Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla

New movement in tech oriented stock, Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla  in the BBC

Published, 11 hours ago, Elon Musk takes part in a news conference at the SpaceX Starbase.

By Peter Hoskins, BBC Business reporter

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk has sold another 22 million shares, worth $3.58bn (£2.9bn), in the electric car maker Tesla., The shares were sold on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week, according to a filing with a US financial regulator.

It brings the total of Tesla stocks sold by Mr Musk over the past year to almost $40bn., Earlier this week Mr Musk lost his position as the world's richest person.

The reason for the latest share sales has not been disclosed., He remains Tesla's biggest shareholder with a 13.4% stake, according to financial market data provider Refinitiv.

Last month Mr Musk revealed that he had sold 19.5 million shares of Tesla worth $3.95bn, just days after completing a $44bn takeover of social media platform Twitter.  ... ' 

Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails

 Of Technical Interest, worth signing into:

Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails

 DECEMBER 9, 2022 EXPLAINABLE AI FEATURED POSTS MACHINE LEARNING SYNTHETIC DATA VISUALIZATION

Entitled “Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails”, the full version in PDF format is accessible in the “Free Books and Articles” section, here. Also discussed in details with Python code in my book “Synthetic Data”, available here.

While the technique discussed here is a last resort solution when all else fails, it is actually more powerful than it seems at first glance. First, it also works in standard cases with “nice” functions. However, there are better methods when the function behaves nicely, taking advantage of the differentiability of the function in question, such as the Newton algorithm (itself a fixed-point iteration). It can be generalized to higher dimensions, though I focus on univariate functions here.

Perhaps the attractive features are the fact that it is simple and intuitive, and quickly leads to a solution despite the absence of convergence. However, it is an empirical method and may require working with different parameter sets to actually find a solution. Still, it can be turned into a black-box solution by automatically testing different parameter configurations. In that respect, I compare it to the empirical elbow rule to detect the number of clusters in unsupervised clustering problems. I also turned the elbow rule into a fully automated black-box procedure, with full details offered in the same book .... '

About the author

Vincent Granville is a pioneering data scientist and machine learning expert, co-founder of Data Science Central (acquired by  TechTarget in 2020), founder of MLTechniques.com, former VC-funded executive, author and patent owner. Vincent’s past corporate experience includes Visa, Wells Fargo, eBay, NBC, Microsoft, and CNET. Vincent is also a former post-doc at Cambridge University, and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).  

Vincent published in Journal of Number Theory, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is also the author of multiple books, including “Intuitive Machine Learning and Explainable AI”, available here. He lives  in Washington state, and enjoys doing research on spatial stochastic processes, chaotic dynamical systems, experimental math and probabilistic number theory.  

NSA Surveillance Effort: Too Far?

 TechnologyCybersecurity

NSA Watchdog Concluded One Analyst’s Surveillance Project Went Too Far   In Bloomberg

Newly unearthed inspector general’s report is coda to Snowden-era controversy over NSA surveillance methods. The National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

By Jason Leopold, Katrina Manson, and William Turton

November 1, 2022 at 9:18 AM EDT

An “experienced” analyst working at the National Security Agency developed a surveillance project about a decade ago that resulted in the unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US, newly unearthed documents show.

An investigation into the matter, which hasn’t been previously reported, found that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard” and violated numerous rules and possibly the law, according to a 2016 report by the NSA’s Office of Inspector General. The agency released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. 

The inspector general’s report sheds new light on unauthorized surveillance and lax oversight at a secretive agency whose global eavesdropping methods have faced intense scrutiny for vacuuming up massive amounts of data — including on Americans, who are protected by US law from being surveilled without authorization. The IG’s investigation unfolded as the first news stories were being published based on leaked classified documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The inspector general’s report also reveals how a single analyst was given relatively free rein to develop a surveillance technique that many of his superiors didn’t understand. And it shows the lengths to which whistleblowers inside the agency went to get their allegations taken more seriously. The full report is here.

