A genetic therapy has improved the vision of patients who would otherwise have gone blind.
A clinical study by British scientists has shown that the improvement is long-lasting and so the therapy is suitable to be offered as a treatment.
The researchers will apply for approval to begin trials to treat more common forms of blindness next year.
Posted in economics, energy, sustainability
Nice
Mark L. Clifford on China, renewable energy, and economic growth.
By young china watchers for the diplomat.
April 29, 2016.
LeEco is known as the “Netflix of China” due to its very popular video streaming service, but the conglomerate also has interests in a much wider range of sectors including smartphones, TVs and electric vehicles.
Ding Lei, LeEco’s auto chief and a former top official at General Motors’ China venture with SAIC Motor, says part of LeEco’s advantage in tomorrow’s auto industry is that it carries no baggage from today’s.
This, the man said, is the future of cars, and the Chinese consumer electronics company LeEco is going to make that future a reality.
Luv this.
He too wears a golden robe and sings chants.
Standing at just over half a metre tall, Xian’er is the product of a collaboration between Longquan temple on the outskirts of Beijing, a technology company and local universities specializing in artificial intelligence.
Hmmm;
The latest figures are a clear sign that India’s largest outsourcing firms are succeeding at ‘non-linear’ growth, where revenues increase disproportionately compared with hiring.
While the numbers are good news for an industry that is trying to defend profit margins, it raises concerns over the future of hiring and the availability of engineering jobs in a sector that employs over three million people.
“What you’re seeing now is about 200,000 people being hired in the IT industry — it’s not the 4–5 lakhs that they used to hire 10 years ago. And that’s because the growth has shrunk from 35–40% and the competition was for resources. Even now the competition is for resources, but it’s for slightly more experienced resources — people who can work on automation, artificial intelligence, machine languages, data sciences. So, it’s not hiring for Java coding anymore,” said Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in a recent interview.
There’s a website on the Dark Web offering to store Dox and accept a ransom payment to have it removed; provided the person responsible for uploading the information pays a commission and a processing fee to the website for services rendered.
In addition, it also provides a Doxing-as-a-Service platform, which promises to collect a complete profile on a person for $150.
The website is Ran$umBin (Ransom Bin). Designed to be friendly, easy to use extortion service, its existence was brought to Salted Hash’s attention by Cymmetria’s head of threat intelligence research, Nitsan Saddan. For those not familiar, Cymmetria is a cyber deception startup founded by Gadi Evron and Dean Sysman.
Posted in robotics/AI
China’s love of robots.
The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China’s Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust — the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process — clogs the air. As workers haul trolleys across the factory floor, the cavernous, shed-like building reverberates with a loud clanging.
Guangdong is the growth engine of China’s manufacturing industry, generating $615bn in exports last year — more than a quarter of the country’s total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ($600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans.
