Scientific Advisory Board News
Ray Kurzweil has joined the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory
Board.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical
character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the
blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech
synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand
piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially
marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully
founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech
recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment,
cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these
technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's web site,
KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of
Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000
Lemelson-MIT Prize (view the video at
http://mfile.akamai.com/12032/rm/kurzwe...son01.rm),
the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received
the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in
technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. Ray has
also received scores of other national and international awards,
including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top
science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the
Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association
for Computing Machinery. Ray has received twelve honorary Doctorates and
honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and
international film awards.
Ray's book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines", was named Best Computer
Science Book of 1990. His best-selling book, "The Age of Spiritual
Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", has been published
in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon in the
categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence." Ray's latest book
is "The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology", published
by Viking.
Leading Scientist Calls for 1918 Flu Genome to Be "Un-Published"
"The decision by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to
publish the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in
the GenBank database is extremely dangerous and immediate steps should
be taken to remove this data," says inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics was reconstructed
and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of
federal and university scientists announced in the October 7, 2005 issue
of Science Magazine, as the New York Times reported on Thursday.
Besides the threat of accidental release of the reconstructed virus from
laboratories, "the other potential threat comes from the availability of
the full genome sequence, which has been put on the GenBank database," a
condition of the publication of the paper in Science, said Nature in an
editorial.
In addition, Science staff writer Jocelyn Kaiser revealed that "Both the
authors and Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists
could, in theory, use the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu
virus."
"I am calling for this genome to be 'un-published,'" Kurzweil proposes. "I realize that this is like trying to gather the horses back into the
barn, but that is exactly what we should try to do. Yes, there have been
valuable insights that have been gained from recreating this virus, but
those insights can be published without disclosing the actual DNA
sequence.
"The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with a
need to know and who have been cleared by a security investigation and
have signed an agreement not to disclose the information, with criminal
penalties for such disclosure. In addition, I recommend that the
Congress initiate legislation to prohibit publication of all such
sensitive data on virulent genomes (the exact extent to be defined) on
all U.S. government publicly available Internet sites.
"No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for
an atomic bomb, and this information is even more dangerous. As Jonathan
Tucker, a policy analyst at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in
Washington DC, pointed out in Nature, 'Anyone can order DNA to be made
to a certain sequence.'
"We should take immediate steps to remove this information from the web
and block any further publication of the actual genetic sequence to
prevent its access by would-be bioterrorists," Kurzweil advises.
A more detailed article with references is available at
http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.ht...d%3D4934
Third Space Tourist Returns to Earth
Dr. Olsen, entrepreneur and founder of EPITAXX, Inc. and Sensors
Unlimited, Inc., said upon his return from the International Space
Station, "The experience was more fulfilling than I could have ever
imagined." He continued, "I have a newfound sense of wonder seeing the
Earth and stars from such an incredible perspective. Certainly, through
my training I was prepared for the technical aspects, but I had no idea
that I would be flooded with such amazement and joy after seeing my
first sunrise and sunset from space and the feeling of continual
weightlessness. It was an unforgettable experience that I am truly
grateful for and will relive in my mind for the rest of my life."
All Lifeboat Foundation members are eligible for a 5% discount with
Space Adventures on terrestrial tours, zero-gravity and supersonic jet
flights, sub-orbital space flights, and a $200,000 discount on trips to
the International Space Station! Your Lifeboat membership will be
extended by one year if you go on any of these adventures and will be
extended into a lifetime membership if you select the International
Space Station adventure.
You can learn about Space Adventures packages at
http://spaceadventures.com