Many details about the analyst’s project aren’t known. The inspector general deemed the analyst’s action “egregious” in hindsight but noted he got conflicting guidance, told by some officials that his activities were acceptable and told by others to stop. The February 2016 report, which spans more than 400 pages and had been classified top secret, is heavily redacted. It’s not known if the analyst—or anyone else—was held accountable for what the inspector general described as potentially illegal surveillance.

The NSA didn’t respond to specific questions about the report, including whether any action was taken against the analyst. But an NSA spokesperson provided a statement saying that the agency is “fully committed to the rigorous and independent oversight provided by the NSA Inspector General’s Office.”

“The NSA operates in a culture of compliance to ensure that NSA’s foreign intelligence mission is conducted in accordance with all applicable laws, regulations and procedures,” the spokesperson said.

The analyst said he was working on a “SIGDEV” effort, according to the report. That is short for signals intelligence development, aimed at finding and improving new avenues for eavesdropping. Two former NSA officials who reviewed the report told Bloomberg News that he appeared to be developing a new surveillance tool to improve spying methods that had scooped up Americans’ communications. The former officials asked not to be named in order to discuss sensitive intelligence information.

The inspector general’s investigation was sparked by two whistleblowers in May 2013. The analyst was taken aback by criticism of his work and vigorously defended it. Nonetheless, he told an investigator he had “been proceeding with his project in a ‘kind of [by the] seat of the pants’ mode” and that it was “kind of dangerous” and “unknown territory,” according to the report.

relates to NSA Watchdog Concluded One Analyst’s Surveillance Project Went Too Far

The probe began a month before the first news stories appeared based on Snowden’s leaks. Those stories revealed a massive, warrantless program to collect Americans’ phone records, map mobile phone locations worldwide and undermine encryption, and they came out at a time when the agency was already facing criticism for its expansion of surveillance capabilities after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

There is no indication in the inspector general’s report that the events are related to NSA activities and programs revealed in the Snowden documents, which had been secretly authorized. However, the inspector general’s investigation occurred during a period in which the NSA was under intense pressure to address alleged wrongdoings.   ....  '

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

Listened to the report on the Nuclear Fusion testing Breakthrough this past week by the DOE and Lawrence Livermore Labs (LLNL), More to follow. Here is a presentation to the press and panel discussion.

https://youtu.be/Cmzep3YaRNI

Panel Discussion: Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

On December 5 2022, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This historic, first-of-its kind achievement will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy .... ' 

Uncertain US Self Driving?

 More indication of key elements of uncertainty.  But still, I believe,  in time ultimate success.

Self-Driving Cars Face Uncertain Path to U.S. Deployment

By Reuters, October 31, 2022

The Cruise Origin autonomous vehicle, a Honda and General Motors self-driving car partnership, seen during its unveiling in 2020.

The difficult path to deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) was highlighted by an announcement  that Ford Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG would close their self-driving startup Argo AI, citing the fact that the technology is still a long way off.

This comes as legislation to amend regulations to include self-driving cars remains stalled in Congress, and officials at the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have not revealed when they might act on petitions to grant initial approval to self-driving vehicles without human controls.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and industry representatives have called on U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to develop a comprehensive federal framework for AVs to ensure the nation remains competitive, especially as China has made substantial investments in autonomous and connected vehicle technologies.

From Reuters

View Full Article   

U.S. Steel Looks to Forge High-Tech Future at Mills New and Old

Old industry using advanced tech of AI

 U.S. Steel Looks to Forge High-Tech Future at Mills New and Old

The Wall Street Journal, Isabelle Bousquette, December 1, 2022

U.S. Steel Corp. is looking to implement artificial intelligence (AI) across its mills, although it has proven difficult to deploy AI technology at its older mills. Some of the equipment at U.S. Steel's 110-year-old Gary Works mill in Indiana, for instance, dates to the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. Steel's Christian Holliday said each mill needs its own AI model based on its unique environment. However, machines at older mills must be retrofit with sensors and cameras to collect the necessary data, and they often lack wireless network capacity for sensors. Nevertheless, machine-learning algorithms are being implemented at Gary Works to boost efficiency, and a digital twin is being developed to predict finish times and optimize output. ... ' 

What is Threat Intelligence?

