The Tyranny of the Algorithm - Measuring "Social Credit"

By John Harris on The Guardian

Credit scores already control our finances. With personal data being increasingly trawled, our politics and our friendships will be next.

or the past couple of years a big story about the future of China has been the focus of both fascination and horror. It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call “social credit”, and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

Read More...

Who's Listening? Are Your Devices Using Your Speech to Send You Ads?

Have you heard this one yet? The idea that everything you say in the presence of your smart devices is being used to send you specific ad content?

I read an article a few weeks ago where someone claimed to have tested this theory and found it to be true. So I decided to test it myself. I started talking about needing to find some nice bras and undies as a gift for someone, and lo and behold, look what turned up on one of my favorite websites. Could be totally coincidental, sure, but maybe not.

Give your phone a refreshing new look! Grab a beautiful cell phone or tablet case from Cool Mobile Accessories, offering cases and accessories for your favorite devices!

Breathe right, and say goodbye to allergens! Get the exact size air-condition or furnace filter you need, cut to order, shipped to your door! Only  from: Perfectly Pure Air Filters

Read More...

The End of Human Speech?

Wish I could live long enough to see this!

By CIARAN MCGRATH on EXPRESS

HUMAN speech will become a thing of the past by the year 2050, by which time we will communicate by thought via a computer-generated collective consciousness, it has been claimed...

Marko Karjnovic unveiled his ideas at The Museum of the Future as part of the World Government Summit in Dubai.

The Hybrid Intelligence Biometric Avatar (HIBA), will understand the feelings of people connected to it, take on their personas, exchange information with them and even become part of the fabric of their brains.

Read More...

Friday Physics & Philosophy: The Physics of Free Will

Is free will only an illusion? And if so, what does that really mean?

It's time for some Friday deep thoughts, the melding of physics with giant philosophical questions...

By Stephen Skolnick on Physics Central

At the intersection of physics and philosophy, there's a question that's weighed on the minds of great thinkers for centuries: Is there truly such a thing as free will? When we make a choice, are we fundamentally any different than a calculator "choosing" which segments of its display to light up when the = button is pressed?

Read More...

The Hunt is on for the Dark Photon!

Sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland, but it's true.

Ryan F. Mandelbaum on Gizmodo

It appears that the Universe is full of dark matter—around six times more of it than there is regular matter. It has obvious visible effects, like the way it bends light from distant galaxies. Despite dedicated searches, no signs of a dark matter particle explaining these effects have turned up.

Perhaps instead physicists will be able to find some dark force, a portal into the dark world. Such a “dark photon” would be dark matter’s equivalent of a photon, the way that dark matter particles interact with one another. Scientists are searching for such a particle. It hasn’t turned up yet, based on new results from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. But the search isn’t over—and a lot of physicists are really excited about it.

“LHCb had to work really hard to get to this mass range,” Caterina Doglioni, a researcher at Lund University who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo. “The way they did it is quite cool. They reinvented the data taking of LHC experiments”

Physicists have been using plenty of methods such as big vats of liquid xenon to try and find dark matter particles directly, and still have no leads. Dark photons would take dark matter’s story deeper, and imply that there’s a dark universe governed by dark forces.

Read more...

Give your phone a refreshing new look! Grab a beautiful cell phone or tablet case from Cool Mobile Accessories, offering cases and accessories for your favorite devices!

Breathe right, and say goodbye to allergens! Get the exact size air-condition or furnace filter you need, cut to order, shipped to your door! Only  from: Perfectly Pure Air Filters

Read More...

Series: People Who Are Taking Us Into the Future - Elon Musk

Today I'm starting a series of videos and articles profiling some special people. These are people who are defying incredible opposition from established and entrenched industries who abhor and despise any possible disruption to the status quo. These are people who have battled doubters and haters to pursue their dream of making change, making our world better, and taking us into the future...

Give your phone a refreshing new look! Grab a beautiful cell phone or tablet case from Cool Mobile Accessories, offering cases and accessories for your favorite devices!

Breathe right, and say goodbye to allergens! Get the exact size air-condition or furnace filter you need, cut to order, shipped to your door! Only  from: Perfectly Pure Air Filters

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read More...

Deep Question of the Day - Is the Universe Conscious?

Don't scoff, it's a legitimate question. Check out this article to see how this theory might explain a lot!

By Philip Goff on aeon

n the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers compatible with the existence of life. But, against all the odds, our Universe does.

Read More...

When Time Gets Entangled with Itself

The fact that sub-atomic particles can become "entangled" is a staple of quantum mechanics. The idea is that, once they become entangled, two particles will always be able to affect each other, no matter how far apart they get. And the effect is instantaneous. This makes it seem like there can be faster than light travel of information, which isn't supposed to be possible.

This article deals with something even more weird: Entangled time.

Read More...

Should We be Worried About Earth's Poles Flipping?

Science says, No (probably). Here's why:

By Jeanna Bryner on LiveScience

Earth's magnetic poles, whatever they're doing, are not going to spark chaos and kill us all — a scenario making the rounds online right now.

According to the Australian news site news.com.au, a magnetic flip would not only cause massive blackouts, "even flushing the toilet could become impossible."

