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.
RPI’s new material takes semiconducting transistors to new levels.
Two-dimensional phosphane, a material known as phosphorene, has potential application as a material for semiconducting transistors in ever faster and more powerful computers. But there’s a hitch. Many of the useful properties of this material, like its ability to conduct electrons, are anisotropic, meaning they vary depending on the orientation of the crystal. Now, a team including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has developed a new method to quickly and accurately determine that orientation using the interactions between light and electrons within phosphorene and other atoms-thick crystals of black phosphorus. Phosphorene—a single layer of phosphorous atoms—was isolated for the first time in 2014, allowing physicists to begin exploring its properties experimentally and theoretically. Vincent Meunier, head of the Rensselaer Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy and a leader of the team that developed the new method, published his first paper on the material—confirming the structure of phosphorene—in that same year.
“This is a really interesting material because, depending on which direction you do things, you have completely different properties,” said Meunier, a member of the Rensselaer Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (cMDIS). “But because it’s such a new material, it’s essential that we begin to understand and predict its intrinsic properties.”
Meunier and researchers at Rensselaer contributed to the theoretical modeling and prediction of the properties of phosphorene, drawing on the Rensselaer supercomputer, the Center for Computational Innovations (CCI), to perform calculations. Through the Rensselaer cMDIS, Meunier and his team are able to develop the potential of new materials such as phosphorene to serve in future generations of computers and other devices. Meunier’s research exemplifies the work being done at The New Polytechnic, addressing difficult and complex global challenges, the need for interdisciplinary and true collaboration, and the use of the latest tools and technologies, many of which are developed at Rensselaer.
Blockchaining coming to healthcare digital services.
Blockchain and digital health services could be a perfect match for each other across a variety of applications. From distributed interoperable health records to proof of adherence for medication, the healthcare industry is ripe for digital innovation. More generally, technology is a hyper-deflationary force, and this could be particularly effective in delivering quality health care through more effective channels such as mobile apps.
Investments in the digital health space have increased significantly in the past two years. This is largely possible because of improved low-power sensors and user-friendly cloud platforms that interface with those hardware devices. The Rock Health Funding Database shows a $4.5 billion increase in venture funding in digital health from 2014 to 2015.
Smart contract technology is built on top of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and is a hallmark of “Bitcoin 2.0” platforms. Blockchain is the fundamental infrastructure needed for Bitcoin transactions to work, and an enabling technology for the next generation of asset-based platforms.