Considerable and mostly non technical look at the idea of 'Threat Intelligence'. Nicely done overview.    From Recorded Future, a former collaborator to our enterprise.

What is Threat Intelligence?

Digital technologies lie at the heart of nearly every industry today. The automation and greater connectedness they afford have revolutionized the world’s economic and cultural institutions — but they’ve also brought risk in the form of cyberattacks. Threat intelligence, often synonymous with open source intelligence (OSINT) is knowledge that allows you to prevent or mitigate those attacks. Rooted in data, threat intelligence provides context — like who is attacking you, what their motivation and capabilities are, and what indicators of compromise in your systems to look for — that helps you make informed decisions about your security.

“Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and action-oriented advice about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets. This intelligence can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard.” — Gartner

For more detailed overview of all things Threat Intelligence, download our comprehensive Threat Intelligence Handbook or keep reading below.

Why Is Threat Intelligence Important?

Today, the cybersecurity industry faces numerous challenges — increasingly persistent and devious threat actors, a daily flood of data full of extraneous information and false alarms across multiple, unconnected security systems, and a serious shortage of skilled professionals. Additionally, the attack surfaces organizations have to understand and protect are bigger now than ever before. Threats aren’t coming from one angle, organizations need to understand business risk from cyber attacks, physical security and operational disruptions, attacks on their reputation, and more.

Some organizations try to incorporate threat data feeds into their network, but don’t know what to do with all that extra data, adding to the burden of analysts who may not have the tools to decide what to prioritize and what to ignore.

A threat intelligence solution can address each of these issues. The best solutions use a combination of machine learning to automate data collection and processing, integrate with your existing solutions, take in unstructured data from disparate sources, and then connect the dots by providing context on indicators of compromise (IoCs) and the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors.

Threat intelligence is actionable — it’s timely, provides context, and is able to be understood by the people in charge of making decisions.

Who Can Benefit From Threat Intelligence?

All security & risk teams and leaders! Threat intelligence is widely imagined to be the domain of elite analysts. In reality, it adds value across security functions for organizations of all sizes.

When threat intelligence is treated as a separate function within a broader security team rather than an essential component that augments every other function, the result is that many of the people who would benefit the most from threat intelligence don’t have access to it when they need it.

Security operations teams are routinely unable to process the alerts they receive — threat intelligence integrates with the security solutions you already use, helping automatically prioritize and filter alerts and other threats. Vulnerability management teams can more accurately prioritize the most important vulnerabilities with access to the external insights and context provided by threat intelligence. And fraud prevention, risk analysis, and other high-level security processes are enriched by the understanding of the current threat landscape that threat intelligence provides, including key insights on threat actors, their tactics, techniques, and procedures, and more from data sources across the web.  .... ' 

An Example of Drones Sensing Rare or Hidden Things

I like the hidden and rare sensing aspect of the problem.   Other Applications? 

 Daredevil Drones Find Nearly Extinct Plants Hiding in Cliffs

Reuters, Daisy Chung; Gloria Dickie; Simon Scarr, December 10, 2022

Scientists at Hawaii's nonprofit National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) and the state's Division of Forestry and Wildlife are using drones to find and collect samples of nearly extinct plants in cliffs and other hard-to-reach locations. NTBG's Ben Nyberg and researchers at Canadian aerospace company Outreach Robotics developed the Multi-Use Aerial Manipulator Bidirectionally Actuated (Mamba), which dangles on a cable below a drone. The remote-piloted robot arm can detach from the drone to pluck plant samples in perilous regions as far as 4 meters (13 feet) away. Mamba has so far collected 29 cuttings or seeds from 12 endangered plant species on the island of Kauai. Nyberg suggested the robot "can be the difference between extinction and survival" for such plant species.

Full Article

Expect and Fear the Trading Bot

Be very careful ... 

I, Trading Bot

Algorithms are being unleashed on the crypto markets.

