2 New England beaches are among the best in the country … – Boston.com

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Need two more reasons to look forward to summer? Ogunquit Beach in Ogunquit, Maine, and Race Point Beach in Provincetown recently nabbed spots on TripAdvisors 2017 Travelers Choice list of the 25 best beaches in the United States.

The travel site used both the quantity and quality of reviews and ratings posted between November 2015 and November 2016, plus a proprietary algorithm, to determine award-worthy beaches around the world.

Spot No. 14 on the list of top 25 U.S. beaches went to Ogunquit Beach. According to TripAdvisor reviews, its beachgoers are big fans of the wide, clean space and enjoy that gift shops and eateries are within walking distance of the waterfront. TripAdvisor says the best time to visit Ogunquit Beach is between June and September.

Provincetowns Race Point Beach was awarded spot No. 23. TripAdvisor userscommented on the whale-watching opportunities, soft sand, beauty of the dunes, and ample parking spaces. The travel site recommends heading down the Cape to this seashore spot between June and August.

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Sewage spill closes beaches near Bangor – Kitsap Sun

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BANGOR Health officials issued a seven-day no-contact advisory Monday for beaches between Lofall and an area north ofSeabeck following a5,000-gallon sewage spill at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor.

The sewage discharge began Thursday and was corrected Monday morning, according to a Kitsap Public Health District news release citing information provided by the Navy. The Navy reported the spill to health officials Monday.

The closure covers the east shore of Hood Canal from Kitsap Memorial State Park south to the area of Sunset Farm, north of Seabeck.The health district is posting advisory signsat public beaches.

The public is advised to avoid swimming, wading and other types of contact with the water in the affected area. People who are exposed should washimmediately with soap and water.

Residents are advisedto not gather shellfish in the area. The health district recommends against harvesting shellfish anywhere in the county during and after heavy rains because of an increased risk of illness from water-borne pathogens and pollution.

The spill at Bangor was the latest in a series of sewage dischargesthat have affected beaches this winter in Kitsap. Massive spills in Seattle closed beaches on the east side of Bainbridge Island and North Kitsap this month. The health district lifted a no-contact advisory for those areas Feb. 21.

For information and updates on no-contact orders, go to kitsappublichealth.org/beaches.

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Photographer taking pictures of young girls on beaches prompts angry parents’ protest in St Ives – Cornwall Live

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Angry parents are holding a protest in St Ives against a photographer taking pictures of young girls in their swimwear on the town's beaches and posting them on a website.

It was revealed last week that a photographer, known only by an alias, had shared hundreds of pictures of young girls on the internet. Many were taken with a long lens without the parents' consent.

They were shared on a website called Deviant Art. Since enquiries were made of the website last week, the photographer has removed almost all the pictures of girls and replaced them with general shots of St Ives. Galleries of children listed by year, called, for instance, 'Girls 2013' have also been removed.

The police said last week that the photographer was not doing anything illegal and officers had spoken to a man in St Ives. They said they had examined his computer and did not find any indecent images.

Read next: St Ives man Paul Salt took pictures of girls on the beach and had 4,000 indecent images

But parents have reacted with anger that the practice was going on in the first place, and Chloe Gold, who lives in the town, has now organised a 'silent protest'.

She said: "This is not a lynch mob and we are not targeting one person or any individual. This is about raising awareness of this issue. We've got so many people who live in St Ives in a bubble and have not realised what is going on.

"This is not about the content of the pictures either. I've had people saying to me they are not indecent images. This is about, collectively, who they belong to, who they've been taken of and how they've been used. For me, the police are not acting quickly enough and I think the law should be changed. People are very, very angry that someone can do this.

"When I first saw the website, I felt sick. To be honest, I also felt sad and, in some way, that we are all to blame for allowing this to happen. If we don't talk about this, how are our children going to talk about it?"

Read next: Last chance for St Ives alcoholic who stole 30,000 from mother's life savings

She said the police had been informed of the protest and added that anyone concerned about the issues, and particularly if they feared their children may have been pictured, was welcome to join them.

The protest will be held on Tuesday at 10am on the harbour front outside The Sloop pub. A second protest is being organised by the fire station on Higher Stennack at about 5.30pm on Tuesday, for anyone who is working in the day and unable to attend the morning event.

Read next: St Ives residents packed out Edward Hain Hospital meeting but NHS absences were noted

Cornwall Live contacted the website provider and a spokesman for Deviant Art said: "Deviant Art enjoys an excellent reputation in its cooperation with law enforcement and we will take immediate action when alerted to criminal conduct by appropriate authorities as our policies do not permit the posting of illegal and unlawful content.

"This particular user of the website has posted many photographs, the majority consisting of non-controversial subjects. We have no indication or record of criminal behaviour by this user."

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Photographer taking pictures of young girls on beaches prompts angry parents' protest in St Ives - Cornwall Live

Palm Beach County tourism leaders seek award nominations | Malled! – Palm Beach Post (blog)

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Discover The Palm Beaches, the countys tourism marketing arm, is accepting nominations for its annual Providencia Award, which is given to an individual or entity that has made a contribution to the county as a desirable tourist destination.

Nominations can be made online through March 17 at ThePalmBeaches.com/Providencia-Award.