As reported by Undark, Daniel Baker, the director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is suggesting a reversal would render parts of the planet uninhabitable (though Baker is not directly quoted saying this).

Read more...

Give your phone a refreshing new look! Grab a beautiful cell phone or tablet case from Cool Mobile Accessories, offering cases and accessories for your favorite devices!

Breathe right, and say goodbye to allergens! Get the exact size air-condition or furnace filter you need, cut to order, shipped to your door! Only  from: Perfectly Pure Air Filters

Read More...

Watch the Lunar Eclipse in One Minute!

I have several excuses for not watching the eclipse live and in person. First, I live in the wrong part of the world. Second, it was happening too early in the morning. And third, a house would have been locking my view. So, if you were in the same impossible position, there's a video!

Give your phone a refreshing new look! Grab a beautiful cell phone or tablet case from Cool Mobile Accessories, offering cases and accessories for your favorite devices!

Breathe right, and say goodbye to allergens! Get the exact size air-condition or furnace filter you need, cut to order, shipped to your door! Only  from: Perfectly Pure Air Filters

Read More...

We Could Soon Be Regenerating Teeth!

OK, so we can't yet regrow hearts, lungs, or important stuff like that. But what may be coming soon is the ability to regrow teeth. Don't laugh, this is important too, if not of the same order as hearts and lungs.

Read More...

Artificial Intelligence - The Weapon of the Next Cold War?

There are essentially two schools of thought regarding what AI will mean for the human race: It will either solve all our problems or exterminate us. Of course there are more nuanced outcomes one could imagine, but these are the extremes of the spectrum. This writer posits a more near-term effect:

By Jeremy Straub on RealClearScience

It is easy to confuse the current geopolitical situation with that of the 1980s. The United States and Russia each accuse the other of interfering in domestic affairs. Russia has annexed territory over U.S. objections, raising concerns about military conflict.

Read More...

10 Unsettling Solutions to the Fermi Paradox (Video)

You know about the Fermi Paradox, right? No? It's pretty simple, really. It boils down to the question, Where are all the aliens? It's about the apparent contradiction between estimates of how many aliens should be out there (lots!) and how many we've met (none so far!).

Check out this video that lists 10 possible solutions to the paradox. Enjoy!



Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our news feed. Get regular updates via Email. Contact us for advertising inquiries.

Read More...

Calculating How Many ETs Exist

Simple math shows how many space aliens may be out there

It’s a lot more than you might imagine!

by Seth Shostak on MACH

If you say you believe space aliens exist, I doubt your friends will be shocked. In a universe aglow with 2 trillion galaxies, you'd be supremely smug to think that Earth alone hosts clever creatures. One 2015 poll showed that 54 percent of Americans feel confident that intelligent aliens are out there.

Read More...

Artificial Neurons Are 100s of Times Faster Than Human Ones

Artificial neurons compute faster than the human brain

A computing system that mimics neural processing could make artificial intelligence more efficient — and more human.

By Sara Reardon on Nature

Superconducting computing chips modeled after neurons can process information faster and more efficiently than the human brain. That achievement, described in Science Advances on 26 January, is a key benchmark in the development of advanced computing devices designed to mimic biological systems. And it could open the door to more natural machine-learning software, although many hurdles remain before it could be used commercially.

Read More...

Ripping Space a New One (with Lasers!)

Have you heard this one? It's always fun to break things, but come on guys!

Physicists are planning to build lasers so powerful they could rip apart empty space

Read More...

When it comes to voice recognition, the NSA reigns supreme!

By Ava Kofman on The Intercept

AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War, during the winter of 1980, FBI agents recorded a phone call in which a man arranged a secret meeting with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. On the day of his appointment, however, agents were unable to catch sight of the man entering the embassy. At the time, they had no way to put a name to the caller from just the sound of his voice, so the spy remained anonymous. Over the next five years, he sold details about several secret U.S. programs to the USSR. It wasn’t until 1985 that the FBI, thanks to intelligence provided by a Russian defector, was able to establish the caller as Ronald Pelton, a former analyst at the National Security Agency. The next year, Pelton was convicted of espionage.

Read More...

Giant Sun's Surface Imaged for the First Time Ever!

Check out this first-ever image of the surface of a giant star outside our solar system!

Daily Galaxy

"This is the first time that we have such a giant star that is unambiguously imaged with that level of details," said Fabien Baron, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University. "The reason is there's a limit to the details we can see based on the size of the telescope used for the observations. An international team of astronomers has produced the first detailed images of the surface of a giant star, named π1Gruis, outside our solar system, revealing a nearly circular, dust-free atmosphere with complex areas of moving material, known as convection cells or granules, according to a recent study.

Read More...

What's Coming in 2018?

What can we look forward to, science breakthrough-wise, in the near future, say this year?

By Philip Ball in The Guardian

Read More...

The Dark Sector - What If Dark Matter is an Entire Dark Universe?

By Sarah Charley on Symmetry

We don’t need extra dimensions or parallel universes to have an alternate reality superimposed right on top of our own. Invisible matter is everywhere.

For example, take neutrinos generated by the sun, says Jessie Shelton, a theorist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who works on dark sector physics. “We are constantly bombarded with neutrinos, but they pass right through us. They share the same space as our atoms but almost never interact.”

Read More...