Lifeboat Foundation

Remember a few weeks back, when we learned that Google’s artificial neural network was having creepy daydreams, turning buildings into acid trips and landscapes into Magic Eye pictures? Well, prepare to never sleep again, because last week, Google made its “inceptionism” algorithm available to the public, and the nightmarish images are cropping up everywhere.

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These charts map the “truth scores” of statements related to geography, history and entertainment. Correct statements appear along the diagonal, with color intensity indicating the strength of the score (credit: Giovanni Ciampaglia)

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Vannevar Bush’s prediction, half a century later, rings true: “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

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After Spencer Kimball left Google, he found himself missing some of the custom-built software the company uses internally. So he and a bunch of fellow ex-Googlers started building their own. And now they want to make it available to everyone to power the next Google or Facebook.

Specifically, Kimball wanted something like Google’s database system Spanner. Spanner is designed to juggle data between potentially millions of database servers, a tool that keeps Google’s services online even if several servers, or an entire datacenter, go offline. While few companies need to operate at quite the scale Google does, the ability to stay online even if many systems fail, and to automatically balance resources between servers, would be useful to many other companies. Read more

So it was great to get back to New York and be able to report on what is called the“New NY Broadband Program.” It involves a $500 million expenditure to help ensure that New Yorkers across the state have access to current-generation Internet capacity. There’s lots of potential in the plan, targeted at providing every New Yorker with access to 100 megabit per second (Mbps) service (10 Mbps uploads) by the end of 2018. Because New York expects a 1:1 match from the private sector for each grant or loan it makes, that means the state hopes to be deploying at least $1 billion on high-speed Internet access infrastructure.

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The National Security Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn’t know is just how much information the whistleblower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access. Read more

“We are interested in now, most of us,” says Robert Grass, a researcher in chemistry at ETH Zurich. “We buy our furniture in Ikea. We don’t care if in 10 years it falls apart. With information it is similar. We don’t think into the future.”

But Grass isn’t like most of us. His team, which is exploring how to use DNA as a data storage mechanism, is one of several academic and commercial entities grappling with the challenge of protecting data against the elements over time spans stretching out to millions of years. Read more

Human Capital Report 2015 WEF

Tanvi Misra | CityLab
“The idea is not just to teach city governments new techniques on harvesting open data to tackle urban problems and measure performance, but to replicate successful approaches that are already out there.“Read more