Each nomination will be reviewed by a panel of local tourism leaders, who will ultimately narrow the list to three finalists. The public will be invited to select the 2016 Providencia Award winner by voting online at PalmBeachPost.com, beginning April 10 through May 1.

A juvenile loggerhead sea turtle named Shertz swims at Marinelife Center just before being released to the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday, October 25, 2016. (Bruce R. Bennett / The Palm Beach Post)

The winner will be announced on May 12 as local tourism leaders celebrate Travel Rally Day, an event heralding the economic impact of the industry, at the Lake Worth Casino Building & Beach Complex.

Tourism is the top non-agricultural economic driver for The Palm Beaches, and were able to deliver on our brand promise that this destination is the best way to experience Florida because of our tourism industry partners, said Jorge Pesquera, Discovers president and CEO. The prestigious Providencia Award helps us honor one of the outstanding leaders or entities contributing to the tremendous success of tourism in The Palm Beaches.

Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach won the prize last year.

Nominations for the award are based on several criteria: contributing to the growth of the local tourism industry; implementing innovative sales, marketing, public relations and social media initiatives; and creating awareness of Palm Beach County as a premier tourist destination.

Previous winners of the Providencia Award include Loggerhead Marinelife Center; The Honda Classic; International Polo Club Palm Beach; James Ponce; Delray Beach International Tennis Championships; The Colony Hotel Palm Beach; Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens; Kravis Center for the Performing Arts; Marathon of the Palm Beaches; South Florida Fair; Patrick Rooney Sr.; and Norton Museum of Art.

The award is named after a Spanish ship that sank off the coast in the 1880s. The crew sold its coconuts to people who planted them along the waterfront. Ultimately, thats how Palm Beach got its name.

The award has been given out more than two dozen times since 1989.

Discover announced this month that a record-breaking 7.35 million visitors traveled to Palm Beach County in 2016 an increase of 5.8 percent above 2015s level.

The increase marks the eighth consecutive year of tourism growth in the county, according to Discover.

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We’re on the Verge of a Gravitational Wave Astronomy Boom – Seeker

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A prototype space-based gravitational wave detector performed far better than expected during its trial run, raising prospects that a follow-on observatory to listen for echoes from the biggest crashes in the cosmos will be launched ahead of schedule.

LISA Pathfinder, which has been in orbit for a little more than a year, was intended to test if two small cubes could be kept in an extremely steady and measurable state of free fall. If successful, scientists could use the technique to detect ripples in space, a phenomenon first envisioned by Albert Einstein 100 years ago.

The ripples, which are called gravitational waves, occur due to massive objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, warping the fabric of spacetime as they move. The first detection of gravitational waves was made last year with the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.

Putting a system in space would give astronomers a way to detect ripples that oscillate over hours instead of in fractions of seconds, such as the gravitational waves detected by the twin LIGO observatories.

The waves LIGO detected were caused by two black holes, each about 30 times more massive than the sun, colliding to become a single larger black hole more than 1.3 billion light years away.

RELATED: A Rapidly Spinning Black Hole Was Seen Killing a Distant Star

The space-based LISA observatory, by comparison, would be able to detect black holes one million times more massive than the sun that date back to the dawn of the universe.

"It's a different astronomy and very, very rich," astrophysicist Stefano Vitale, with the University of Trento in Italy, told reporters at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

For LISA to work, the space buoys have to be kept at a level of quiescence equal to one-millionth of one-billionth of the force of Earth's gravity, said Vitale, the lead scientist for LISA Pathfinder.

The goal of the demonstration mission was to get within 10 percent of that mark. To save money, LISA Pathfinder suspends two cubes within one spacecraft, which contributes additional forces. A laser keeps tabs on the distance between the cubes.

The operational LISA would use three satellites, formation flying in a triangle more than 620,000 miles apart and tracked by lasers, to detect gravitational waves.

RELATED: Our Supermassive Black Hole Could Be 'Supercharging' Stars' Magnetism

LISA Pathfinder ended up far exceeding expectations.

"We have done better than the requirement for LISA," Vitale said. "This is a final green light for LISA."

Originally targeted for launch in 2031, scientists are now looking at launching two years earlier, Vitale said.

By then, LISA should have many terrestrial counterparts. The two LIGO detectors are in the process of being upgraded and will be joined this year by a third gravitational wave detector, called Virgo, in Italy.

With three detectors, scientists can triangulate an observation and home in on the location.

For example, If Virgo had been operational when LIGO made its first gravitational wave detection, scientists would have been able to determine where the black holes crashed to within 10 square degrees instead of 600 square degrees, said astrophysicist Gabriela Gonzalez, with Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

In 2020, Japan expects to open its Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector, KAGRA, which is being built more than 650 feet underground in Kamioka, northwest of Tokyo. A fourth detector in India is aiming for a 2024 debut.

Top photo: The collision of two black holes holes a tremendously powerful event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO is seen in this still from a computer simulation.

WATCH: Do Black Holes Ever Die?

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We're on the Verge of a Gravitational Wave Astronomy Boom - Seeker

Astronomers find evidence of rocky planets around a dead star and a failed one – Astronomy Magazine

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A pair of binary stars, marked SDSS 1557, have evidence of a rocky planet. Theyre calling it a Tatooine system. The truth is weirder than that.

