Commentary
The crime scene was straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. One hundred and fifty dead birds lay sprawled on the ground, fallen out of trees in a park in The Hague, The Netherlands.
The second such occurrence last autumn made Dutch citizens look up and wonder. With robust starlings turned upside-down at their feet, the usual suspects of disease, pollution, and foul play were dismissed.
When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”
And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.
If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors.”
Today he may be making good on his prediction. The electric vehicle manufacturer confirmed that it has acquired a small San Diego lab that owns ultracapacitor patents and technology.
Maxwell Technologies provides dry electrode manufacturing technology that can be used to make to make batteries that power electric vehicles and renewable energy systems. The company announced that in an all-stock transaction it will merge and become a wholly owned by a subsidiary of Tesla.
It’s even more fascinating than we thought.
The Milky Way looks nothing like the flat space pancake it is usually depicted as. The newly-created and most accurate 3D map of our galaxy reveals that it’s warped and twisted, and even more fascinating.
A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their “intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture” by mapping the so-called “classical Cepheids.”
Burning their fuel quickly, those pulsating stars that live fast and die young are 100,000 times brighter than the Sun. The combination of their pulsation periods and known luminosity allowed the scientists to determine their location with the high accuracy of between 3 to 5 percent.
Now with its cover in place, our NASA InSight lander will collect accurate data despite wind and temperature changes on the Red Planet: https://go.nasa.gov/2St6gUj
US$190 million in investors’ money has been locked since Cotten died in December. His widow says she doesn’t know his passwords.
About US$190 million in cryptocurrency has been locked away in a online black hole after the founder of a currency exchange died, apparently taking his encrypted access to their money with him.
Investors in QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have been unable to access their funds since its founder, Gerald Cotten, died last year.
AI may quickly point out a corrupt official, but it is not very good at explaining the process it has gone through to reach such a conclusion.
“We just use the machine’s result as reference,” Zhang Yi, an official in a province that’s still using the software, told the SCMP. “We need to check and verify its validity. The machine cannot pick up the phone and call the person with a problem. The final decision is always made by humans.”
Algorithmic Justice
Though corruption in China is reportedly widespread, officials are probably right to be suspicious of a black box algorithm that can bring down the hammer of justice without explaining its reasoning.
What actually occurs in a superposition—the strange condition in which entities seem to be in two or more places or states at the same? This is the root question in quantum mechanics, and the answer was unknown until now. In a new research paper, a joint team of researchers from Israel and Japan, has described a novel experiment that could finally shed light on the true nature of this puzzling phenomenon.
The researchers estimate that their experiment, that can be carried out within a few months, could possibly allow scientists a sneak peek at where an object like a particle of light i.e. a photon will actually be when it is positioned in a superposition. And as per their predictions, the answer can be even stranger and more baffling than “two places at once.”
The characteristic occurrence of a superposition involves firing photons at two parallel slits into a barrier. One fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics is that the tiny particles can behave like waves, so that those passing through one slit “interfere” with those passing through the other. These wavy ripples either boost or cancel one another to create a new characteristic pattern on a detector screen. The oddest fact is that this interference occurs even if only a single particle is fired at a time. The particle seems to somehow pass through both slits simultaneously and displays interference with itself. This is a true superposition.
