Lifeboat Foundation

A.I. entrepreneur Gary Marcus thinks the technology is too important to cede to corporate control.

Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, thinks artificial intelligence could spark the greatest positive transformation education has ever seen. He shares the opportunities he sees for students and educators to collaborate with AI tools — including the potential of a personal AI tutor for every student and an AI teaching assistant for every teacher — and demos some exciting new features for their educational chatbot, Khanmigo.

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Continue reading “The Amazing AI Super Tutor for Students and Teachers | Sal Khan | TED” »

On April 28, NASA and its partners achieved another major milestone in the future of space communications — achieving 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) throughput on a space-to-ground optical link between a satellite in orbit and Earth, the highest data rate ever achieved by optical communications technology.

These data rates are made possible by using laser communications, which packs information into the oscillations of light waves in lasers, instead of using radio waves like most space communications systems.

-optical and even free space optics seems to be the future. People need to think about this when making devices.

Continue reading “NASA, Partners Achieve Fastest Space-to-Ground Laser Comms Link” »

A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.

The CVE-2023–32233 identifier has been reserved for the vulnerability, but a severity level is yet to be determined.

The security problem stems from Netfilter nf_tables accepting invalid updates to its configuration, allowing specific scenarios where invalid batch requests lead to the corruption of the subsystem’s internal state.

May 11 (Reuters) — Google announced a flurry of artificial intelligence products – but users might need AI just to understand them all.

The Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit on Wednesday demonstrated or referenced at least 15 different AI products and features ranging from software solely for creating smartphone wallpaper to another for organizing personal files to yet another for photo editing.

Attendees of Google’s I/O conference in Mountain View, California, could be forgiven for leaving the annual event with their heads spinning. Take one of Google’s press releases from the event: “Duet AI serves as your expert pair programmer and assists cloud users with contextual code completion, offering suggestions tuned to your code base, generating entire functions in real-time, and assisting you with code reviews and inspections.”

Cell division is a standard biological process we all learned about in high school. While this process becomes more complex with more advanced study, there | Immunology.

The costs used to recover the deposits for the failed US regional banks will be paid by other US banks especially the larger banks.

The largest US lenders face billions of dollars in extra fees to replenish the government’s bedrock deposit insurance fund. The move comes after the fund was tapped to backstop uninsured depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Su Keenan reports on Bloomberg Television.

Continue reading “Big Banks Face Billions in Extra FDIC Fees After SVB Failure” »

Long rumored but never confirmed, a new app that combines Disney+ and Hulu content is finally on the horizon. Disney CEO Bob Iger made the announcement during the company’s second-quarter earnings call and suggested the new app would be on the market by the end of 2023.

“I’m pleased to announce that we will soon begin offering a one app experience domestically that incorporates our Hulu content via Disney+, while we continue to offer Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ as standalone options,” he said. “This is a logical progression of our [direct-to-consumer] offerings that will provide greater opportunities for advertisers, while giving bundle subscribers access to more robust and streamline content, resulting in greater audience engagement and ultimately leading to a more unified streaming experience. We will begin to roll out this one app offering by the end of the calendar year and we look forward to sharing more details in the future.”

A transition to a carbon-free economy is the reality of the modern energy industry. Reduction in CO₂ emission is one of the main challenge in energy engineering in the last decades. Renewable energy sources are playing an important role on the way to a zero-carbon economy [1,2]. Solar energy is one of the main and almost unlimited energy sources in the World. The different technologies of solar energy use have been developed in the last years [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]]. However, even though the progress in the development of solar energy technologies is notable, there are a lot of challenges for energy science. One of them is the fact that more than 60% of electricity is produced by conventional technologies via hydrocarbon fuel combustion: steam turbines, gas turbines, etc. While the share of electricity produced by using solar energy is no more than a few percent [9].

Among various ways of utilization of solar energy for electricity generation, a combination of solar energy with the traditional steam and gas turbine cycles can be highlighted. The power plants where solar energy is combined with conventional power cycles are named integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS). In these systems, solar energy is used to produce heat and after that heat is used to generate mechanical work or electricity.

Combined cycle power plants (CCPP) show one of the highest energy efficiency among conventional power plants [10]. The modern cycles with high-temperature gas turbines have an efficiency up to 70% and even higher. In such cycles, the high-temperature gas turbines with the turbine inlet temperature (TIT) up to 1,600 °C are applied [11,12]. In the last years, a lot of various integrated solar combined cycle systems (ISCCS) were developed by various scientists and engineers. The main way to use solar energy in such cycles is a steam generation in CCPP [[13], [14], [15], [16]]. In other words, solar energy in such ISCCS is utilized as an energy source in a steam turbine cycle.