Both of the two stars in the system are not quite stars. One is a white dwarf, the remnants of a Sun-like star after it exhausts its hydrogen reserves and becomes an Earth-sized husk of white, hot, dense fury. The other is a brown dwarf, a large object that forms like a star, but ultimately fails to ignite and begin fusing hydrogen into helium. They often fall short of the mass of a small star, but are far more massive than gas giants (usually a minimum of 10 times the mass of Jupiter).

The white dwarf seems to be eating rocky asteroids trailing off from a belt and eventually falling into the dense white dwarf. The asteroids appear to be made of mostly metals rather than ice and lighter minerals, which points to the formation of rocky planets at some point in the systems past.

They still may be hiding there today, but there could be a giant impediment to finding them: the brown dwarf. The object was hiding in the results, as brown dwarfs give off little light, but its mass gives the white dwarf a noticeable tug.

The brown dwarf was effectively hidden by the dust until we looked with the right instrument, Steven Parsons of University of Valparaso and University of Sheffield and a coauthor on the paper said in a press release, but when we observed SDSS 1557 in detail we recognised the brown dwarfs subtle gravitational pull on the white dwarf.

The study was published in Nature Astronomy.

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Star formation on filaments in RCW106 – Astronomy Now Online

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Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project. Acknowledgement: UNIMAP / L. Piazzo, La Sapienza Universit di Roma; E. Schisano / G. Li Causi, IAPS/INAF, Italy

Stars are bursting into life all over this image from ESAs Herschel space observatory. It depicts the giant molecular cloud RCW106, a massive billow of gas and dust almost 12,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Norma, the Carpenters Square.

Cosmic dust, a minor but crucial ingredient in the interstellar material that pervades our Milky Way galaxy, shines brightly at infrared wavelengths. By tracing the glow of dust with the infrared eye of Herschel, astronomers can explore stellar nurseries in great detail.

Sprinkled across the image are dense concentrations of the interstellar mixture of gas and dust where stars are being born. The brightest portions, with a blue hue, are being heated by the powerful light from newborn stars within them, while the redder regions are cooler.

The delicate shapes visible throughout the image are the result of radiation and mighty winds from the young stars carving bubbles and other cavities in the surrounding interstellar material.

Out of the various bright, blue regions, the one furthest to the left is known as G333.6-0.2 and is one of the most luminous portions of the infrared sky. It owes its brightness to a stellar cluster, home to at least a dozen young and very bright stars that are heating up the gas and dust around them.

Elongated and thin structures, or filaments, stand out in the tangle of gas and dust, tracing the densest portions of this star-forming cloud. It is largely along these filaments, dotted with many bright, compact cores, that new stars are taking shape.

Launched in 2009, Herschel observed the sky at far-infrared and submillimetre wavelengths for almost four years. Scanning the Milky Way with its infrared eye, Herschel has revealed an enormous number of filamentary structures, highlighting their universal presence throughout the Galaxy and their role as preferred locations for stellar birth.

This three-colour image combines Herschel observations at 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green) and 250 microns (red), and spans over 1 on the long side; north is up and east to the left. The image was obtained as part of Herschels Hi-GAL key-project, which imaged the entire plane of the Milky Way in five different infrared bands. Avideo panoramacompiling all Hi-GAL observations was published in April 2016.

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SPACE organisation to help specially-abled children learn about astronomy – Tech2

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Physically and visually impaired children and youngsters in Delhi, Ludhiana and Chennai will get an opportunity to learn various aspects of astronomy as part of the National Science Day celebrations in the country, New Delhi-based Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) organisation said on Monday.

National Science Day is celebrated on 28 February to commemorate the discovery of Raman Effect in 1928 by Indian physicist and Nobel Laureate Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman in India.

In accordance with this years theme Science and technology for specially-abled persons SPACE will take skill development classes air rocket construction and launching, weigh yourself on different planets, catch the meteors, ring the planet, astronaut can you be one, take a picture as an astronaut and dress as an alien and astronaut, the organisation said in a statement on Monday.

Children and youngsters from the Asthavakra School, Rohini; Sparsh Foundation, Kalyan Vihar and Model Town in Delhi; Nirdosh School, Sarbha Nagar in Ludhiana and Sankalp-Open School and Learning Centre in Chennai, will participate in the initiative by SPACE.

The organisation also conducts various science related activities with public, school and college students and have successfully organised various programmes such as Astronomy fairs and competitions with the objective to create enthusiasm among people and to inculcate scientific temper among the masses.

Tags: astronomy, ISRO, National Science Day, Raman effect, Space

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Artificial intelligence will change America. Here’s how. – Washington Post

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By Jonathan Aberman By Jonathan Aberman February 27 at 7:00 AM

The term artificial intelligence is widely used, but less understood. As we see it permeate our everyday lives, we should deal with its inevitable exponential growth and learn to embrace it before tremendous economic and social changes overwhelm us.

Part of the confusion about artificial intelligence is in the name itself. There is a tendency to think about AI as an endpoint the creation of self-aware beings with consciousness that exist thanks to software. This somewhat disquieting concept weighs heavily; what makes us human when software can think, too? It also distracts us from the tremendous progress that has been made in developing software that ultimately drives AI: machine learning.

Machine learning allows software to mimic and then perform tasks that were until very recently carried out exclusively by humans. Simply put, software can now substitute for workers knowledge to a level where many jobs can be done as well or even better by software. This reality makes a conversation about when software will acquire consciousness somewhat superfluous.

