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On September 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be seen as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights are only visible at higher latitudes, in northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia.

What the world experienced that day, now known as the Carrington Event, was a massive geomagnetic storm. These storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from the surface of the sun and hits the Earth. This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection.

The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena. As an electrical engineer who specializes in the power grid, I study how geomagnetic storms also threaten to cause power and internet outages and how to protect against that.

AMD is at it again. 😃


The launch of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D is imminent. Chips are out in the wild and early bird reviews and benchmarks are popping up on the web. Given that AMD has been touting the gaming prowess of the 5800X3D, we’ve been waiting to see if that claim holds up. And it appears that it does.

Peruvian hardware site Xanxo Gaming (via 3DCenter) managed to get hold of a retail Ryzen 7 5800X3D and put it through a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, comparing it to Intel’s Core i9 12900KF. As the site wasn’t sampled by AMD, it’s not subject to an embargo.

“Re-Architecting” Low Energy Wireless & IoT — Dr. David Su, Ph.D. 0, CEO & Co-Founder, Atmosic


Dr. David Su, Ph.D. (https://atmosic.com/company/leadership/) is CEO and Co-Founder of Atmosic, a fascinating company that is “re-architecting” wireless connectivity solutions from the ground up to radically reduce Internet of Things (IoT) device dependence on batteries, aiming to make batteries last forever and the Internet of Things battery free – thus breaking the power barrier to widespread IoT adoption.

Dr. Su brings to Atmosic over 30 years of engineering expertise with an extensive wireless background, as his past teams’ radio designs have brought billions of successful devices to market. He was on the early engineering team at Atheros, as VP Analog/RF Engineering, and VP Engineering with Qualcomm following the 2011 acquisition of Atheros. He was also at HP for several years.

Dr. Su earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) and Master of Engineering (MEng) in Electrical Engineering, from University of Tennessee, a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and has been a Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow.

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The growth potential of intelligent machines is attaining milestones almost every other day. Each day, new publications and media houses are reporting the new achievements of AI. But there were still questions about the creative potential of AI. Experts believe that artificial intelligence machines will never be able to achieve the creative consciousness that human intelligence possesses. Well, AI has again proved them wrong! The technology is now capable of creating its own art, out of its own imagination, and also poetry, that only the most deeply conscious human brains can do.

There have been several instances where programming and poetry have converged into generating some of the most outstanding pieces in the history of tech. Programming itself has its own set of minimalist aesthetics that does not take up much space and does not take too long to execute. Also, there have been many programmers who had links to poetry and art, which makes it easier for them to curate a mindblowing tech that can yield the same standard of results. Nowadays, companies like OpenAI create futuristic technology that is not only advanced but also boldly creative. In fact, its poetry-writing AI has made huge strides over the internet!

Verse by Verse, is a Google tool, that takes suggestions from classic American poets to compose poetry. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to identify the language pattern of a poet’s work and apply it to the poetry it generates. The tool allows users to choose from 22 different American classical poets and the type of poem they would like to write. The program offers poetic forms such as free verse, and quatrain, and also allows choosing the number of syllables to choose. What all it needs is, an opening line. Once given the first line, it generates the rest of the poem on its own, giving suggestions at every line, making it more interactive compared to other Open AI’s GPT-2 programs.

There are ways around this, but they don’t have the exciting scalability story and worse, they have to rely on a rather non-tech crutch: human input. Smaller language models fine-tuned with actual human-written answers are ultimately better at generating less biased text than a much larger, more powerful system.

And further complicating matters is that models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 don’t always generate text that’s particularly useful because they’re trained to basically “autocomplete” sentences based on a huge trove of text scraped from the internet. They have no knowledge of what a user is asking it to do and what responses they are looking for. “In other words, these models aren’t aligned with their users,” OpenAI said.

Any test of this idea would be to see what happens with pared-down models and a little human input to keep those trimmed neural networks more…humane. This is exactly what OpenAI did with GPT-3 recently when it contracted 40 human contractors to help steer the model’s behavior.

Once the over-excitement recedes we might be able to get a better understanding of what, or who, is creating real value. Bronwyn Williams, a trends analyst and futurist who also serves as Chief Commercial Officer at Carbon Based Lifeforms was keen to stress that as we shift from the Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 world, we are shifting from demonetization to the re-monetization of the digital commons. By that she means, that with Web 2.0 the modus operandum was the offer of services … See more.


Should you offer fractional shares in yourself and your future success?

Humans could live until the ripe old age of 150 years according to recent research – and scientists are racing to work out how.

Harvard geniuses, biohackers and internet billionaires are all looking for ways that humans can crack the code on aging.

WaitButWhy blogger Tim Urban writes “the human body seems programmed to shut itself down somewhere around the century mark, if it hasn’t already”.

An international team, co-led by researchers at The University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute (NGI) in the UK and the Penn State College of Engineering in the US, has developed a tunable graphene-based platform that allows for fine control over the interaction between light and matter in the terahertz (THz) spectrum to reveal rare phenomena known as exceptional points. The team published their results today in Science.

The work could advance optoelectronic technologies to better generate, control and sense light and potentially communications, according to the researchers. They demonstrated a way to control THz waves, which exist at frequencies between those of microwaves and infrared waves. The feat could contribute to the development of ‘beyond-5G’ wireless technology for high-speed communication networks.