Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8981

Robots are about to go underground — for a competition anyways.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles.

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You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.

This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

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Hotel revenue management and use of analytics for room sales has remained largely unchanged for decades since the early 1980s when hotels started looking at yield and how they could optimize the revenue each room could generate. By the mid-1990’s, Marriott’s successful execution of revenue management strategies were adding between $150 — $200 million in annual revenue and thus marked the beginning of data intelligence to drive new revenue.

Fast forward to 2016 — and the part insight, part intuition, part data-driven approach to revenue management largely hasn’t moved into the new age of big data for most hoteliers.

There is a new application of data modelling hotels are utilizing to see big gains in RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) and this comes through price differentiation. That is — dynamically displaying different room rates for every person that views your hotel search price query.

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This presentation was posted by Jason Mayes, senior creative engineer at Google, and was shared by many data scientists on social networks. Chances are that you might have seen it already. Below are a few of the slides. The presentation provides a list of machine learning algorithms and applications, in very simple words. It also explain the differences between AI, ML and DL (deep learning.)

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In the U.S., air travel accounts for about a third of all Co2 emissions. A startup called ZeroAvia wants to clean things up in a big way.

ZeroAvia recently emerged from stealth with a zero-emission powertrain for small aircraft. It’s electric, but there are no big, bulky batteries involved. ZeroAvia opted for compressed hydrogen instead.

Why not use batteries? Compressed hydrogen is about four times as energy-dense as today’s best batteries. Founder, physicist and pilot Valery Miftakhov told FastCompany “actually getting a sizable aircraft in the air for a reasonable amount of time will be quite difficult with batteries.” That’s something he believes isn’t likely to change in the near future.

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In a session at the Crypto and Privacy Village within the DEF CON 27 conference in Las Vegas, Cat Murdock, security analyst at GuidePoint Security, outlined a nightmare scenario seemingly straight out of an episode of Black Mirror (the session, coincidentally, was titled Black Mirror: You Are Your Own Privacy Nightmare – The Hidden Threat of Paying For Subscription Services).

Murdock detailed how simply having a Netflix account could potentially be the key that enables an attacker to gain access to a user’s banking information. She noted that approximately 60% of the adult population pays for some form of online subscription service, be it Netflix, Spotify or something else. She also noted that everyone with an online subscription has a bank account.

One way a financial institution verifies an account holder when they try to gain access is to verify a recent transaction, which is where subscription services come into play. Murdock observed that there are only so many plans that a subscription service offers and the payments typically recur at the same time every month.

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