When you combine the explosion in competency of machine learning with a continued development of hardware that mimics human action (think robots), our society is headed into a perfect storm where both physical labor and knowledge labor are equally under threat.

The trends are here, whether through the coming of autonomous taxis or medical diagnostics tools evaluating your well-being. There is no reason to expect this shift towards replacement to slow as machine learning applications find their way into more parts of our economy.

The invention of the steam engine and the industrialization that followed may provide a useful analogue to the challenges our society faces today. Steam power first substituted the brute force of animals and eventually moved much human labor away from growing crops to working in cities. Subsequent technological waves such as coal power, electricity and computerization continued to change the very nature of work. Yet, through each wave, the opportunity for citizens to apply their labor persisted. Humans were the masters of technology and found new ways to find income and worth through the jobs and roles that emerged as new technologies were applied.

Heres the problem: I am not yet seeing a similar analogy for human workers when faced with machine learning and AI. Where are humans to go when most things they do can be better performed by software and machinery? What happens when human workers are not users of technology in their work but instead replaced by it entirely? I will admit to wanting to have an answer, but not yet finding one.

Some say our economy will adjust, and we will find ways to engage in commerce that relies on their labor. Others are less confident and predict a continued erosion of labor as we know it, leading to widespread unemployment and social unrest.

Other big questions raised by AI include what our expectations of privacy should be when machine learning needs our personal data to be efficient. Where do we draw the ethical lines when software must choose between two peoples lives? How will a society capable of satisfying such narrow individual needs maintain a unified culture and look out for the common good?

The potential and promise of AI requires a discussion free of ideological rigidity. Whether change occurs as our society makes those conscious choices or while we are otherwise distracted, the evolution is upon us regardless.

Jonathan Aberman is a business owner, entrepreneur and founderof Tandem NSI, a national community that connects innovators to government agencies. He is host of Whats Working in Washington on WFED, a program that highlights business and innovation, and he lectures at the University of Marylands Robert H. Smith School of Business.

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Honda Chases Silicon Valley With New Artificial-Intelligence Center – Wall Street Journal (subscription)

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TOKYOHonda Motor Co. is creating a research arm focused on artificial intelligence, an area where one of its American advisers says it risks falling behind. R&D Center X will open in Tokyo in April as a software-focused counterpart to Honda's ...
New Honda R&D centre to develop technologies such as autonomous driving and artificial intelligenceFinancial Express

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Why 2017 Is The Year Of Artificial Intelligence – Forbes

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Why 2017 Is The Year Of Artificial Intelligence
Forbes
A recent acceleration of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) has made it a hot topic in boardrooms, government and the media. But it is still early, and everyone seems to have a different view of what AI actually is. Having investigated the ...

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4 challenges Artificial Intelligence must address – The Next Web – TNW

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If news, polls and investment figures are any indication, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon become an inherent part of everything we do in our daily lives.

Backing up the argument are a slew of innovations and breakthroughs that have brought the power and efficiency of AI into various fields including medicine, shopping, finance, news, fighting crime and more.

Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us.

But the explosion of AI has also highlighted the fact that while machines will plug some of the holes human-led efforts leave behind, they will bring disruptive changes and give rise to new problems that can challenge the economical, legal and ethical fabric of our societies.

Here are four issues that need Artificial Intelligence companies need to address as the technology evolves and invades even more domains.

Automation has been eating away at manufacturing jobs for decades. Huge leaps in AI have accelerated this process dramatically and propagated it to other domainspreviously imagined to remain indefinitely in the monopoly of human intelligence

From driving trucks to writing news and performing accounting tasks, AI algorithms are threatening middle class jobs like never before. They might set their eyes on other areas as well, such as replacing doctors, lawyers or even the president.

Its also true that the AI revolution will create plenty of new data science, machine learning, engineering and IT job positions to develop and maintain the systems and software that will be running those AI algorithms. But the problem is that, for the most part, the people who are losing their jobs dont have the skill sets to fill the vacant posts, creating an expanding vacuum of tech talent and a growing deluge of unemployed and disenchanted population. Some tech leaders are even getting ready for the day the pitchforks come knocking at their doors.

In order to prevent things from running out of control, the tech industry has a responsibility to help the society to adapt to the major shift that is overcoming the socio-economic landscape and smoothly transition toward a future where robots will be occupying more and more jobs.

Teaching new tech skills to people who are losing or might lose their jobs to AI in the future can complement the efforts. In tandem, tech companies can employ rising trends such as cognitive computing and natural language generation and processing to helpbreak down the complexity of tasks and lower the bar for entry into tech jobs, making them available to more people.

In the long run governments and corporations must consider initiatives such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), unconditional monthly or yearly payments to all citizens, as we slowly inch toward the day where all work will be carried out by robots.

As has been proven on several accounts in the past years, AI can be just as or even more biased than humans.

Machine Learning, the popular branch of AI that is behind face recognition algorithms, product suggestions, advertising engines, and much more, depends on data to train and hone its algorithms.

The problem is, if the information trainers feed to these algorithms is unbalanced, the system will eventually adopt the covert and overt biases that those data sets contain. And at present, the AI industry is suffering from diversity troubles that some label the white guy problem, or largely dominated by white males.

