Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11063

For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

None of this is anywhere near total restoration. The patients can make out a few words for the first time. And unlike normal vision, the range of light intensity levels remains very narrow. But obviously it’s much better than nothing and will get better over time.

As a point of humor, he tells the story of one of his blind patients who totally redesigned one of his experiments for him.

Potentially describing how general artificial intelligence will look like.

Since scientists started building and training neural networks, Transfer Learning has been the main bottleneck. Transfer Learning is the ability of an AI to learn from different tasks and apply its pre-learned knowledge to a completely new task. It is implicit that with this precedent knowledge, the AI will perform better and train faster than de novo neural networks on the new task.

DeepMind is on the path of solving this with PathNet. PathNet is a network of neural networks, trained using both stochastic gradient descent and a genetic selection method.

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Since one of the topic areas that Lifeboat promotes history and cultures. I wanted to share this particular US History fact. Many believe that Andrew Jackson was the central figure in the US genocide and removal of the Native Americans. Well, he wasn’t.

Meet the father of the Native American Genocide and Removal, James Madison. In Madison’s ignaurgeral address Madison made it a point to make Indian removal happen via a volunteer removal which established a course of destruction of the native americans. Madison and his advisors were the real founders and architects of the native American removal. And, Madison’s successor James Buchanan expanded upon it to architect plans to wipe out the Cherokee and many tribes of the west which was further executed in 1823 by Andrew Jackson who was often known in NA history as the “White Devil.”

So, to truly go to the 1st US President responsible for the 1823 NA removal and genocide means looking at least 2 US presidents prior to Jackson.

The president must “from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union”

Continue reading “1816 James Madison” | >

By Kelsey Tollefson | Executive Editor John Lenker

Space suits are iconic—a visual metaphor for the excitement of the original Space Race and mankind’s first forays off our planet. While many still associate space travel with the puffy white suits worn by astronauts in the 1960s, a proliferation of sci-fi movies in the intervening decades has opened our imaginations to a wider array of possibilities. Far from being fantastical, these new spacesuits reflect an evolved understanding of the considerations involved in protecting the human body from harsh environments outside Earth’s atmosphere.

Related: Under pressure: the past, present, and future spacesuit market.

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“Launched in 2007, the Fuller Challenge has defined an emerging field of practice: the whole systems approach to understanding and intervening in complex and interrelated crises for wide-scale social and environmental impact. The entry criteria have established a new framework through which to identify and measure effective, enduring solutions to global sustainability’s most entrenched challenges. The rigorous selection process has set a unique standard, gaining renown as “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award.”

The Fuller Challenge attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.”

Deadline is March 31, 2017

NASA intends to send astronauts to orbit the moon in 2018 at the apparent request of President Donald Trump, potentially saving taxpayers $10 billion dollars.

Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, sent a letter to the space agency’s employees saying they should “explore the feasibility” of sending astronauts to orbit the moon in 2018, seemingly at the request of the Trump administration.

Speeding up NASA’s plans to orbit the moon with astronauts could save money in the long term.

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