Lifeboat Foundation

In collaboration with a team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT experts have begun designing and testing technical research through which further examination of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can be performed in the U.S.

The effort, known as Project Hamilton, is in an exploratory phase, and the research is not intended as a pilot or for public deployment. Instead, the researchers have explored two different approaches that could be used to process transactions, and thus could indicate the technical feasibility of a potential CBDC model. In a process involving significant design flexibility, the MIT group tested factors such as the volume and speed of transactions, and the resilience of the systems in general, among other requirements for a viable digital currency.

“The core of what we built is a high-speed transaction processor for a centralized digital currency, to demonstrate the throughput, latency, and resilience of a system that could support a payment economy at the scale of the United States,” says Neha Narula, director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, who led the effort with the Boston Fed. “It is important to note that this project is not a comment on whether or not the U.S. should issue a CBDC—but work like this is vital to help determine the answer to that question. This project serves as a platform for creating and comparing more viable designs, and provides a place to experiment and collaborate on more advanced digital currency functionality.”

A hundred years of physics tells us that collective atomic vibrations, called phonons, can behave like particles or waves. When they hit an interface between two materials, they can bounce off like a tennis ball. If the materials are thin and repeating, as in a superlattice, the phonons can jump between successive materials.

Now there is definitive, experimental proof that at the nanoscale, the notion of multiple thin materials with distinct vibrations no longer holds. If the materials are thin, their atoms arrange identically, so that their vibrations are similar and present everywhere. Such structural and vibrational coherency opens new avenues in materials design, which will lead to more energy efficient, low-power devices, novel material solutions to recycle and convert waste heat to electricity, and new ways to manipulate light with heat for advanced computing to power 6G wireless communication.

The discovery emerged from a long-term collaboration of scientists and engineers at seven universities and two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories. Their paper, “Emergent Interface Vibrational Structure of Oxide Superlattices,” was published January 26 in Nature.

Texas Instruments revealed plans Thursday to invest $3.5 billion annually in its U.S. semiconductor chip manufacturing through 2025 as manufacturers face a global shortage of the tech necessary for an increasing number of goods.

The near-term investment figure marks a considerable uptick from the company’s capital expenditures in recent years. And from 2026 to 2030, the company said, it will continue investing in its manufacturing to the tune of 10% of annual revenue.

“It is increasingly clear that the secular growth of semiconductor content will continue for at least another 10 to 15 years,” the Dallas-based chipmaker’s chief executive, Rafael Lizardi, told analysts and investors during a presentation.

After NSO, another Israeli company, QuaDream, has been caught weaponizing iPhone bugs to deploy a spyware called Reign, similar to Pegasus.

A number of India-based call centers and their directors have been indicted for their alleged role in placing tens of millions of scam calls aimed at defrauding thousands of American consumers.

The indictment charged Manu Chawla, Sushil Sachdeva, Nitin Kumar Wadwani, Swarndeep Singh, Dinesh Manohar Sachdev, Gaje Singh Rathore, Sanket Modi, Rajiv Solanki and their respective call centers for conspiring with previously indicted VoIP provider E Sampark and its director, Guarav Gupta, to forward the calls to U.S. citizens.

“Criminal India-based call centers defraud U.S. residents, including the elderly, by misleading victims over the telephone utilizing scams such as Social Security and IRS impersonation as well as loan fraud,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a release.

Blockchain may one day eliminate inefficiencies and lack of transparency in supply chains. While slow in coming, this revolution would benefit not only customers and brands, but the invisible” workers who power global trade.

#Blockchain #SystemShock #BloomberQuicktake.

Continue reading “This Huge Bet on Blockchain Could Change A $50 Trillion Industry” »

“Today, simple warning systems are the most common means for aiding a rotorcraft aircrew, such as auditory alerts to increase altitude. These warning systems are limiting and can induce unanticipated cognitive burdens on pilots”, says Northrop Grumman. “Studies have shown that inattentional blindness to such warnings can occur, often making them ineffective for the aircrew.”

To help keep the AI assistant in sync with its human users, the software program will use sensors, worn by the pilots, to gauge what each human perceives and knows. The types of sensors were not disclosed, though eye-tracking technologies have been used for similar purposes in the past.

E verything is Code. Immersive [self-]simulacra. We all are waves on the surface of eternal ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness in motion, self-referential creative divine force expressing oneself in an exhaustible variety of forms and patterns throughout the multiverse of universes. “I am” the Alpha, Theta & Omega – the ultimate self-causation, self-reflection and self-manifestation instantiated by mathematical codes and projective fractal geometry.

In my new volume of The Cybernetic Theory of Mind series – The Omega Singularity: Universal Mind & The Fractal Multiverse – we discuss a number of perspectives on quantum cosmology, computational physics, theosophy and eschatology. How could dimensionality be transcended yet again? What is the fractal multiverse? Is our universe a “metaverse” in a universe up? What is the ultimate destiny of our universe? Why does it matter to us? What is the Omega Singularity?