March 2015 – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Sun, 04 Jun 2017 19:00:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 An Emerging Science of Clickbait https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/an-emerging-science-of-clickbait Tue, 31 Mar 2015 22:00:32 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13887 MIT Technology Review -


In the world of Internet marketing and clickbait, the secret of virality is analogous to the elixir of life or the alchemy that turns lead into gold. It exists as a kind of Holy Grail that many search for and few, if any, find.

The key question is this: what is the difference between stories that become viral and those that don’t?Read more

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Where Were You 3 Minutes Ago? Your Apps Know https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/where-were-you-3-minutes-ago-your-apps-know Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:00:05 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13885 By Elizabeth Dwoskin — Wall Street Journal

Dozens of smartphone apps collect so much location data that their publishers can plot users’ comings and goings in detail, a forthcoming peer-reviewed study found.

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University concluded that a dozen or so popular Android apps collected device location – GPS coordinates accurate to within 50 meters – an average 6,200 times, or roughly every three minutes, per participant over a two-week study period.

The research comes at a time of increasing concern about electronic privacy. A 2014 Pew survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans feel they’ve lost control over personal data. While savvy users understand that using mobile devices entails some privacy tradeoffs – for example, a navigation app will reveal their location to the app’s publisher – most don’t realize the extent to which such information is collected and distributed, the researchers said.
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The buzz of something new https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/the-buzz-of-something-new Mon, 30 Mar 2015 22:00:38 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13883 The Economist -


THIS year, some predict, will be the year of the microdrone. Small, pilotless aircraft—most of them helicopters with four or more sets of rotors and a payload slung between them—are moving out of the laboratory and into practical use. They are already employed for aerial photography and surveillance, particularly in Europe. In Paris, earlier this month, drones flying around the Eiffel tower caused a security scare. And in America, on March 19th, Amazon, a retailer, was given permission to test a drone designed to deliver its goods.

These drones, though, rely on an operator on the ground. Indeed, this is often a legal requirement. But it is also a constraint. If a world of microdrones really is to come about, then the craft will need to be able to cut the surly bonds of Earth and fly unsupervised. For that, they are going to have to get a lot more intelligent.Read more

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Transnationalism to Transhumanism: the Mont Order Club’s video discussion https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/transnationalism-to-transhumanism-the-mont-order-clubs-video-discussion Mon, 30 Mar 2015 19:46:56 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13907 The Mont Order Club hosted its first video conference in February 2015, as shown below.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Suggested topics included  transhumanism, antistatism, world events, movements, collaboration, and alternative media. The Mont Order is an affiliation of dissident writers and groups who share similar views on transnationalism and transhumanism as positive and inevitable developments.

Participants:

  • Harry Bentham (Beliefnet)
  • Mike Dodd (Wave Chronicle)
  • Dirk Bruere (Zero State)

For more information on Mont Order participants, see the Mont Order page at Beliefnet.

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Space Privatization, Tourism And Morals https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/space-privatization-tourism-and-morals Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:00:14 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13880 By: Leigh Cooper — Inside Science
Novel technologies, innovative engineering and breathtaking discoveries could be the story of the next 100 years of space exploration. But space travel involves more than math, telescopes and rovers according to the speakers at a session at last month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California. Modern space exploration mixes together governments and private companies, science and ethics, promise and possibilities.

Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, thinks that the desire to explore, which has pushed humans to cross oceans and conquer mountains, will continue to propel humans into space.

“I think what is happening now is as profound as the transition that took place among hunter gatherers when they left Africa 50 or 60 thousand years ago,” said Impey. “It took an amazing short time – just a couple hundred generations – for simple tribal units of 50 or 100 to spread essentially across the Earth.“Read more

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Intelligent robots must uphold human rights https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/intelligent-robots-must-uphold-human-rights https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/intelligent-robots-must-uphold-human-rights#comments Sun, 29 Mar 2015 22:00:20 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13878 Hutan Ashrafian  — nature.comhttp://images.sequart.org/images/i-robot-510ea6801c50a.jpg

There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and physicist Stephen Hawking have in recent months warned of the dangers of intelligent robots becoming too powerful for humans to control. The ethical conundrum of intelligent machines and how they relate to humans has long been a theme of science fiction, and has been vividly portrayed in films such as 1982’s Blade Runner and this year’s Ex Machina.Read more

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It’s Time For Robot Pilots https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/its-time-for-robot-pilots Sun, 29 Mar 2015 10:00:14 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13876 Jason Koebler — MotherBoard

http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/article/20326/1427390573566811.png?crop=1xw:0.8160465116279069xh;*,*&resize=2300:*&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=90
It’s increasingly looking like the plane that crashed Monday in France, killing 150 people, went down because one of the pilots ​turned off the autopilot and intentionally crashed it into the ground. Why are we still letting humans fly passenger planes?

The short answer is, we’re not really. It’s no secret that planes are already highly automated, and, with technology that’s available today (but that isn’t installed on the Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings that crashed), it would have been possible for someone in a ground station somewhere to have wrested control of the plane from those on board and reestablished autopilot (or to have piloted the plane from the ground)Read more

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Out of the box thinking fostered at unique school founded by tech giants https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/out-of-the-box-thinking-fostered-at-unique-school-founded-by-tech-giants Sat, 28 Mar 2015 22:00:16 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13865 The University of British Columbiahttp://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/SU770.jpgOne year ago, Tamara Etmannski became the first Canadian Global Impact Competition winner. The award earned her a scholarship to take part in a 10-week program at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University — a non-accredited institution that aims to solve the world’s greatest challenges through technology. The university was founded by tech legends Peter Diamandis, of the X PRIZE Foundation, and Ray Kurzweil, of Google.

Etmannski, now a UBC Faculty of Applied Science lecturer, is helping develop a new Masters of Engineering Leadership program, tied to the Sauder School of Business. As the second Canadian Global Impact Competition heats up — the winner will be announced April 2 — Etmannski explains how her experience at Singularity University transformed her thinking, and what engineering and business can teach each other.

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The Feel-Good Switch: The Radical Future of Emotion https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/the-feel-good-switch-the-radical-future-of-emotion Sat, 28 Mar 2015 10:00:17 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13863 By — SingularityHubhttp://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/nerve-cells-1000x400.jpg

For most of the last century, the study of emotions was not considered serious science. The problem was subjectivity. Science is objective, rigorously objective. Emotions, though, are internal states, so the only way to study them is through subjective inference (essentially asking people to report how they feel). But — because people lie, because we often misinterpret our emotions and because comparisons between subjects, that is the depth of my anger versus your anger, is impossible to measure—there’s no objective data to be found.

Thus, until recently, the topic was taboo.

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Tesla’s Model S will add self-driving ‘autopilot’ mode in three months https://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/03/teslas-model-s-will-add-self-driving-autopilot-mode-in-three-months Fri, 27 Mar 2015 22:00:12 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=13847 By Chris Welch — The Verge

Tesla’s preparing a software update that will bring powerful auto-steering functionality to its Model S fleet. During today’s press call — which mostly focused on curing range anxiety — CEO Elon Musk revealed that Tesla will ship a software update “in about three months” that will turn on auto-steering, or “autopilot” as Musk often refers to it. “We can basically go between San Francisco and Seattle without the driver doing anything,” Musk said of the autonomous system that Tesla has developed. For now, you’ll only be able to engage auto-steering on highways. We got a preview of the autopilot functionality during our initial test drive in the P85D, which you can watch below.
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