This is the reason why an AI-judged beauty contest turned out to award mostly white candidates, a name-ranking algorithm ended up favoring white-sounding names, and advertising algorithms preferred to show high-paying job ads to male visitors.

Another problem that caused much controversy in the past year was the filter bubble phenomenon that was seen in Facebook and other social media that tailored content to the biases and preferences of users, effectively shutting them out from other viewpoints and realities that were out there.

While for the moment much of the cases can be shrugged off as innocent mistakes and humorous flaws, some major changes need to be made if AI will be put in charge of more critical tasks, such as determining the fate of a defendant in court. Safeguards also have to be put in place to prevent any single organization or company to skew the behavior of an ML algorithm in its favor by manipulating the data.

This can be achieved by promoting transparency and openness in algorithmic datasets. Shared data repositories that are not owned by any single entity and can be vetted and audited by independent bodies can help move toward this goal.

Whos to blame when a software or hardware malfunctions? Before AI, it was relatively easy to determine whether an incident was the result of the actions of a user, developer or manufacturer.

But in the era of AI-driven technologies, the lines are not as clearcut.

ML algorithms figure out for themselves how to react to events, and while data gives them context, not even the developers of those algorithms can explain every single scenario and decision that their product makes.

This can become an issue when AI algorithms start making critical decisions such as when a self-driving car has to choose between the life of a passenger and a pedestrian.

Extrapolating from that, there are many other conceivable scenarios where determining culpability and accountability will become difficult, such as when an AI-driven drug infusion system or robotic surgery machine harms a patient.

When the boundaries of responsibility are blurred between the user, developer, and data trainer, every involved party can lay the blame on someone else. Therefore, new regulations must be put in place to clearly predict and address legal issues that will surround AI in the near future.

AI and ML feed on data reams of it and companies that center their business around the technology will grow a penchant for collecting user data, with or without the latters consent, in order to make their services more targeted and efficient.

In the hunt for more and more data, companies may trek into uncharted territory and cross privacy boundaries. Such was the case of a retail store that found out about a teenage girls secret pregnancy, and the more recent case of UK National Health Services patient data sharing program with Googles DeepMind, a move that was supposedly aimed at improving disease prediction.

Theres also the issue of bad actors, of both governmental and non-governmental nature, that might put AI and ML to ill use. A very effective Russian face recognition app rolled out last year proved to be a potential tool for oppressive regimes seeking to identify and crack down on dissidents and protestors. Another ML algorithm proved to be effective at peeking behind masked images and blurred pictures.

Other implementations of AI and ML are making it possible to impersonate people by imitating their handwriting, voice and conversation style, an unprecedented power that can come in handy in a number of dark scenarios.

Unless companies developing and using AI technology regulate their information collection and sharing practices and take necessary steps to anonymize and protect user data, theyll end up causing harm than good to users. The use and availability of the technology must also be revised and regulated in a way to prevent or minimize ill use.

Users should also become more sensible about what they share with companies or post on the Internet. Were living in an era where privacy is becoming a commodity, and AI isnt making it any better.

There are benefits and dark sides to every disruptive technology, and AI is no exception to the rule. What is important is that we identify the challenges that lay before us and acknowledge our responsibility to make sure that we can take full advantage of the benefits while minimizing the tradeoffs.

The robots are coming. Lets make sure they come in peace.

This post is part of our contributor series. It is written and published independently of TNW.

Read next: Microsoft will soon let you block desktop apps from installing on Windows 10

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Artificial Intelligence: Removing The Human From Fintech – Forbes

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Artificial Intelligence: Removing The Human From Fintech
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As I'm sure many in the technology industry have thought today, there should have been a way to avoid the Oscars Envelopegate. But, is artificial intelligence the answer to all of our human error problems? A recent Accenture report found that the ...

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Christianity is engaging Artificial Intelligence, but in the right way – Crux: Covering all things Catholic

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In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Jonathan Merritt laments that theologians and Christian leaders, including Pope Francis, have not addressed what he claims will be the greatest challenge that Christianity has ever faced: Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

In his view, intelligent machines threaten to overturn many Christian beliefs, a trial that theologians seem blind to because theyre stuck rehashing old questions instead of focusing on the coming ones.

Such a criticism would be devastating if true, but is it?

A fuller reading of Pope Franciss work suggests that he is actually engaging the issues with AI that most directly affect the contemporary Church and society. Before I get to that, though, its necessary to give Merritts argument his due. Most theologians are indeed not addressing the specific aspects of AI that he considers essential, but this is a wise choice on their part.

First, its important to note that rehashing old questions, or what Catholics like to call the development of tradition, provides many insights into these questions. For example, Merritt claims that Christians have mostly understood the soul to be a uniquely human element, an internal and eternal component that animates our spiritual sides.

This is not an accurate characterization.

Drawing upon the heritage of Greek philosophy, most theologians have understood the soul to be what makes a specific living thing what it is. It is the principle of growth and development in all living things, movements and sensation in animals, and rationality in humans.

Therefore, animals have souls, plants have souls, and an AI that could think and manipulate the world around it would have to have something like a soul.

Merritt qualifies himself in the next sentence to refer to the image of God that each person possesses in her soul. Yet again, major figures in the tradition such as Thomas Aquinas do not see the image of God restricted to humans.

