Lifeboat Foundation

A New Yorker review of “Roadrunner,” a documentary about the deceased celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, reveals that a peculiar method was used to create a voice over of an email written by Bourdain. In addition to using clips of Bourdain’s voice from various media appearances, the filmmaker says he had an “A.I. model” of Bourdain’s voice created in order to complete the effect of Bourdain ‘reading’ from his own email in the film. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

On Twitter, some media observers decided to start the panel right away.

“This is unsettling,” tweeted Mark Berman, a reporter at the Washington Post, while ProPublica reporter and media manipulation expert Craig Silverman tweeted “this is not okay, especially if you don’t disclose to viewers when the AI is talking.” Indeed, “The ‘ethics panel’ is supposed to happen BEFORE they release the project,” tweeted David Friend, Entertainment reporter at The Canadian Press.

Now just need to go to rat monkey human.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have imaged an entire mouse brain across five orders of magnitude of resolution, a step which researchers say will better connect existing imaging approaches and uncover new details about the structure of the brain.

The advance, which was published on June 9 in NeuroImage, will allow scientists to connect biomarkers at the microscopic and macroscopic level. It leveraged existing advanced X-ray microscopy techniques at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne, to bridge the gap between MRI and electron microscopy imaging, providing a viable pipeline for multiscale whole brain imaging within the same brain.

Continue reading “Researchers image an entire mouse brain for the first time” »

Argonne researchers across the laboratory complex are using AI to design better materials and processes, safeguard the nation’s power grid, accelerate medical treatments, automate traditional research, and drive discovery.

Armed with some of the world’s brightest minds and best computing resources, Argonne is at the forefront of AI research, playing an integral role in applying innovative AI methods to solve problems and change lives.

The inventor of the first robot in Greece, Konstantinos Soukos, has pushed Greece into a new era by creating laser weapons that target drones.

When the inventor and businessman Konstantinos Soukos built the first robot in Greece in 1985, he did not imagine that 36 years later he would supply many military forces across the world.

Continue reading “The Greek Laser Weapon That Hits Drones Every 2-3 Seconds” »

BlenderBot 2.0 is better at conducting more extended, more knowledgeable, and factually consistent conversations over multiple sessions than the existing state-of-the-art chatbot. BlenderBot’s improved conversational abilities have made it a serious contender for artificial intelligence research.

The AI model takes the information it gets from conversations and stores them in long-term memory. The knowledge is stored separately for each person they speak to, which ensures that new information learned in one conversation can’t be used against another.

This model can read and respond in real-time, making it an excellent tool for keeping up with current events. It can scan the internet for new information to have a more up-to-date conversation.

CA to build middle-mile network open to all ISPs and give $2B in last-mile grants.

New Zealand drone company considerably accelerates the pace of the nation’s program to plant a billion trees by 2028.

Facepalm: Microsoft is once again advising its customers to disable Windows print spooler, after a new vulnerability that allows hackers to execute malicious code on machines has emerged. While a patch fixing the flaw will be released in due course, the most effective workaround currently on the table is to stop and disable the print spooler service entirely.

This is the third print spooler vulnerability to emerge in just five weeks. While a critical flaw was originally identified and patched in June, a similar flaw – dubbed PrintNightmare – came to light shortly after and was subsequently patched (with mixed success).

Continue reading “Disable Windows print spooler or you could be hacked, says Microsoft” »

For the first time, space weather disruptions triggered by the Sun were measured using pulsars with the help of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) in Pune.

Usually weighing 1.5 times more than the sun, pulsars are massive stars which rotate at a very high speed (up to 600 rotations per minute) and emit periodic radio flashes. Pulsars are considered the most accurate clocks in the universe and scientists accurately predict their flashes.

Using uGMRT, astronomers record pulsar radio flashes once every 14 days and it was during one such observation in February 2019 that they chanced upon Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). One such disruption, resultant CME, was confirmed based on the abnormally-delayed radio signals received from PSRJ2145 – 0750, the pulsar source under uGMRT observation, on February 23, 2019.