Lifeboat Foundation

“It’s good to hear your voice, you know it’s been so long If I don’t get your calls, then everything goes wrong… Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation” — Blondie, “Hanging on the Telephone”

In 1978, Debbie Harry propelled her new wave band Blondie to the top of the charts with a plaintive tale of yearning to hear her boyfriend’s voice from afar and insisting he not leave her “hanging on the telephone.”

But the questions arises: What if it were 2020 and she was speaking over VOIP with intermittent packet losses, audio jitter, network delays and out-of-sequence packet transmissions?

Even in the countries where these journalists are censored, “You’re able to play Minecraft.”

The field is in disagreement about where it should go and why.

Amazon’s answer to Google Stadia is coming.

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Despite the huge contributions of deep learning to the field of artificial intelligence, there’s something very wrong with it: It requires huge amounts of data. This is one thing that both the pioneers and critics of deep learning agree on. In fact, deep learning didn’t emerge as the leading AI technique until a few years ago because of the limited availability of useful data and the shortage of computing power to process that data.

Reducing the data-dependency of deep learning is currently among the top priorities of AI researchers.

Continue reading “Self-supervised learning is the future of AI” »

In the festival’s final day, speakers turn to the cosmos and our place within it.

Scientists have found an ancient submarine forest of bald cypress trees entombed in Mobile Bay off the coast of Alabama.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the forest flourished on the banks of a prehistoric river near the Gulf of Mexico nearly 60,000 years ago. When the trees died, their massive trunks became entombed in peat and sediment. Eventually, sea levels rose, the coastline receded, and the remains of these ancient trees were buried by the sea. The forest was preserved, undisturbed for millennia, until recent intensifying storms along the coast began to expose it.

Earlier this week, NOAA shared a video of the incredible site (below), showing it teeming with schools of fish.

Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear.

Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse. By Peter C Baker.