For him (some other theologians have very different interpretations), we imagine God primarily in our potential for reason and free will, so any being with reason and free will would possess that image, including angels, for Aquinas, rational aliens, for Francis, even true AI, if it existed.

Of course, this reason is not mere instrumental reason, but one that understands purposes, meaning, and the moral law.

Still, based on Merritts argument one might ask, how can such spiritual faculties arise out of silicon circuits (or nanotubes, or any other material)? While a problem, it is no more difficult, nor much different, than the question of how the spiritual arises from lowly flesh, a question that thinkers have wrestled with throughout the Western tradition.

Theologians struggle with this problem in ordinary human development how and when new life gains a soul is a central theological question, for obvious practical reasons. The predominant answer in the Catholic tradition is that, in the process of procreation in which human parents cooperate, God creates an individual spiritual soul for each human body. Something like this framework could be used to think about AI.

It is true that some issues are more difficult, like how AI could be redeemed.

Christianity argues for Gods special care for humanity, with the second person of the Trinity assuming a human nature in the Incarnation. This doctrine raises questions about Christs relation to any possible AI, but ones not fundamentally different to questions of how Christ redeems all of nonhuman creation, questions that have become ever more pressing given environmental devastation.

Given these resources, why havent more theologians directly addressed AI?

First, I would guess that most theologians are less optimistic than the ones Merritt quotes about the actual possibility of true AI. Beyond the sixty years of unfulfilled promises that AI is just around the corner, AI theorists have not addressed philosophical concerns as to whether their programs can have consciousness and grasp meaning.

In his Chinese Room argument, John Searle pointed out that while computer programs manipulate symbols (syntax), allowing them to imitate behavior, they cannot really grasp the meaning (semantics) of the things they manipulate, which would be necessary for consciousness.

A second source of skepticism for engaging AI is that, along with many contemporary non-Christian thinkers, theologians recognize making an AI is an extremely bad idea. If a machine has the free choice necessary for true AI, then it has the possibility of sin, leading to large downside risks, such as human extinction.

This concern about risk raises the final problem with Merritts analysis if one reads Francis carefully, one finds that he addresses the problems of todays limited AI that are harming people right now rather than future speculative possibilities.

Laudato Si, Franciss recent encyclical, is just as much about technology in human ecology as it is about the natural environment.

He addresses contemporary mental pollution and isolation, reflecting concerns in other papal addresses over people only receiving information that confirms their opinions, problems that arise in part due to AI algorithms reflecting our opinions back to us in search results and news feeds, a solipsism whose political effects were chillingly documented in Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation.

In a second and even more important example, he laments a kind of technological progress in which the costs of production are reduced by laying off workers and replacing them with machines.These are not only issues of automation impacting blue collar jobs, but now, even many white collar jobs are disappearing due to the applications of AI.

Pope Francis demonstrates that dealing with Merritts speculative problems may distract us from more pressing challenges, such as knowledge workers in their late 40s whose positions become redundant due to AI and who thus wont be able to make their mortgages while they retrain.

Problems like that may not be as hot a topic for a TED talk as speculating on the prayer life of AI, but these are the challenges of technology that a Church whose members will be judged by their care for the least in society should be addressing.

Paul Scherz is an assistant professor of moral theology/ethics at The Catholic University of America. He examines how the daily use of biomedical technologies shapes the way researchers, doctors, and patients see and manipulate the world and their bodies. Scherz has a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame.

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‘Artificial intelligence is the next big thing’ – The Hindu – The Hindu

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'Artificial intelligence is the next big thing' - The Hindu
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Spencer Kelly, presenter of the BBC's Click technology programme, discusses Indian jugaad, South Korea's jellyfish-hunting robots, and how self-driving cars ...

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'Artificial intelligence is the next big thing' - The Hindu - The Hindu

Aerospace can make america great again | Sonoran News – Sonoran News

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SpaceX just launched ten Iridium Communications satellites into low-Earth orbit. These satellites will beam phone and data service to tens of thousands of Americans who live or work in areas too remote for regular coverage.

Until recently, blasting bus-sized satellites into space using rockets that can be reused belonged in the realm of science fiction. Now, such activities seem routine.

Policymakers should take note. Americans are set to reap the benefits of aerospace firms race to tame the Final Frontier and the industrys investments in manufacturing will create new jobs and wealth in the United States, not just shuffle around current jobs by moving around government dollars.

Since its inception, the aerospace industry has produced technologies that improve Americans quality of life. NASA helped invent memory foam, scratch-resistant glasses, insulin pumps and hundreds of other products we use every day.

Now, private companies are driving aerospace innovation. Thanks to satellite Internet firms, airplane passengers can enjoy Wi-Fi while cruising at 30,000 feet. That has made flying more enjoyable and far more productive. The technology also makes it possible for Americans in remote areas to access high-speed Internet.

Satellite internet has yet to reach its full potential. The satellite internet of things market is expected to grow nearly 20 percent each year through 2022. Improved connectivity made possible by new satellites will improve the efficiency of a wide range of appliances, not just computers and smartphones.

Launching new satellites to support this increased connectivity would have been far too expensive a few years ago. But today, thanks to California-based SpaceX and Washington-based Blue Origins advances in rocket manufacturing, the cost of launches has plummeted. The Air Force is showing interest in ultra-low cost access to space, where reusable launch technologies stimulate tactical innovation in space operations.

