Lifeboat Foundation

Bill Gates shares how personalized learning is changing schools, The Verge reports.

We’ve been saying for ages that parents are among the best problem-solvers in the world, and the story behind Upsee confirms it. When Debby Elnatan’s second son Rotem was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, an umbrella term for a group of neuromuscular movement disorders that develop before birth or early in childhood, she decided that the physical therapists’ recommendations for Rotem to remain seated for most of the day weren’t going to work for her son. She wanted her little boy to move and walk and experience the world from a different viewpoint. The rub: he needed Debby’s help… a lot of it. So she took the matter into her own hands and crafted a device that would allow him to move with her, safely encouraging independence and helping to develop his muscles. Upsee is the result of years of tinkering with Debby’s original harness design to make it more comfortable, user-friendly, and ultimately more beneficial for the children using it. The current version includes different harness colors, an adjustable hip belt for the adult, and double sandals that allow the parent to help guide their child’s feet, effectively teaching them the movements of walking. Debby estimates that the Upsee has been sold in 100 countries: think about all those kiddos who are getting the thrill of walking for the first time!

Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

The Student Innovation Project, or SIP, gives students a chance to develop an innovative idea and put their creativity to work.

As soon as their sophomore year, students are asked to begin brainstorming for their SIP, and also have two classes that help students prepare for their project. Students take PRO211, taught by Professor Vita-Moore, and PRO 483, taught by Professor Belanger.

During senior year, students use most of the time to work on the SIP, constructing a working model that will later be judged at the SIP Fair by UAT Faculty and local industry leaders for feedback.

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Australia should go “Big Science” on addressing Cyber Security. I believe Australia is already making strides in Cyber Security with their own advancements in Quantum.

Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy, to be released this Thursday, will include an emphasis on research and development, as well as education. How might that unfold?

“This book considers two key educational tools for future generations of professionals with a space architecture background in the 21st century: (1) introducing the discipline of space architecture into the space system engineering curricula; and (2) developing space architecture as a distinct, complete training curriculum.”

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In an open-access paper in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Education, Winslow Burleson, PhD, MSE, associate professor, New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing, suggests that “advanced cyberlearning environments that involve VR and AI innovations are needed to solve society’s “wicked challenges*” — entrenched and seemingly intractable societal problems.

Burleson and and co-author Armanda Lewis imagine such technology in a year 2041 Holodeck, which Burleson’s NYU-X Lab is currently developing in prototype form, in collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch.

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Depends who is doing the creating. If a robot is created/ altered by ISIS to attack the western world then robots. At the same time, if a crazy scientist decides to genetically create Cyclops to take over the UK, US, etc. then the genetically alter species. Truly depends on the creator and the creator’s eye.

At Silicon Valley’s inaugural Comic Con, we gave a talk called “Superbabies vs. AI.” Astro, who is captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X division, argued that genetically engineered babies are going to destroy civilization as we know it. He sees the horror of eugenics, X-Men, and a planet entirely populated by the sort of kids who beat him up in middle school, all rolled into one. Danielle, a physician-scientist and wife of said captain of moonshots, argued that the robot apocalypse is going to annihilate humanity. Super intelligent computers will eventually destroy us all, no matter what sort of Asimovian instructions we try to give them. The jury is out about who won the debate, but here are the most important issues we explored.

Will highly evolved AI break into banking systems and steal all of our money or send drones to kill us all?

Continue reading “What will destroy us first: Superbabies or AI?” »

“Virtually all new fossil fuel-burning power-generation capacity will end up “stranded”. This is the argument of a paper by academics at Oxford university. We have grown used to the idea that it will be impossible to burn a large portion of estimated reserves of fossil fuels if the likely rise in global mean temperatures is to be kept below 2C. But fuels are not the only assets that might be stranded. A similar logic can be applied to parts of the capital stock.”

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