Lifeboat Foundation

“I want to build a transformational technology company that stands the test of time,” Kinsel says.

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Pat Kinsel, 36 started Notarize after selling his previous company, mobile-data collection firm Spindle, to Twitter in 2013 and realizing that the notary had failed to sign his documents. Without the signature, the documents became invalid, despite being stamped, a major headache for Kinsel.

Continue reading “Next Billion-Dollar Startups: How Notarize Built A $760 Million Business In Online Notaries” »

Axiom Space, a venture-backed unicorn building the next generation International Space Station, is teaming up with Discovery Channel to give away a trip to the space station onboard SpaceX to the winner of a series of rigorous challenges meant to simulate astronaut training. The series is expected to air in 2022 and for those wanting to go up, casting is underway at discovery.com/astronaut. What this means is that the commercialization of space is happening in a very real way. No longer the realm of science fiction, private startups are joining forces with Fortune 500 companies to build industrial complexes in low Earth orbit for a multitude of commercial purposes including research, development, manufacturing, climate sensing, and even hospitality, with space hotels being planned to serve as WeWorks for those seeking off-planet retreats and remote work offices. you ever gazed up at the stars and wondered what it would feel like to be looking back down at Earth? Are you a space enthusiast who would give anything to travel to space, but never thought you’d have an opportunity? Welcome to WHO WANTS TO BE AN ASTRONAUT — the ultimate chance of a lifetime. Compete for a seat on a flight to the International Space Station where the winner will be able to do something only a handful of humans have ever done…travel into space.

We’re not looking for rocket scientists — this is an opportunity for regular people to have the chance to travel to space and share that journey with the world. (Ok, ok, if you’re a rocket scientist you’re welcome to apply too!)

If this sounds like a mission you want to be part of, now is your chance. Fill out the application below and submit a short video (30−60 seconds) telling us about yourself, why you deserve a chance to travel to space, what it would mean to you, and why you want to participate. We can’t wait to hear from you.

AI.Reverie offered APIs and a platform that procedurally generated fully annotated synthetic videos and images for AI systems. Synthetic data, which is often used in tandem with real-world data to develop and test AI algorithms, has come into vogue as companies embrace digital transformation during the pandemic. In a recent survey of executives, 89% of respondents said synthetic data will be essential to staying competitive. And according to Gartner, by 2,030 synthetic data will overshadow real data in AI models.

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Facebook has quietly acquired AI.Reverie, a New York-based startup creating synthetic data to train machine learning models, VentureBeat has learned.

How feasible is it to build a Jupiter brain, a computer the size of a planet? Just in the past few decades, the amount of computational power that’s available to humanity has increased dramatically. Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the NASA computers used to send astronauts to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Computers have become integral to our lives, becoming the backbone of our communications, finances, education, art, health care, military, and entertainment. In fact, it would be hard to find an area of our lives that computers didn’t affect.

Now imagine that one day we make a computer that’s the size of an entire planet. And we’re not talking Earth, but larger, a megastructure the size of a gas giant like Jupiter. What would be the implications for humans to operate a computer that size, with an absolutely enormous, virtually limitless, amount of computing power? How would our lives change? One certainly begins to conjure up the transformational effects of having so much oomph, from energy generation to space travel and colonization to a fundamental change in the lifespan and abilities of future humans.

Continue reading “How to Make a Jupiter Brain — A Computer the Size of a Planet” »

A Japanese startup at CES is claiming to have solved one of the biggest problems in medical technology: Noninvasive continuous glucose monitoring. Quantum Operation Inc, exhibiting at the virtual show, says that its prototype wearable can accurately measure blood sugar from the wrist. Looking like a knock-off Apple Watch, the prototype crams in a small spectrometer which is used to scan the blood to measure for glucose. Quantum’s pitch adds that the watch is also capable of reading other vital signs, including heart rate and ECG.

The company says that its secret sauce is in its patented spectroscopy materials which are built into the watch and its band. To use it, the wearer simply needs to slide the watch on and activate the monitoring from the menu, and after around 20 seconds, the data is displayed. Quantum says that it expects to sell its hardware to insurers and healthcare providers, as well as building a big data platform to collect and examine the vast trove of information generated by patients wearing the device.

Quantum Operation supplied a sampling of its data compared to that made by a commercial monitor, the FreeStyle Libre. And, at this point, there does seem to be a noticeable amount of variation between the wearable and the Libre. That, for now, may be a deal breaker for those who rely upon accurate blood glucose readings to determine their insulin dosage.

Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s center. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object.

“The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarization. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a Ph.D. student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

“The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100 and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

The opening scene of a brief online documentary by Chinese state-run media channel CGTN shows jaywalkers in Shenzhen getting captured on video, identified, and then shamed publicly in real-time. The report is supposed to highlight the country’s prowess in artificial intelligence, yet it reveals a lesser-known truth: China’s AI isn’t so much a tool of world domination as a narrowly deployed means of domestic control.

On paper, the US and China appear neck and neck in artificial intelligence. China leads in the share of journal citations — helped by the fact that it also publishes more while the US is far ahead in the more qualitative metric of cited conference papers, according to a recent report compiled by Stanford University. So while the world’s most populous country is an AI superpower, investors and China watchers shouldn’t put too much stock in the notion that its position is unassailable or that the US is weaker. By miscalculating the others’ abilities, both superpowers risk overestimating their adversary’s strengths and overcompensating in a way that could lead to a Cold War-style AI arms race.

Our planet is in crisis.

From increasing storms, wild fires and extinctions, to the pollution of our water and the possible failure of our food systems, we are on the brink of a disaster of epic proportions.

Continue reading “Can We Save Our Planet. Creating A Future We Can All Embrace” »

Exclusive: UK scientist says giving booster jabs rather than sharing doses equitably will cause hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s proposed changes to recommendations for using low-dose aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke closely align with guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.