By Nathan Thompson  in CoinDesk

Opinion

 Movies about stock traders and investors often depict Wall Street mercenaries with great hair or uber-nerds wedded to their computers, but the age of the human trader is already a thing of the past. Welcome to the age of the “bot.”

Trading bots use algorithms that execute trades when certain market conditions are met. Since the early 2000s there has been strong growth in these bots especially as market data has become more sophisticated. Now the algorithms are being unleashed on the crypto markets.

Nathan Thompson is the lead tech writer at Bybit. This article is part of CoinDesk’s Crypto 2023 series.

Algorithmic trading is used across most capital markets. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 78% of market trades were performed by “trading centers [that] depend on automated systems and algorithms.” Other commentators peg the volume of stock trades coming from bots at 60% to 70%.

Institutional traders rent or create their own bots that activate when the market hits certain conditions. These algorithms constantly search markets for the right trade setups, such as finding oversold stocks or trading a breakout. When they find the right conditions bots run scripts that determine the position size, execute the trade, employ stop-losses and exit automatically.

The bots are not perfect because they are created using past data, but the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology are already being employed – making them faster and more efficient than ever. Further, bots take the emotion out of trading (helping to stymie some of the emotional burden of investing in volatile markets).

See also: Become a Better Crypto Trader by Avoiding These Cognitive Biases | Opinion

“Reason is a slave to the passions” as philosopher David Hume said, and humans are by definition constantly at risk of making bad decisions based on emotions. For example, the infamous “revenge trade” happens when a trader fires ill-advised bids into the market in a desperate attempt to recoup a large loss, usually compounding their defeat.

More insidious is the fact that people don’t like being wrong. This makes them stay in a trade too long out of an irrational attachment to the company or digital asset when exiting is the best strategy.  ... ' 

New Quantum Computing Advance

New Advances? , Considerably technical ..

 Advance Brings Quantum Computing One Step Closer to Implementation

University of Tokyo (Japan), October 24, 2022

Two ion-electronic hybrid systems able to cool and measure the motion of an electron were developed by researchers at Japan's University of Tokyo (UTokyo). Both systems featured a vacuum-trapped electron that interacted with superconducting circuits and a trapped ion; ions and electrons that are trapped together move toward each other due to Coulomb attraction. The electron's light mass yielded a strong attraction in both an electron-superconducting circuit and an electron-ion coupled system, and the researchers could control the electron's temperature using microwave fields and optical lasers. The researchers also measured their calculations via a single-phonon readout and ground-state cooling. "With the feasibility of quantum-level control of the motion of trapped electrons, the trapped electron becomes more promising and attractive for quantum-technology applications, such as quantum computing," said UTokyo's Alto Osada.  ... ' 

Light-Analyzing 'Lab on a Chip' Opens Door to Portable Spectrometers

Light Sensors. 

 Light-Analyzing 'Lab on a Chip' Opens Door to Portable Spectrometers

Oregon State University News, Steve Lundeberg, October 20, 2022

An international team of scientists led by researchers at Finland's Aalto University has developed an artificial intelligence-driven spectrometer from two-dimensional semiconductor materials that fits on a microchip. Oregon State University's Ethan Minot said the accomplishment demonstrates a method for dramatically miniaturizing the light-measuring devices. The researchers said the device is 100% electrically controllable regarding its absorption of optical colors, conferring vast scalability and widespread usability potential. "Integrating it directly into portable devices such as smartphones and drones could advance our daily lives", said Aalto University's Hoon Hahn Yoon. "Imagine that the next generation of our smartphone cameras could be hyperspectral cameras."  ... ' 

AI Can Code

 Is AI the next step for useful and more secure coding? 

