Lifeboat Foundation

Here comes another great month for stargazing. If you’ve been learning about the night sky during lockdown and paying attention to what goes on each evening in the skies above you may already have seen a bright naked-eye comet, a “Super Blood Moon” lunar eclipse and even a super-rare “great conjunction.”

Now get ready for some repeats—and some incredible new sights.

November will see a couple of meteor showers—the South and North Taurids—as well as the seventh planet, Uranus, at opposition. Those in North America may also get to see a big partial lunar eclipse on November 19 2021 and, if we’re all really lucky, our planet may just get treated to another rare sight as Comet Leonard pays us a visit. That’s due to look its best in December, but for now there’s plenty to get excited about in the November night skies … not least the return of the famous constellation of Orion “the hunter”.

Having machines turn text into speech is nothing new.

Professor Stephen Hawking communicated with a computerized voice for many years, and by now, we’re used to our GPS devices or smart speakers asking questions and responding to our queries.

What is different these days is that the quality of synthesized speech is improving, thanks to several companies using AI to create voice skins for enterprise companies and content creators that give more options for turning text into … See more.

Experts in the AI and Big Data sphere consider October 2021 to be a dark month. Their pessimism isn’t fueled by rapidly shortening days or chilly weather in much of the country—but rather by the grim news from Facebook on the effectiveness of AI in content moderation.

This is unexpected. The social media behemoth has long touted tech tools such as machine learning and Big Data as answers to its moderation woes. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained for CBS News, “The long-term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all—including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global.”

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered Level 4 and Level 5 while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that … See more.

Asphalt is all around us, that’s for sure.

Continue reading “Dump Truck Accident Pours Liquid Asphalt From Overpass Onto Vehicles Below, Providing Lessons For AI Self-Driving Cars” »

Solar PV panels are now a common site around the world and they do a great job. But they only work on flat surfaces. What about the millions of other surfaces that are not so conveniently shaped? That’s where flexible solar film comes in. The concept is not new but now a UK company has developed a unique Solar PV film that could make the technology accessible to millions more people in remote off grid areas in developing nations.

Power Roll Website.
https://powerroll.solar/unique-solar-film/

Continue reading “Solar PV film roll. Revolutionary new production technology” »

The research team lead by professor Pan Jian-Wei has upgraded their photonic quantum computer, demonstrating in a new published study phase-programmable Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) which produces up to 113 photon detection events out of a 144-mode photonic circuit. According to the researchers, the Jiuzhang 2.0 Photonic Quantum Computer (九章二号) is 10 billion times faster than its earlier version. The study “Phase-Programmable Gaussian Boson Sampling Using Stimulated Squeezed Light” was published in the journal Physical Review.

Credit: China Media Group(CMG)/China Central Television (CCTV)

Over 3,500 WiFi networks in Tel Aviv have been cracked by Israeli researchers.

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho Business Analytics software.

Hackers can exploit newly discovered techniques to hide vulnerabilities in source code.