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Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

Adjunct professors in America face low pay and long hours without the security of full-time faculty. Some, on the brink of homelessness, take desperate measures.

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The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

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NASA’s goal to reach Mars is just over a decade away, and Lockheed Martin revealed Thursday how humans might soon walk upon the red planet’s surface.

Lockheed Martin gave CNBC a first look at its new spacecraft prototype, which the company will unveil Thursday at this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

“This is a single-stage, completely reusable lander which will be able to both descend and ascend,” said Lockheed Martin’s Robert Chambers.

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This was the second scholarly paper i saw this year about time travel. Posting because there isn’t nearly enough serious interest about Time Travel in the science community.

Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime.
Benjamin K Tippett1 and David Tsang2
Published 31 March 2017 •

Abstract
In this paper we present geometry which has been designed to fit a layperson’s description of a ‘time machine’. It is a box which allows those within it to travel backwards and forwards through time and space, as interpreted by an external observer. Timelike observers travel within the interior of a ‘bubble’ of geometry which moves along a circular, acausal trajectory through spacetime. If certain timelike observers inside the bubble maintain a persistent acceleration, their worldlines will close.

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Scholarly paper on building a time machine:

“Quantum teleportation through time-shifted AdS wormholes.

(Submitted on 30 Aug 2017)

Based on the work of Gao-Jafferis-Wall and Maldacena-Stanford-Yang, we observe that the time-shifted thermofield states of two entangled CFTs can be made traversable by an appropriate coupling of the two CFTs, or alternatively by the application of a modified quantum teleportation protocol. This provides evidence for the smoothness of the horizon for a large class of entangled states related to the thermofield by time-translations. The smoothness of these states has some relevance for the firewall paradox and the proposal that some observables in quantum gravity may be state-dependent. We notice that quantum teleportation through these entangled states could be used in a laboratory setup to implement a time-machine, which allows the observer to travel far in the future.”

Continue reading “Quantum teleportation through time-shifted AdS wormholes” | >

Finally Mach Effect propulsion had gotten useful levels of funding and will get a validation test with NASA. They reported interim results and have made good progress. Nextbigfuture covered the announcement of funding by NASA NIAC for mach effect propulsion in April 2017. They now have presented the new experiments and path forward with the needed materials to clearly prove significant propulsion and unambiguous space experiments. They have advanced the experimental work and will get test state-of-the-art PIN-PMN-PT materials. They have demonstrated a Force versus Voltage scaling relationship that is consistent with the theory. They have a roadmap to continue.

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Just five years ago, artificial intelligence-enabled computers could barely recognize images fed to them, much less analyze them anything like people can. But suddenly, they’ve turned the tables.

“In 2011 their error rate was 26 percent,” says Jeff Dean, chief of the Google Brain project, which along with other tech giants has helped lead a recent revolution in image recognition as well as speech recognition and self-driving cars. Now, he says, computers’ ability to view and analyze images (pictured) exceeds what human eyes can do.

“If you ’ d have told me that would be a possible just a few years ago, I would ’ ve never believed you,” Dean said during an appearance at a research event in Heidelberg, Germany. But thanks to AI-enabled computer vision advances, computers “can now see … and that has opened our eyes (about) what is possible.”

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