DeepMind's AlphaCode Can Outcompete Human Coders

Gizmodo, Mack DeGeurin, December 8, 2022

DeepMind's AlphaCode model performed well against human coders in a programming competition, with a paper describing its overall performance as similar to that of a "novice programmer" with up to a year of training. AlphaCode achieved "approximately human-level performance" and solved previously unseen natural language problems by forecasting code segments and generating millions of potential solutions. The model then winnowed them down to a maximum of 10 solutions, which the researchers said were produced "without any built-in knowledge about the structure of computer code." Carnegie Mellon University's J. Zico Kolter wrote, "Ultimately, AlphaCode performs remarkably well on previously unseen coding challenges, regardless of the degree to which it 'truly' understands the task."  ... ' 

Big Players Ready for Meta Headset Offerings

Big Players and more Meta Reality Hype and Prep

Apple Is Now Calling Its AR/VR Headset Operating System ‘xrOS’

By Josh Norem on December 5, 2022  in ExtremeTech

Apple seems to be getting close to the launch of its much-hyped AR/VR headset, as it’s reportedly settled on a name for the operating system. Noted Apple soothsayer Mark Gurman is reporting it’s going to be xrOS. This is shorthand for “extended reality,” as opposed to strictly augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR). Previously it was believed to be called realityOS, but Apple has allegedly ditched that for a shorter name, the report said. (The Bloomberg article is paywalled and was summarized by MacRumors.)

The device will be Apple’s first new product since the Apple Watch, which debuted in 2015. The new naming confirms Apple’s plans to follow in the footsteps of the Meta Quest Pro by offering mixed, or extended, reality. That approach will allow the user to experience both VR, a fully digital world, and AR, virtual objects overlaid with reality. This is seen as a more flexible offering than just sticking with one technology. Current headsets like the Meta Quest 2 and Valve Index are strictly VR headsets. ... ' 

How AI-powered Market Research Helps Predict Success of Future Products and Advertising

 Interesting Claims made.

How AI-powered market research helps predict success of future products and advertising

Sean Michael Kerner  @TechJournalist,  December 13, 2022  in Venturebeat

Market research is a business that has always relied on data and lots of it. Making sense of all that data in a meaningful way, however, has long been a challenge, but it’s one that artificial intelligence (AI) is being tasked with solving.

Market intelligence firm, Zappi, helps organizations with research efforts around marketing advertising and product innovation. It’s a business that got started in 2012 and in recent years has deeply integrated AI and machine learning (ML) into its processes and platform to help organizations get better insights. Zappi counts PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Heineken, and Reckitt among its customer base.

Using AI to power no-code platforms and streamline work - Low-Code/No-Code Summit

“Our focus is embedding human expertise into software for the analysis, interpretation and communication of data that will help clients make better decisions,” Steve Phillips, CEO and cofounder of Zappi, told VentureBeat.

In a bid to help the company further grow its technology and go-to-market efforts, Zappi announced today that it has raised $170 million in new funding.  ... ' 

Balancing a Robotic Cube

Uses in Space, Transportation? 

https://spectrum.ieee.org/051410-robotic-sculpture-balances-itself-on-one-corner

Amazing Robotic Sculpture Balances Itself on One Corner Is it a sculpture? Is it a robot? The Balancing Cube is both  ERICO GUIZZO 14 MAY 20 102 MIN READ

Is it a sculpture? Is it a robot? The Balancing Cube is both.

The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure's center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard!

Created by Raffaello D'Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

D'Andrea, whose robotic creations include a self-assembly chair, a people-seeking table, and an army of warehouse bots -- couldn't help but wonder: Could a machine perform a similar balancing act, with individual elements coordinating their movements to keep the system stable?

See the result in the video below. I love the part when Trimpe pushes the cube slightly and its balancing mechanisms respond, the motors screeching as if he were teasing a living creature.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/v/gbT_XoSIlEo&hl=en_US&fs=1& expand=1]

So how does it work?

The Balancing Cube is an example of a distributed control platform. Each module [see illustration below] is a self-contained unit with a computer, battery, motor, and inertial sensors (a tri-axis accelerometer and tri-axis rate gyro). So instead of relying on a centralized controller, the modules share their inertial data through a bus network. Then each module combines its own data with the shared data to determine the orientation of the cube -- and command its motor accordingly.

In other words, each module makes its own computations and moves its own motor, but as a result the combined motion keeps the system stable -- just like the Cirque du Soleil acrobats.

D'Andrea and Trimpe discussed the cube's control scheme last week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Anchorage, Alaska.