Next-generation rockets have even made space-based businesses look viable.

Made in Space, a California startup, recently sent a 3D printer to the International Space Station, laying the groundwork for manufacturing in zero gravity. The firm plans to produce optical fiber in space, which would eliminate the microscopic imperfections caused by gravity. This high quality fiber could revolutionize everything from medical devices to telecommunications.

Aerospace firms arent just spurring technological progress; theyre supporting millions of jobs. Americas aerospace sector employs over 1.2 million people and indirectly supports an additional 3.2 million jobs.

These jobs are helping to replace losses weve seen in the broader manufacturing sector. While the number of overall American manufacturing jobs dropped 22 percent from 2002 to 2012, jobs in the aerospace industry grew 7 percent. Aerospace exports also generated a trade surplus of over $80 billion in 2015 the highest in the manufacturing sector.

Aerospace companies are even leading the charge to revitalize the manufacturing workforce.

Firms are designing their own educational programs, often at community colleges, to train workers. Northrop Grumman, for instance, has partnered with Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California to create a sixteen-week vocational program in aircraft manufacturing. The firm recruits many of the students upon graduation. Such public-private partnerships could serve as a model for manufacturers in other sectors.

Private aerospace companies are strengthening the labor force and pouring billions of dollars into new technologies that will improve Americans lives. Thats a reason to cheer every liftoff.

Rebecca Grant, Ph.D., is president of IRIS Independent Research, a public-policy research organization, and director of the Washington Security Forum. She is the former director of the General Billy Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies at the Air Force Association.

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$1.10 Billion Aerospace Interior Adhesive Market 2017 by Resin … – Yahoo Finance

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DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Aerospace Interior Adhesive Market by Resin Type (Epoxy, Cyanoacrylate, Acrylic, PU), Product Type (IFE, Seating, Stowage Bins, Galley, Panels), Aircraft Type (Single Aisle, Regional Jets, Small, Medium, Large Wide Body) - Global Forecast to 2021" report to their offering.

The global aerospace interior adhesive market is projected to reach USD 1,101.7 million by 2021, at a CAGR of 5.35% from 2016 to 2021.

The growing middle class and increasing disposable income as well as growing demand of low cost airlines are major factors expected to drive the growth of the aerospace interior adhesive market. However, stringent government regulations and stagnant growth in North America and Europe may restrain the growth of the aerospace interior adhesive market.

Small wide body aircraft type is expected to be the fastest-growing aircraft type between 2016 and 2021, wherein aerospace interior adhesive are used. Small wide body aircrafts are mid- to large-size, long-range, and wide body twin-engine jet airliner. These aircrafts have two engines, a conventional tail, and a supercritical wing design for reduced aerodynamic drag. They have seating capacity in the range of 120 to 180. Aircrafts such as Boeing 767 and A310 are considered under this segment. They are preferred in the shorter routes and their demand is increasing in the Asia-Pacific region.

Market Dynamics

Drivers

Restraints

Opportunities

Challenges

Companies Mentioned

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/lwdt4t/aerospace

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$1.10 Billion Aerospace Interior Adhesive Market 2017 by Resin ... - Yahoo Finance

Top 5 Vendors in the Global Civil Aerospace Simulation and Training Market from 2017-2021: Technavio – Business Wire (press release)

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LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Technavio has announced the top five leading vendors in their recent global civil aerospace simulation and training market report until 2021. This research report also lists five other prominent vendors that are expected to impact the market during the forecast period.

The research study by Technavio on the global civil aerospace simulation and training market for 2017-2021 provides a detailed industry analysis based on aircraft type (fixed-wing aircraft and rotary-wing aircraft) and geography (EMEA, the Americas, and APAC).

A civil flight simulator recreates the aircraft flight environment and various aspects of flight artificially for pilot training purposes on civil and military aircraft. The global civil aerospace simulation and training market size is projected to grow to USD 3.7 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of close to 5% over the forecast period, says Avimanyu Basu, a lead analyst at Technavio for aerospace research.

Competitive vendor landscape

The global civil aerospace simulation and training market is a well-established and mature market with suppliers who have dominated the simulator industry from decades. A majority of these players are multinational and often offer customized products for specific aircraft models. The market is continuously evolving, highly capital intensive, and technologically inclined, where vendors need to introduce newer technologies and training models to keep up with new lines of new age aircraft. The rising global air passenger density is expected to have a significant impact on the growth of the market.

Request a sample report: http://www.technavio.com/request-a-sample?report=56807

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report including the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more.

Top five vendors in the global civil aerospace simulation and training market

CAE

CAEs diversified business ranges from sale and aftersales services of simulation products to providing other services such as training and aviation services, in-service support, integrated enterprise solutions, and crew sourcing. The company has nearly 70 years of experience in offering innovative training solutions, underpinned by simulators.

FlightSafety International

FlightSafety International has expertized in providing advanced training programs and new technology simulators for the current and next-generation aircraft. The company has over 1,800 qualified and experienced instructors and provides more than 4,000 individual courses for 135 types of aircraft, using more than 300 simulators.

