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Category: government – Page 162

PARIS (AP) — The French government has outlined measures to ensure early diagnostic testing for young children with autism and help for them going to school.

In a statement following a Cabinet meeting Monday, the government promised that expenses linked to diagnostic testing will be fully reimbursed.

Measures include opening specific classes at preschools and elementary schools, and putting in place teacher and medical staff training and research to better understand autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder.

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It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn’t really do any of that.

Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share.


SILVER SPRING, Md. — Blue Origin has studied repurposing upper stages of its future New Glenn launch vehicle to serve as habitats or for other applications as part of a series of NASA-funded commercialization studies.

Brett Alexander, vice president of government sales and strategy at Blue Origin, said the company looked at ways it could make use of the second stage of New Glenn rather than simply deorbiting the stage at the end of each launch, but emphasized the company currently had no firm plans to reuse those stages at this time.

That study was part of a series of study contracts awarded by NASA last August to study future concepts to support commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit. “We focused there on the reuse of the second stage of New Glenn and what we might be able to do with that volume and capacity once we’re on orbit,” he said during a panel discussion about low Earth orbit commercialization at the American Astronautical Society’s Goddard Memorial Symposium here March 20.

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As the World Wide Web marks its 30th birthday on Tuesday, public discourse is dominated by alarm about Big Tech, data privacy and viral disinformation. Tech executives have been called to testify before Congress, a popular campaign dissuaded Amazon from opening a second headquarters in New York and the United Kingdom is going after social media companies that it calls “digital gangsters.” Implicit in this tech-lash is nostalgia for a more innocent online era.

Let’s not let artificial intelligence put society on autopilot.

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The last two decades have seen a great upswing in commercial space endeavors with hundreds of new companies formed and a few prominent billionaires entering the fray. This is all good, but it remains devilishly hard to make money in space without tapping into government space markets. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer that the commercialization of space is absolutely essential for the growth of the space economy and achieving all of the goals we espouse for human activities in space.

So, what do I mean by commercial space? This has been a great topic of debate ever since NASA initiated the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. There are many definitions and which is appropriate depends on the context. The real distinction is between the public sector and the private sector. Any given space activity can include a mixture of both elements. The purest form of commercial activity takes place entirely within the private sector. It is performed by private-sector companies for the benefit of private-sector customers using private-sector capital. Something like Direct TV would be an example.

At the other end of the spectrum is a pure public-sector activity where the activity is performed entirely by public-sector agencies using public-sector employees, entirely funded by public funds for a public purpose. An example would be SLS, but even it is not purely public as several private sector companies are employed. In between are all manner of hybrids involving a mix of investment funds, executing entities and customers.

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Messed up is the right phrasing for it, I figure.

March 18 (UPI) — After a dead whale washed ashore in the Philippines, scientists pulled 88 pounds of plastic debris from the mammal’s intestines. The young Cuvier’s beaked whale died from gastric shock, according to biologists.

The necropsy was conducted by scientists at the D’ Bone Collector Museum. They were assigned by biologists with the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.

“This whale had the most plastic we have ever seen in a whale. It’s disgusting,” museum biologists wrote in a Facebook update. “Action must be taken by the government against those who continue to treat the waterways and ocean as dumpsters.”

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One of the perks of being President of the United States of America is that you get to submit your budget recommendations to the US Congress before any decisions are made. While it’s up to Congress to make the budget and the President to sign it into law, the recommendations for the next fiscal year are where the administration gets to set their agenda and announce to the world the direction it wants to go in.

Last year, the https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/12/the-…e-science/” target=”_self” data-ga-track=” InternalLink: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/12/the-…e-science/”>Trump administration proposed cutting a number of Earth Science missions, ending NASA Astrophysics’ flagship mission for the 2020s, WFIRST, and eliminating NASA’s Office of Education. Then-acting administrator Robert Lightfoot https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-acting-administrator…t-proposal” target=”_blank” rel=” nofollow noopener noreferrer” data-ga-track=” ExternalLink: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-acting-administrator…t-proposal”>put out a statement mentioning hard choices and an inability to do everything with a limited budget, but Congress overturned these cuts and restored funding for these programs. This year, the assault is even worse, and has a better chance of succeeding. Here’s why.

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Japan is hoping to play a lead role in crafting international rules on what has been called lethal autonomous weapons systems or LAWS.

Japan is planning to give its backing to international efforts to regulate the development of lethal weapons controlled by artificial intelligence at a UN conference in Geneva late this month, government sources said Saturday.

It would mark a departure from Japan’s current policy. The government was already opposed to the development of so-called killer robots that could kill without human involvement. But it had called for careful discussions when it comes to rules so as to make sure that commercial development of AI would not be hampered.

With the policy shift, Japan is hoping to play a leading role in crafting international rules on what have been called lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, the sources said.

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My colleague Conor Sen recently made a bold prediction: Government will be the driver of the U.S. economy in coming decades. The era of Silicon Valley will end, supplanted by the imperatives of fighting climate change and competing with China.

This would be a momentous change. The biggest tech companies — Amazon.com, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google (Alphabet Inc.) and (a bit surprisingly) Microsoft Corp. — have increasingly dominated both the headlines and the U.S. stock market:

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