Posted in alien life, complex systems, physics, quantum physics, science, space travel | Leave a Comment on Extending Galactic Habitable Zone Modeling to Include the Emergence of Intelligent Life — By Morrison Ian S. and Gowanlock Michael G. | Astrobiology
Quoted: “Sometimes decentralization makes sense.
Filament is a startup that is taking two of the most overhyped ideas in the tech community—the block chain and the Internet of things—and applying them to the most boring problems the world has ever seen. Gathering data from farms, mines, oil platforms and other remote or highly secure places.
The combination could prove to be a powerful one because monitoring remote assets like oil wells or mining equipment is expensive whether you are using people driving around to manually check gear or trying to use sensitive electronic equipment and a pricey a satellite internet connection.
Instead Filament has built a rugged sensor package that it calls a Tap, and technology network that is the real secret sauce of the operation that allows its sensors to conduct business even when they aren’t actually connected to the internet. The company has attracted an array of investors who have put $5 million into the company, a graduate of the Techstars program. Bullpen Capital led the round with Verizon Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Samsung Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Haystack, Working Lab Capital, Techstars and others participating.
“This cluster of technologies is what enables the Taps to perform some pretty compelling stunts, such as send small amounts of data up to 9 miles between Taps and keep a contract inside a sensor for a year or so even if that sensor isn’t connected to the Internet. In practical terms, that might mean that the sensor in a field gathering soil data might share that data with other sensors in nearby fields belonging to other farmers based on permissions the soil sensor has to share that data. Or it could be something a bit more complicated like a robotic seed tilling machine sensing that it was low on seed and ordering up another bag from inventory based on a “contract” it has with the dispensing system inside a shed on the property.
The potential use cases are hugely varied, and the idea of using a decentralized infrastructure is fairly novel. Both IBM and Samsung have tested out using a variation of the blockchain technology for storing data in decentralized networks for connected devices. The idea is that sending all of that data to the cloud and storing it for a decade or so doesn’t always make economic sense, so why not let the transactions and accounting for them happen on the devices themselves?
That’s where the blockchain and these other protocols come in. The blockchain is a great way to store information about a transaction in a distributed manner, and because its built into the devices there’s no infrastructure to support for years on end. When combined with mesh radio technologies such as TMesh it also becomes a good way to build out a network of devices that can communicate with each other even when they don’t have connectivity.”
Read the Article, and watch the Video, here > http://fortune.com/2015/08/18/filament-blockchain-iot/
Quoted: “Traditional law is a form of agreement. It is an agreement among people and their leaders as to how people should behave. There are also legal contracts between individuals. These contracts are a form of private law that applies to the participants. Both types of agreement are enforced by a government’s legal system.”
“Ethereum is both a digital currency and a programming language. But it is the combination of these ingredients that make it special. Since most agreements involve the exchange of economic value, or have economic consequences, we can implement whole categories of public and private law using Ethereum. An agreement involving transfer of value can be precisely defined and automatically enforced with the same script.”
“When viewed from the future, today’s current legal system seems downright primitive. We have law libraries — buildings filled with words that nobody reads and whose meaning is unclear, even to courts who enforce them arbitrarily. Our private contracts amount to vague personal promises and a mere hope they might be honored.
For the first time, Ethereum offers an alternative. A new kind of law.”
Read the article here > http://etherscripter.com/what_is_ethereum.html
Quoted: “IBM’s first report shows that “a low-cost, private-by-design ‘democracy of devices’ will emerge” in order to “enable new digital economies and create new value, while offering consumers and enterprises fundamentally better products and user experiences.” “According to the company, the structure we are using at the moment already needs a reboot and a massive update. IBM believes that the current Internet of Things won’t scale to a network that can handle hundreds of billions of devices. The operative word is ‘change’ and this is where the blockchain will come in handy.”