L-3 Link Simulation & Training

L-3 Link Simulation & Training provides simulation systems, training services, and aircraft contractor logistics support. The company offers products and services across three categories: commercial training solutions, civil aviation, military. It has established its presence in the aerospace services industry with its range of offerings such as civil aviation solutions including integrated solutions, equipment solutions, and airfield training solutions.

Rockwell Collins

Rockwell Collins offers products and services across different sectors: commercial aviation, business aviation, defense and government, and airports, rail, and civil infrastructure. Rockwell Collins also designs, manufactures, and sells electronic communications, aviation systems, and avionics for aerospace and defense industries across the globe.

Thales

Thales provides solutions primarily to the aerospace and defense industries globally. Thales is involved in the production and development of aerospace products, solutions, and commercialization. Also, the company provides security equipment for the defense and aerospace market, offers modernization and upgrading services, as well as retrofit services, repair, maintenance, and upgrading of aircraft parts.

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Become a Technavio Insights member and access all three of these reports for a fraction of their original cost. As a Technavio Insights member, you will have immediate access to new reports as theyre published in addition to all 6,000+ existing reports covering segments like aerospace components, aerospace manufacturing, and aerospace products. This subscription nets you thousands in savings, while staying connected to Technavios constant transforming research library, helping you make informed business decisions more efficiently.

About Technavio

Technavio is leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, resellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

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The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses by Meredith Wadman review – The Guardian

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Germ warfare Leonard Hayflicks use of human cells helped pave the way to a revolution in public health. Photograph: Alamy

In March 1968, biologist Leonard Hayflick visited the basement of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia. He was seeking a set of 375 vials, each bearing the code WI-38. Once found, he placed them in a nitrogen-cooled container and then hid them in a friends house. He informed no one at Wistar, his former employer, of his actions.

A few days later, Hayflick transported the vials to Stanford University, where he had just been made professor of medical microbiology. There he started to sell them to drug companies.

Each vial contained several millioncells grown from a single aborted human foetus. Infected with rubella, polio, rabies, hepatitis A and other viruses, the WI-38 cells would act as hosts for growing these viruses so they could be used as the basis of vaccines, Hayflick argued. Crucially, they would be free of contaminants that had recently been found in vaccines made from viruses grown in animal cells not an issue for his pristine foetal cells.

A gifted experimenter, Hayflick had created the WI-38s (which stands for Wistar Institute sample 38) in 1962. They were the worlds first line of normal, noncancerous human cells and held fantastic promise. However, they were not Hayflicks property. They belonged to the Wistar Institute, and their removal and subsequent sale for profit left him wide open to charges of theft. In the end, he only narrowly avoided prosecution. So why did the biologist take such extraordinary action?

Meredith Wadman is clear about the source ofHayflicks woes. He was working under duress, reined back by obdurate, ultra-conservative, self-protective vaccine regulators who were preventing him from using his cells for vaccine work. Hence his decision to sell them on the quiet to pharmaceuticals companies.

The move would haunt Hayflick for the rest of his life. He was hounded from office and never received the accolades he deserved for deriving his cells (which are still used by vaccine makers today). It took a decade of procrastination before US regulators capitulated and approved his cells for vaccine development. (Europe was far quicker off the mark.) Since then, more than 6bn vaccine doses based on his cells have protected the west against rubella, rabies, chicken pox, and other lethal or debilitating illnesses.

Hayflick achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble

In the case of rubella, which can cause severe foetal damage in pregnant women, the vaccine halted infections and stopped mothers seeking abortions as they had done widely in the past after finding themselves infected in early pregnancy. Thus a vaccine itself based on aborted foetal tissue had a far greater pro-life effect than all the efforts of anti-abortion religiousactivists.

It is an extraordinary story and Wadman is to be congratulated, not just for uncovering it but for relaying it in such a pacy, stimulating manner. This is a first-class piece of science writing that does considerable justice to Hayflick, a character who achieved great things but let his pigheadedness lead him into trouble.

For long periods in his later life, Hayflick, a family man, was cold-shouldered by US academia and he had to scrabble for work in the wake of his raid on Wistars freezers. In a fair world, he should have been heading departments of leading researchers although today, aged 86, he does find himself at least partially rehabilitated, having served as an adviser to several biotech companies and authored some well-received books.

Much of this restoration concerns the crucial role he played in the field of ageing research, for in developing his WI-38 cells, Hayflick discovered an intriguing fact. There was an upper limit for the number of times each of his cells would divide known today as the Hayflick limit. Previously, scientists thought that cells in a culture could continue to divide for ever. The existence of an upper limit gave scientists a means to explore cellular senescence, by homing in on the mechanism that regulates thelimiting of cell division and so creating a flourishing field that today offers important insights into cancer and ageing.

More to the point, Hayflicks relentless campaigning for the right to use human cells instead of animal cells to make vaccines helped speed up a revolution in public health in the west, though few thanked him at the time. Nevertheless, he played a key role in the victory in the war against viral diseases such as rubella and polio, an achievement that freed us from truly terrible scourges.

This point is worth recalling whensome individuals, including Donald Trump, openly question theworth and effectiveness of vaccines. For them, Alan Shaw, a former vaccine researcher, has a perfect response quoted by Wadman.Developing vaccines is probably one of the most productive things you can do, simply because if you succeed in getting one made, you watch a disease disappear.

The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman is published by Doubleday (20). To order a copy for 16 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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