Lifeboat Foundation

U.S. company can keep hosting vast coronavirus-related project but must protect French citizens’ health data from American government, court rules.

A French court has ruled that Microsoft Corp. can continue hosting a government-run project aggregating citizens’ anonymous health data to use for AI-based research, but must guarantee no data will be sent to the U.S. or be shared with American intelligence authorities.

The ruling, handed down last week, contradicts the stance of France’s data protection authority, which told the court this month that any U.S. cloud provider could be forced to comply with U.S. surveillance laws and should therefore not be allowed to host sensitive health data. The regulator’s opinion could provide clues for other companies handling such data, legal experts say.

Continue reading “French Court Asks Microsoft for Safeguards Against U.S. Surveillance of Health Data” »

Earlier this month, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez split the 2020 physics Nobel Prize for decades of work on black holes. Click here to learn more about their monumental achievement and about the history of our understanding of these exotic objects in space.

Why is one particular intellectual capacity valued over so many other worthy qualities, like compassion, honesty, courage, and common sense?

A t some point during the past decade, Harvard professor Michael Sandel started to notice the increasingly frequent invocation of a particular word: “smart.” The term was being applied to all manner of products and devices: smart phones, smart cars, smart thermostats, even smart toasters. He also heard the word creeping into the language of politics, employed to justify and promote governmental initiatives. “The way the word was being used bothered me,” Sandel says. “It seemed to pair a narrow kind of technocratic expertise with an attitude of smug superiority.”

Political philosopher that he is, Sandel decided to conduct an analysis of presidential rhetoric. Before the 1980s, he found, American presidents rarely used the word “smart” in their public speeches. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush employed the term relatively sparingly. But the use of the word in presidential remarks “exploded” during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Sandel reported, with each man uttering the word “smart” at least 450 times. Barack Obama spoke it more than 900 times, and Hillary Clinton often invoked the term both as Secretary of State and as a candidate running for the highest office. This “rhetorical tic,” Sandel came to recognize, was representative of a much more sweeping cultural change, one he addresses with concern in his new book, “The Tyranny of Merit.” Over the past 40 years, he observes, America’s ruling class has exalted one quality, one virtue, one human attribute above all others: smartness.

Continue reading “A smarter way of thinking about intelligence” »

Ocean of Things was outlined by DARPA in 2017 and the rough idea revolved around deploying small drifters in the Southern California Bight and Gulf of Mexico to collect data on environmental and human impacts. The small devices collect sea temperature and state, surface activities and data on marine life.

PARC’s contract calls for up to 10,000 more compact drifters. In phase one of Ocean of Things PARC built 1,500 drifters.

Two years after it left Earth, Mercury probe BepiColombo has completed the first of its first flybys of Venus. The manoeuvre is designed to give the spacecraft a boost on its journey — but it’s also too good an opportunity to pass up for a little science.

As it swung around the planet on a curved trajectory, BepiColombo gave its instruments a workout, testing their functionality for a taste of what the spacecraft will do in Mercury orbit and collecting some data on Venus – recently in the news for the discovery of phosphine gas in its atmosphere.

And the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) probe took a whole lot of images, which the ESA compiled into a video of the flyby.

SpaceX is a leader in aerospace innovation. The company was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with the ultimate mission to make life multiplanetary. For over a decade, SpaceX teams have worked to develop technologically advanced rockets and spacecraft. Developing rockets comes with many challenges. SpaceX had a couple of failed missions in the early days. The company went from almost not making it to orbit to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States in 2020.

The company’s first rocket, Falcon 1, failed to attain Earth orbit three times: in March 2007 and August 2008, but in September 2008 SpaceX became the first American private company to send a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit. Despite the challenges, SpaceX pushed through until the fourth rocket launch reached orbit. A fourth failure “would have been absolutely game over,” Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress conference in 2017. “Fortunately, the fourth launch, which was … the last money that we had for Falcon 1 –that fourth launch worked. Or it would have been… that would have been it for SpaceX,” he said. The company was able to land a government contract from NASA when it reached orbit.

SpaceX then worked to develop an improved version of the rocket. In 2010, the company launched the Falcon 9, powered by nine Merlin 1D engines. Falcon 9 was designed so that its first-stage could be reused. Other companies use expendable rockets. SpaceX engineers accomplished developing the world’s first orbital-class rocket capable of returning from space to perform a controlled landing powered by its engines. Falcon 9 is capable of launching payload to orbit and landing soon after liftoff. In 2015 a Falcon 9 first-stage booster returned to Earth near its launch site for the first time, after several explosive landings (video below).

Extreme events occur in many observable contexts. Nature is a prolific source: rogue water waves surging high above the swell, monsoon rains, wildfire, etc. From climate science to optics, physicists have classified the characteristics of extreme events, extending the notion to their respective domains of expertise. For instance, extreme events can take place in telecommunication data streams. In fiber-optic communications where a vast number of spatio-temporal fluctuations can occur in transoceanic systems, a sudden surge is an extreme event that must be suppressed, as it can potentially alter components associated with the physical layer or disrupt the transmission of private messages.

Recently, extreme events have been observed in quantum cascade lasers, as reported by researchers from Télécom Paris (France) in collaboration with UC Los Angeles (USA) and TU Darmstad (Germany). The giant pulses that characterize these extreme events can contribute the sudden, sharp bursts necessary for communication in neuromorphic systems inspired by the brain’s powerful computational abilities. Based on a quantum cascade laser (QCL) emitting mid-infrared light, the researchers developed a basic optical neuron system operating 10,000× faster than biological neurons. Their report is published in Advanced Photonics.

Morgan Stanley, the New York-based investment bank, has nearly doubled its valuation of Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, from $52 billion in July to over $100 billion, it said in a research note issued Thursday. The bank’s so-called “bull case”–its absolute best-case scenario–puts SpaceX at a value above $200 billion.

The investment bank says that SpaceX’s Starlink internet-from-satellites service has driven a near $50 billion increase in the rocket company’s value since July. Forbes is sticking with investors’ more conservative valuation.

In the 2013 science fiction film “Elysium” starring Matt Damon, Earth’s wealthiest 0.01% move to the ultimate gated community, a luxurious orbiting space colony, leaving a poverty-stricken humanity to fend for themselves on a ravaged planet.

Interestingly, it is indeed some of today’s 0.1% who are leading the way into space to build communities beyond Earth. However, quite the opposite of the movie, their goals are of the highest order, from democratizing access to space by lowering costs, to creating new products and ideas, to helping save the planet and opening space to future generations.

Yet, given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, social justice and green movements, even as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson spend billions to support a human breakout into space, there is a backlash building that holds these projects as icons of extravagance — even as their work may help save the Earth. This is the “Elysium effect.”