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Good move by China especially as one is determine to expand quickly and expedite their competitive edge around PLM and SCM.

BEIJING, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) — China will promote standardization to push industrial upgrades and foster new competitive edges, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday.

Standardization represents a country’s core industrial competitiveness and overall prowess and China will highlight standardization as part of its reform agenda, Li said while addressing the ongoing 39th International Organization for Standardization (ISO) General Assembly.

China will speed up the development of standards for emerging sectors, technology and business models to promote innovation and entrepreneurship while forcing out outdated production capacity, Li said.

Continue reading “China will promote standardization to accelerate industrial upgrading: premier” | >

So, here is the real question we in the US should start raising is how does all of this look for the US to its allies, frienemies, etc. with US filling the headlines with statements like this one. No wonders allies and others are expanding their partnerships with Russia.

WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has “exceptionally capable and sophisticated” computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard.

When asked in a television interview whether Russia is trying to manipulate the American presidential election, Brennan didn’t say. But he noted that the FBI is investigating the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, and he cited Moscow’s aggressive intelligence collection and its focus on high-tech snooping.

“I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it,” he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Continue reading “CIA Director John Brennan warns of Russian hacking” | >

Ouch!

According to a countdown clock from Sen. Ted Cruz, there are less than three weeks until the Obama administration puts the Internet at risk from takeover and censorship by China, Russia, and Iran. This conspiratorial fearmongering is, frankly, absurd.

But just because this particular alleged conspiracy is insane doesn’t mean that there is no conspiracy. Of course authoritarian regimes want more control over the Internet, and at this very moment, they are working through the U.N. to get it. But instead of targeting the administration of the domain name system (which, thanks to the so-called “IANA transition” Sen. Cruz opposes, is nearly out of their reach), their chosen vehicle is next-generation Internet standards, particularly an arcane proposal called the Digital Object Architecture (DOA). The best way to stop authoritarian regimes and keep the Internet free is to go through with the transition.

DOA is the brainchild of the legendary Bob Kahn, co-inventor of the Internet’s TCP/IP protocol. The Internet does a great job of moving bits around the world, but it isn’t always so good at authentication, rights management, and access controls. Kahn’s idea, dating back to the early 1990s, is to bake “information management” directly into core protocols. What if every piece of data and every device that accessed the network had a permanent, trackable unique identifier? If you wanted to access information on the network, the system would decide if you were authorized to receive it and, if so, allow you to fetch it.

Continue reading “How Russia and the UN are actually planning to take over the Internet” | >

An international collaboration of scientists involving a team of researchers at Manchester led by Dr. David J. Lewis has developed a tiny electric sensor, which could potentially improve patient survival rates by telling doctors if a person has had a heart attack.

Cardiovascular diseases account for around 30 per cent of adult deaths in the 30–70 year age group, which is greater than the combined deaths from all types of cancer. The ability to diagnose cardiac disease is therefore of utmost concern to doctors. When someone has a heart attack, certain chemicals are released into their bloodstream in elevated amounts, and blood tests are therefore the key to diagnosis.

Lewis, from Manchester’s School of Materials, has worked with his colleagues and a team at India’s Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST) since 2014 to develop a nanoscale sensor made from ‘few-layer black phosphorus’, a new 2D material, which was coated in Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA)/genetic material. The immobilised DNA binds to a chemical called myoglobin, which increases in blood plasma after a heart attack and can be detected and measured by a simple electrical test. This could have a major impact, as it is potentially the most rapid, sensitive, selective and accurate method currently available to detect if someone has elevated levels of myoglobin – the measurement of which is one of the methods used in hospitals to check if someone has suffered a heart attack. The researchers predict that its eventual introduction into the clinic could potentially improve patient survival rates after an attack.

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Interesting read.

When it comes to delivering drugs, nanoparticles shaped like rods and worms are the best bet for making the daunting journey to the centre of a cell, new Australian research suggests.

A new study published in Nature Nanotechnology has answered a long-standing question that could lead to the design of better drug delivery vehicles: how nanoparticle shape affects the voyage through the cell.

“We were able to show for the first time that nanoparticles shaped like rods and worms were more effective than spherical nanoparticles at traversing intracellular barriers and this enabled them to get all the way into the nucleus of the cell,” says lead author UNSW’s Dr Elizabeth Hinde.

Continue reading “Journey to the Centre of the Cell: Nano-Rods and Worms Wriggle Best” | >

Awesome @ my friends at ORNL! Luv it and expect much success too.

No one knows what the next, best way to build electronic circuits will be. That said there’s no shortage of efforts to invent something beyond current lithography. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, perhaps not surprisingly, is in the thick of the race and two recent studies from ORNL researchers showcase promising but very different approaches.

One method suggests phase change in a single complex oxide material may allow “creating” circuit elements much smaller than in today’s CMOS process while a second study puts STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) to work directly writing tiny patterns in metallic “ink,” forming features in liquid that are finer than half the width of a human hair. Articles describing both are posted on the ORNL web site.

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Nice article; however, disappointed that the author expanded the exploration of programming in Quantum to include Google, MIT, U. Sydney, etc. who all have been exploring the programming on QC. D-Wave indeed is doing a lot in this space and has been even training numerous US Government personnel on QC; just would be interesting to learn more about the advances in this space from other players who have been sharing for several months their breakthroughs in programming QC.

The jury is still out when it comes to how wide-ranging the application set and market potential for quantum computing will be. Optimistic estimates project that in the 2020s it will be a billion-dollar field, while others expect the novelty will wear off and the one company behind the actual production of quantum annealing machines will go bust.

Ultimately, whichever direction the market goes with quantum computing will depend on two things. First, the ability for applications of sufficient value to warrant the cost of quantum systems have to be in place. Second, and connected to that point, is the fact that enough problems can be mapped to these machines—a tricky problem that if not solved, will lead to a limited ecosystem of capabilities and, of course, developers.

There is no doubt D-Wave understands this. The company is getting in front of those challenges by hosting quantum computing programming courses designed to onboard new developers. As one might imagine, however, determining the right background for participants is as nebulous as the future of the quantum computing ecosystem.

Continue reading “One thought on “So, You Want to Program Quantum Computers…”” | >