Toggle light / dark theme

Allowing the driver of an autonomous vehicle to watch a movie, a dealer to sell automobiles from a “virtual” car lot, or an engineer to simulate how a new part fits: the auto industry is getting a tantalizing taste of the metaverse at the huge CES technology show.

One gadget on display in Las Vegas is an in-car television system, developed by French parts maker Valeo, that needs no remote.

To change the channel, drivers or passengers wearing a headset make a simple swipe in the air with their hand, and sensors in the car detect the movement.

Who has the best odds of winning?

In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.

For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021 but with much less fanfare.

Penguins may be self-aware.


A trio of researchers—one with the Indian government’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, another with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the third with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, also in India—has found that some species of wild penguins may have some degree of self-awareness.

Prabir Ghosh Dastidar, Azizuddin Khan and Anindya Sinha have written a paper describing their study of the behavior of Adélie in Antarctica and what they learned in their effort. The full paper is available on the bioRxiv preprint server.

Prior research has shown that self-awareness is rare in the —up to now, only a few mammals, some birds and some fish have been found to have it. In humans it is an easy thing to test, but in animals it takes some doing. Most studies looking for it have used what is known as the mirror test, where as its name suggests, test animals are allowed to see themselves in a mirror while researchers study their reactions.

A new drug that contains an ACE2 decoy molecule may be the way we stop COVID-19 permanently.


What’s Needed is a New Approach

A recent paper appearing in Science Advances published on December 7, 2022, describes a new approach to tackling COVID-19. A new drug in animal trials has shown effectiveness in stopping the spread of coronaviruses and all variants. It is the way this drug works that gives it a unique advantage not just to stop present Omicron and other COVID-19 versions but all future evolutions of the virus and other coronaviruses.

Why the confidence in this drug? Rather than synthesize antibodies to fight COVID-19 and create vaccines that deliver them to tag the virus (the mRNA approach), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has created a molecule that is an ACE2 receptor decoy.

Join us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhD

Bristle Discount Link (Oral Microbiome Quantification):
ConquerAging15
https://www.bmq30trk.com/4FL3LK/GTSC3/

TruDiagnostic Discount Link (Epigenetic Testing)
CONQUERAGING!
https://bit.ly/3Rken0n.

Quantify Discount Link (At-Home Blood Testing):

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

At their best, AI systems extend and augment the work we do, helping us to realize our goals. At their worst, they undermine them. We’ve all heard of high-profile instances of AI bias, like Amazon’s machine learning (ML) recruitment engine that discriminated against women or the racist results from Google Vision. These cases don’t just harm individuals; they work against their creators’ original intentions. Quite rightly, these examples attracted public outcry and, as a result, shaped perceptions of AI bias into something that is categorically bad and that we need to eliminate.

While most people agree on the need to build high-trust, fair AI systems, taking all bias out of AI is unrealistic. In fact, as the new wave of ML models go beyond the deterministic, they’re actively being designed with some level of subjectivity built in. Today’s most sophisticated systems are synthesizing inputs, contextualizing content and interpreting results. Rather than trying to eliminate bias entirely, organizations should seek to understand and measure subjectivity better.