Hackers could shut them down—or turn them into weapons.
[Source Images: 3DSculptor/iStock, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center]
Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk says if people are negative about the present, then they aren’t reading enough history. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett also agree this is the best time to be alive.
Coronvirus fears are being raised in earnings calls throughout different sectors as Wall Street looks for any effects from the virus spreading within and outside of China, which should lead to a lot of talk on what could be the busiest single day of the earnings season.
Nearly 10% of the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.18%, 46 components, are scheduled to report on Wednesday, along with four members of the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, −0.09% — Boeing Co. BA, −0.68%, Dow Inc. DOW, +0.68%, McDonald’s Corp. MCD, −0.15% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.89%.
The company on that list most linked to coronavirus fears is McDonald’s, which has had to temporarily shut down some of its stores in China due to fears about the outbreak. During the SARS crisis in the early 2000s, there was a “pronounced but relatively short-lived” impact on restaurant sales in the Greater China region, according to Bernstein analyst Sara Senatore. China accounts for only 2% of McDonald’s earnings and the company has only closed about 1% of its China stores so far, so expect executives to play down any effects when they report before the bell Wednesday.
AI starts playing an important role in design. So should designers be worried about it? Will AI-enabled systems take over jobs that require creativity?
Prosthetic hands restore only some of the function lost through amputation. But combining electrical signals from forearm muscles with other sources of information, such as eye tracking, promises better prostheses. A study funded by the SNSF gives specialists access to valuable new data.
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The hand is a precious limb. Its 34 muscles and 20 joints enable movements of great precision and complexity which are essential for interacting with the environment and with others on a daily basis. Hand amputation thus has severe physical and psychological repercussions on a person’s life. Myoelectric prosthetic hands, which work by recording electrical muscle signals on the skin, allow amputees to regain some lost function. But dexterity is often limited and the variability of the electrical signals from the forearm alone makes the prosthetics sometimes unreliable. Henning Müller, professor of business informatics, is investigating how combining data from myoelectric signals with other sources of information could lead to better prosthetics. Müller has now made available to the scientific community a dataset that includes eye tracking and computer vision as well as other information (electromyography and acceleration sensor data).
Yes, you can detect another person’s consciousness. Christof Koch described a method called ‘zap and zip’. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is the ‘zap’. Brain activity is detected with an EEG and analyzed with a data compression algorithm, which is the ‘zip’. Then the value of the perturbational complexity index (PCI) is calculated. If the PCI is above 0.31 then you are conscious. If the PCI is below 0.31 then you are unconscious. If this link does not work then go to the library and look at the November 2017 issue of Scientific American. It is the cover story.
Zapping the brain with magnetic pulses while measuring its electrical activity is proving to be a reliable way to detect consciousness.