Read the article here > https://99bitcoins.com/ibm-believes-blockchain-elegant-solution-internet-of-things/
Posted in big data, complex systems, computing, food, information science, machine learning, mapping, space, surveillance, sustainability | Leave a Comment on 2015 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium | July 26–31, 2015 | Milan, Italy
Hosted by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium 2015 (IGARSS 2015) will be held from Sunday July 26th through Friday July 31th, 2015 at the Convention Center in Milan, Italy. This is the same town of the EXPO 2015 exhibition, whose topic is “Feeding the planet: energy for life”.
Posted in astronomy, big data, complex systems, computing, cosmology, energy, engineering, ethics, existential risks, futurism, general relativity, governance, government, gravity, hardware, information science, innovation, internet, journalism, law, life extension, media & arts, military, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, quantum physics, science, security, singularity, space, space travel, supercomputing, sustainability, time travel, transhumanism, transparency, treaties | 1 Comment on CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!
- Press release by our partner ”Risk Evaluation Forum” emphasizing on renewed particle collider risk: http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/newsbg.pdf
- Study concluding that “Mini Black Holes” could be created at planned LHC energies: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-mini-black-holes-lhc-parallel.html
- New paper by Dr. Thomas B. Kerwick on lacking safety argument by CERN: http://vixra.org/abs/1503.0066
I read all the news about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 latest “failure” to land on an autonomous spaceport drone ship aka barge. I view these as trials to success. Here’s why.
1. Grasshopper Successes: The two videos below show that the early landing trials aka Grasshopper from several heights between 250m and 1,000m.
The lessons here are:
a) Pinpoint landing of a 1st stage rocket is technologically feasible.
b) This 1st stage rocket has to attain zero vertical velocity at a minimum 250m above the barge.
Video of 250m test
Video of 1,000m test
2. Falcon 9 1st stage crash landing — 1st attempt: SpaceX tells us that the failure was due to a hard landing (see video below) but at 0:03 minutes into the video one can see that the 1st stage has substantially tilted before it hit the deck i.e. the 1st stage did not tilt because it hit the deck.
The lessons here:
a) A wobble — a dynamic instability — occurs before landing.
b) The guidance systems are unable to cope with new wobble.
Video of 1st attempt
3. Falcon 9 1st stage crash landing — 2nd attempt: The video of the second attempt (below) confirms that indeed a wobble has been introduced before the stabilization fins are deployed. Further, this deployment exacerbates the wobble, and the guidance systems is unable to handle this exacerbated wobble.
The lessons here:
a) 1st stage vertical velocity needs to be zero by at least 250m above deck.
b) The stabilization fins need to be redesigned to alleviate exacerbation.
c) Like the Space Ship One’s shuttlecock approach, the 1st stage upper fins need to be deployed before the lower fins are.
d) Upgrade the landing guidance system to account for more severe wobbles.
If at a minimum, SpaceX achieves zero velocity at 250m before deployment of landing gear it will be successful. The other recommendations are good to have.
I expect SpaceX to be successful by their 3rd try.
Posted in big data, business, complex systems, computing, disruptive technology, economics, futurism, governance, human trajectories, information science | 2 Comments on Can Ethereum help eliminate corruption and bureaucracy in the developing world? Could Ethereum One Day Transform Law, Finance, and Civil Society?
Quoted: “Ethereum’s developers believe their project will lead to the proliferation of programs they call “smart contracts,” in which the terms of an agreement are written in code and enforced by software. These smart contracts could carry out the instructions of a complex algorithm based on data feed—such as a stock ticker. They could facilitate practically any financial transaction, such as holding money in escrow or dispersing micropayments among autonomous machines. They could be used to create a peer-to-peer gambling network, a peer-to-peer stock trading platform, a peer-to-peer social network, a prenuptial agreement, a will, a standard agreement to split a dinner check, or a public registry for keeping track of who owns what land in a city.
Gupta predicts that these smart contracts will be so cheap and versatile that they’ll do “a lot of things that today we do informally,” and take on a lot of the “donkey work of running a society.””
Read the article here > http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/here-comes-ethereum-an-information-techn
