Watch Entire Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObmFR5Dz7Ac
Algorithms are incredible aids for making data-driven, efficient decisions. And as more industries uncover their predictive power, companies are increasingly turning to algorithms to make objective and comprehensive choices. However, while we often rely on technology to avoid inherent human biases, there is a dark side to algorithm-based decisions: the potential for homogenous data sets to produce biased algorithms.
Many of the people and companies employing algorithms hope that their use of technology in replacement of humans results in reduced unconscious bias. While it would be great if it were that simple, this mindset is often a case of “mathwashing:” our tendency to attribute objectivity to technology.
Read Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fridapolli/2017/12/05/the-dark-side-of-artificial-intelligence/#35dc74a91261
CLEVELAND, OHIO--In an underdog city, at an underdog NASA lab, researchers are thinking hard about an undeservedly neglected planet. Venus is Earth’s cousin, closest in composition and size, but for decades it has remained veiled. NASA hasn’t sent a mission there since 1989; more recent European and Japanese orbiters have made halting progress that stops largely at the planet’s thick sulfur clouds. No craft has touched down since 1985, when the last of a series of advanced Soviet landers clad in armored pressure vessels endured a couple hours before succumbing to the deep-ocean pressure and furnacelike temperature of the planet’s surface. The baleful conditions and lack of funding have made Venus, Earth’s closest neighbor, feel more distant than ever. That is, except here.
Read Article: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/armed-tough-computer-chips-scientists-are-ready-return-hell-venus
You may have heard the term ‘blockchain’ and dismissed it as a fad, a buzzword, or even technical jargon. But I believe blockchain is a technological advance that will have wide-reaching implications that will not just transform the financial services but many other businesses and industries.
A blockchain is a distributed database, meaning that the storage devices for the database are not all connected to a common processor. It maintains a growing list of ordered records, called blocks. Each block has a timestamp and a link to a previous block.
Read Entire Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/24/a-complete-beginners-guide-to-blockchain/#279d88d36e60
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has launched Cheyenne, a 5.34-petaflop supercomputer dedicated to supporting research around Earth system sciences.
More than triple the performance of the previous NCAR supercomputer, Yellowstone, it is ranked as the 20th most powerful system in the world according to Top500.
The supercomputer was built by HPE’s recent acquisition, SGI, and features Intel’s 18-core, 2.3GHz Broadwell Xeon E5-2697v4 processors and Mellanox EDR InfiniBand.
It has more than four thousand dual-socket nodes, 20 percent of which have 128GB of memory, while the rest have 64GB, giving it a memory capacity of 313 terabytes.
The computer has a data storage of 20 petabytes of DataDirect Networks’ SFA14KX systems, with the option to expand it up to 40 petabytes. DDN’s system gives the computer a data transfer rate of 220 gigabytes per second.
Cheyenne has a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.
Read Article: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/servers-storage/ncars-534-petaflop-supercomputer-cheyenne-comes-online/97746.fullarticle
Possibly the strongest hybrid silk fibers yet have been created by scientists using all renewable resources. Combining spider silk proteins with nanocellulose from wood, the process offers a low-cost and scalable way to make bioactive materials for a wide range of medical uses.
Read Article: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170517120737.htm
Robots are branching out. A new prototype soft robot takes inspiration from plants by growing to explore its environment.
Vines and some fungi extend from their tips to explore their surroundings. Elliot Hawkes of the University of California in Santa Barbara and his colleagues designed a bot that works on similar principles. Its mechanical body sits inside a plastic tube reel that extends through pressurized inflation, a method that some invertebrates like peanut worms (Sipunculus nudus) also use to extend their appendages. The plastic tubing has two compartments, and inflating one side or the other changes the extension direction. A camera sensor at the tip alerts the bot when it’s about to run into something.
Read Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/robot-grows-plant?mode=topic&context=96
Like the surface of an alien planet, thin sheets of copper display a complex topography of ridges and valleys. These never-before-seen undulations may spell trouble for electronic gadgets: The zigzagging surface could contribute to the electrical resistance of miniature copper wires that snake throughout computer chips.
Using a scanning tunneling microscope, scientists observed nanoscale peaks and dips on a sheet of copper, with angles of a few degrees, researchers report in the July 28 Science. “When we saw that, we were absolutely shocked,” says materials scientist John Boland of Trinity College Dublin. Conventional wisdom was that the copper would lay mostly flat.
Copper and other metals are a conglomeration of smaller bits, known as grains. Within each grain, the atoms are neatly arranged, but at grain boundaries, the pattern is disrupted. In the type of copper the researchers studied, nanocrystalline copper, the grains are particularly small; each has around 1 million atoms. Boland and colleagues showed for the first time that, in films of nanocrystalline copper just tens of nanometers thick, peaks and dips appear where misaligned grains meet.
Read Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/thinnest-films-copper-look-flat-they-arent
A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed significantly from one part of the lake to another, according to a comprehensive look at findings from the first three-and-a-half years of NASA's Curiosity rover mission.
Read Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170601151831.htm
New research suggests a link between two powerful trends, the Internet of Things and enterprise digital transformation. But are we really there yet?
The Internet of Things is often thought of as primarily an industrial and consumer technology. But there’s a growing consensus that IoT is also taking a leading role in digital transformation in a wide variety of business applications in locations around the world.
Read Article: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3211438/internet-of-things/is-iot-really-driving-enterprise-digital-transformation.html
About Oliver Briscoe
Oliver Briscoe is a 20+ year veteran of the Informational Technology field. He understands his first principals and loves teaching others.