Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9607

I’ve spent most of the past two years focusing on issues like harmful content, elections integrity and privacy. I think it’s important to define what roles we want companies and governments to play in taking on these challenges, so I wrote this op-ed laying out how regulation can help.

Tech nology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks. These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone.

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas” | >

Artificial neural networks are the heart of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. Historically, the simplest implementation of an artificial neuron traces back to the classical Rosenblatt’s “perceptron”, but its long term practical applications may be hindered by the fast scaling up of computational complexity, especially relevant for the training of multilayered perceptron networks. Here we introduce a quantum information-based algorithm implementing the quantum computer version of a binary-valued perceptron, which shows exponential advantage in storage resources over alternative realizations. We experimentally test a few qubits version of this model on an actual small-scale quantum processor, which gives answers consistent with the expected results. We show that this quantum model of a perceptron can be trained in a hybrid quantum-classical scheme employing a modified version of the perceptron update rule and used as an elementary nonlinear classifier of simple patterns, as a first step towards practical quantum neural networks efficiently implemented on near-term quantum processing hardware.

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A few days back we talked about a joint NASA and ESA study that was being conducted in Germany looking at long term effects of weightlessness on astronauts and how artificial gravity might help them. More details have surfaced about that study, and it pays very well for doing nothing but laying in bed. The study pays participants $19,000 (16,500 euro) and is known as AGBRESA study 2019.

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The first Women in Science Open House aims to inspire young women in the STEM field.

Michelle Cash, program coordinator at the Sandy Creek Nature Center, the event has been something she has wanted to do for a long time. After speaking with an intern at the nature center, they realized now is the perfect time because of recent social movements and the increase of women in political power.

“I think this is a good time to recognize and start to make people aware that there’s women out there doing really good stuff for science and has been doing stuff for science for a long, long time,” Cash said.

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Regions Financial Corporation has barred its customers from purchasing cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

The US-based bank and financial service clarified in its 2018 bank deposit agreement that it reserved the right to “return or decline to pay” for items related to “decentralized, non-fiat virtual currencies, cryptocurrency or another digital currency or money that relies on distributed ledger or blockchain.”

2018 Regions Bank Deposit Agreement pic.twitter.com/mDtEr5T1ep

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The hunt for gravitational waves is back on. After a series of upgrades, the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) will resume its search for ripples in space and time on Monday, April 1.

LIGO is famous for making the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for which the observatory’s founders were awarded the Nobel Prize. The observatory was able to detect gravity waves generated by two colliding black holes which were located 1.3 billion light-years away from Earth, and since then has observed nine more black hole mergers and one collision of two neutron stars.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused by massive bodies which bend it like a bowling ball placed on a rubber sheet. They were predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity in 1916, but it took nearly a century for physicists to observe them because the effects are so small. Since these waves have been detected, they can be used to investigate cosmic objects as an alternative to light-based telescopes.

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