Lifeboat Foundation

Sara M. Watson — The Atlantic

Facebook has always “manipulated” the results shown in its users’ News Feeds by filtering and personalizing for relevance. But this weekend, the social giant seemed to cross a line, when it announced that it engineered emotional responses two years ago in an “emotional contagion” experiment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Since then, critics have examined many facets of the experiment, including its design, methodology, approval process, and ethics. Each of these tacks tacitly accepts something important, though: the validity of Facebook’s science and scholarship. There is a more fundamental question in all this: What does it mean when we call proprietary data research data science?

As a society, we haven’t fully established how we ought to think about data science in practice. It’s time to start hashing that out.

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By Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.

This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

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By Abby Phillip — The Washington Post

NASA engineer and physicist Harold White announced a few years ago that he was working on a potentially groundbreaking idea that could allow space travel faster than the speed of light. Yes, like in “Star Trek.”

And now, to boldly go where no designer has gone before, Mark Rademaker — who is collaborating with White — has created a CGI design concept for the “warp ship.” They’re calling it the IXS Enterprise.

“We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming Warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM career,” Rademaker said in an e-mail interview. “It does have some Sci-Fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to.”

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Muscle-powered bio-bots walk on command http://phys.org/news/2014-06-muscle-powered-bio-bots-video.html

Crowdsourcing for robots http://www.kurzweilai.net/crowdsourcing-for-robots

Giant space telescope could detect hints of life on exoplanets http://www.kurzweilai.net/giant-space-telescope-could-detect…exoplanets

Continue reading “Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini” »

By Clément Vidal — Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

I am happy to inform you that I just published a book which deals at length with our cosmological future. I made a short book trailer introducing it, and the book has been mentioned in the Huffington Post and H+ Magazine.

About the book:
In this fascinating journey to the edge of science, Vidal takes on big philosophical questions: Does our universe have a beginning and an end, or is it cyclic? Are we alone in the universe? What is the role of intelligent life, if any, in cosmic evolution? Grounded in science and committed to philosophical rigor, this book presents an evolutionary worldview where the rise of intelligent life is not an accident, but may well be the key to unlocking the universe’s deepest mysteries. Vidal shows how the fine-tuning controversy can be advanced with computer simulations. He also explores whether natural or artificial selection could hold on a cosmic scale. In perhaps his boldest hypothesis, he argues that signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are already present in our astrophysical data. His conclusions invite us to see the meaning of life, evolution, and intelligence from a novel cosmological framework that should stir debate for years to come.

You can get 20% off with the discount code ‘Vidal2014′ (valid until 31st July)!

Wall Street OTC

An Arizona start-up company says it has successfully completed its first small-scale test flight of a stratospheric balloon and capsule being developed to show tourists a space like view of the Earth from 19 miles (30 km) above ground.

Privately owned by World View, an offshoot of Paragon Space Development Corp, aims to start taking passengers to the edge of space in the Voyager vehicle by 2016, according to a company statement.

“We couldn’t be any more excited about the results from this test flight,” said Jane Poynter, chief executive officer of World View. “It represents a foundational achievement that moves us one step closer to offering a life-changing experience of our Voyagers.”

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By Daniela Hernandez — Wired

Long Island dermatologist Kavita Mariwalla knows how to treat acne, burns, and rashes. But when a patient came in with a potentially disfiguring case of bullous pemphigoid–a rare skin condition that causes large, watery blisters–she was stumped. The medication doctors usually prescribe for the autoimmune disorder wasn’t available. So she logged in to Modernizing Medicine, a web-based repository of medical information and insights.

Within seconds, she had the name of another drug that had worked in comparable cases. “It gives you access to data, and data is king,” Mariwalla says of Modernizing Medicine. “It’s been very helpful, especially in clinically challenging situations.”

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by Brian Krassenstein — 3D Print.com

http://youtu.be/pu8XZo3XnhQ

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Patrick McGreevy — LA Times

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed bills that recognize the legal use of Bitcoins and other digital currencies in California, repeal a requirement for food handlers to use gloves, and keep minor truants out of lockup facilities, his aides announced Saturday.

In all, the governor signed 15 pieces of legislation into law, including one that reflects the changing way that technology has Californians doing business.

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