Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: mathematics

A team of computer scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) have been successful in developing a new method to alleviate wildlife poaching. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the project that has created a model for ‘green security games’.

This model is based on game theory to safeguard wildlife from poachers. Game theory involves predicting the actions of enemy using mathematical equations and subsequently formulating the best possible restrain moves. This model will enable more efficient patrolling of parks and wildlife by park rangers.

An artificial intelligence (AI) application, known as Protection Assistant for Wildlife Sanctuary (PAWS) was developed by Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at USC and Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and systems engineering at USC, in 2013. The team has since then spent a couple of years to test the effectiveness of the application in Uganda and Malaysia.

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“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

A horseshoe-shaped apparition has UFO trackers seeing stars.

For hardcore UFO believers, it’s a case almost too good to be true. A mysterious, horseshoe-shaped object appeared along the Earth’s horizon in NASA’s live feed from the International Space Station—and then the feed was cut.

Cue the X-Files music.

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Lov’n Quantum Espresso

Researchers use specialized software such as Quantum ESPRESSO and a variety of HPC software in conducting quantum materials research. Quantum ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, plane waves and pseudo potentials. Quantum ESPRESSO is coordinated by the Quantum ESPRESSO Foundation and has a growing world-wide user community in academic and industrial research. Its intensive use of dense mathematical routines makes it an ideal candidate for many-core architectures, such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.

The Intel Parallel Computing Centers at Cineca and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) along with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) are at the forefront in using HPC software and modifying Quantum ESPRESSO (QE) code to take advantage of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors used in quantum materials research. In addition to Quantum ESPRESSO, the teams use tools such as Intel compilers, libraries, Intel VTune and OpenMP in their work. The goal is to incorporate the changes they make to Quantum ESPRESSO into the public version of the code so that scientists can gain from the modification they have made to improve code optimization and parallelization without requiring researchers to manually modify legacy code.

Figure 2: The electronic density of states calculated by Quantum ESPRESSO. This is one of the key properties that permit researchers to understand the electrical properties of the device. Courtesy of 1) A. Calzolari - National Research Council of Italy - Institute for Nanoscience (CNR-NANO), 2) R. Colle – University of Bologna (Italy), 3) C. Cavazzoni – Cineca (Italy) and 4) E. Pascolo – OGS (Italy)Electrical conductivity of a PDI-FCN2 molecule.

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Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom’s southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions—and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself.

“It’s well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later,” Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. “The question is, when exactly?”

Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times. Their first major analysis, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, suggests that the ability to read and write was widespread throughout the Kingdom of Judah, setting the stage for the compilation of Biblical texts.

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Part 2

In part 1 of the journey, we saw the leading observations that needed explanation. Explanations that we want to do through the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. No technical and expert knowledge in these theories yet, only scratches of its implications. So let us continue.

THE RELATIVITY THEORY Deducing from the Hubble expansion, the galaxies were close in the distant past but certainly not in this current form as the telescopes now see them receding. In fact, if they were receding it also means they were expanding.

Therefore, when we reverse the receding galaxies into the far distant past they should end up at a point somewhere sometime with the smallest imaginable extension, if that extension is conceivable at all. Scientists call it the singularity, a mathematical deduction from the relativity theory. How did this immeasurable Universe made of clusters of galaxies we now see ever existed in that point called singularity?

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Like this article highlights; we will see a day soon when all techies will need some level of bio-science and/ or medical background especially as we move closer to Singularity which is what we have seen predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others. In the coming decade/s we will no longer see tech credentials relying strictly on math/ algorithms, code, etc, Techies will need some deeper knowledge around the natural sciences.

If you are majoring in biology right now, I say to you: that was a good call. The mounting evidence suggests that you placed your bet on the right degree. With emergent genetic recombination technologies improving at breakneck speed alongside a much deepened understanding of biological circuitry in simple, “home grown” metabolic systems, this field is shaping up to be a tinkerer’s paradise.

Many compare this stage of synthetic biology to the early days of microprocessing (the precursor to computers) when Silicon Valley was a place for young entrepreneurs to go if they needed a cheap place to begin their research or tech business. One such tech entrepreneur, the founder of O’Reilly media, Tim O’Reilly — who also coined the term “open source” — made this comparison in an interview with Wired magazine., O’Reilly further commented on synthetic biology saying, “It’s still in the fun stage.”

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Game theory is a branch of mathematics that looks at how groups solve complex problems. The Schrödinger equation is the foundational equation of quantum mechanics — the area of physics focused on the smallest particles in the Universe. There’s no reason to expect one to have anything to do with the other.

But according to a team of French physicists, it’s possible to translate a huge number of problems in game theory into the language of quantum mechanics. In a new paper, they show that electrons and fish follow the exact same mathematics.

Schrödinger is famous in popular culture for his weird cat, but he’s famous to physicists for being the first to write down an equation that fully describes the weird things that happen when you try to do experiments on the fundamental constituents of matter. He realised that you can’t describe electrons or atoms or any of the other smallest pieces of the Universe as billiard balls that will be exactly where you expect them to be exactly when you expect them to be there.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=9grWo5ZofmA

A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:

The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.

But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.

While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.

Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.

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Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of the mathematical programming system Wolfram Language, thinks there might be intelligent life, of a sort, in the digits of pi. He spoke recently at the SETI Institute about what his “principle of computational equivalence” means for non-human intelligence — check out the heady hour-and-a-half lecture below.

The key thread running through his concept is that simple rules underpin complex behavior. For Wolfram, the pigmentation patterns on a mollusk shell, for example, aren’t necessarily the outcome of deliberate evolutionary forces. “I think the mollusk is going out into the computational universe, finding a random program, and running it and printing it on its shell,” Wolfram says in the lecture. “If I’m right, the universe is just like an elaborate version of the digits of pi.” (There is some debate, of course, over just how right Wolfram is — though you won’t really get that from the lecture.)

To show how this simplicity-begetting complexity relates to aliens, Wolfram draws from the end of Carl Sagan’s Contact). Spoilers (for a book): after communicating with the alien intelligence, astronomer Ellie Arroway finds in the digits of pi an image of a circle. She takes it as a sign of intelligence baked into the universe. Because the digits are both random and infinite, this also means that within pi “combinatorially there exists the works of Shakespeare and any possible picture of any possible circle,” Wolfram says.

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