures the wonder artists worldwide have experienced with the rejuvination of the space industry of the past few years. From finding water on Mars to landing reusable rockets (plural!), 2015 has been a great year for space, and artists are loving it.”

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I am really pleased to announce that our mouse longevity program has finally begun. We have submitted our proposal for funding to Longecity and shortly will begin fundraising so we can begin testing.

You may enjoy our brand new podcast where our project lead explains what the project is about and how we can help develop longevity interventions.

Continue reading “Adam Alonzi interviews Edouard Debonneuil — MMTP — Major Mouse Testing Program” »