Their control algorithm uses inertial data to estimate how the cube is oriented relative to gravity and how fast it is moving. But this estimate is independent of the rigid body dynamics of the cube; that is, the algorithm doesn't require a dynamic model of the cube, and the method works both in static conditions and for when the structure is in motion.

The cube, made of aluminum, is 1.2 meter on its sides and stands about 2 m tall. It may look like a star, but that's because its faces consist of X-shaped elements. It's cubic shape becomes apparent if you imagine lines connecting its corners [see image above]. (Think of Isamu Noguchi's Red Cube in New York.)

The goal of the project was more than just building a high-tech piece of art. The researchers wanted to investigate the advantages and limits of distributed control. In particular, they knew that the balancing mechanisms didn't need to share all their sensor data, but they wanted to find out which pieces they did need to share.

In terms of hardware, they focused on a modular design, trying to create a balancing system that would consist entirely of self-contained mechanisms. Indeed, you can use their mechanisms to balance not only a cube but also other shapes.

A final but critical design requirement: the hardware had to be robust enough to withstand repeated falls.

Images and video: Raffaello D'Andrea and Sebastian Trimpe/Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control - ETH Zurich

Erico Guizzo

 

Colgate Advertising as a Space Hygiene Company

Spent a considerable amount of time working at Procter & Gamble,  often a competitor to Colgate,  so its interesting to see this product connection with arch competitor Colgate.   How well will an increased link to NASA act to promote product?: 

How Colgate-Palmolive, and NASA and an astronaut are teaming for demonstrating better space hygiene results.    Attention getting idea, but how well will this work?       

Earth's Poles Flipping?

The linked article below claims that NASA has detected an increase in the wandering of the earth's magnetic poles.  Ultimately this can produce what is called a 'Laschamp Event' or flipping of the poles.  This actually happened last about 41,000 year ago, as measured by physical effects in lava flows.  It appears to occur about every 250K years, with considerable variance.  The potential considerable negative effects are outlined in the piece below.  This would seem to be much more difficult to stop, since it is based on the earth's magnetic field and content,  than redirecting an asteroid.    Based on what I know a reasonable article.  Further examining  - FAD

Article in Youtube:    https://youtu.be/8M1givE6Gh8

Earths Poles Flipping?

NASA Announced That They Are Monitoring a Huge Escalating Anomaly In Earth's Magnetic Field

74,176 views  Dec 11, 2022

Many people have come to depend on the Earth's magnetic field even without realizing it! Your phone is able to perform some basic functions, like directing you while driving to your destination. However, a catastrophic event is threatening to render life-saving tasks like this impossible: the flipping of the Earth's poles! Why are the Earth's poles flipping? What are the consequences, and how can you cope with it? In this video, we dive into the Earth's poles flipping, which has many people worried as it is happening! There are many things that shape your daily life, even without you realizing it. Thanks   to   science   and   technology,   we   have   come   to   rely   on   many   natural phenomena that are not apparent to the naked eye! The Earth's magnetic poles are an example, and this has a lot to do with the Earth's magnetic field! But what is the Earth's magnetic field, and where did it come from?

New Fusion Energy Development from Lawrence Livermore

Have been hearing much that these advances are still net energy deficient.  Seeking paper. 

Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes

Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels

© Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.

The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.

Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.

The US breakthrough comes as the world wrestles with high energy prices and the need to rapidly move away from burning fossil fuels to stop average global temperatures reaching dangerous levels. Through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration is ploughing almost $370bn into new subsidies for low-carbon energy in an effort to slash emissions and win a global race for next-generation clean tech.

The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.  ... ' 

Apple Will Use US Chips

 Arizona made chips to be used ... 

Tim Cook Confirms Apple Will Use US-Made Chips From New Arizona Fab

By Adrianna Nine on December 7, 2022    in ExtremeTech

As if TSMC’s massive new Arizona fab wasn’t (literally) groundbreaking enough, Apple CEO Tim Cook has added to the excitement. At a factory event on Tuesday, Cook announced that Apple would begin using chips made in the desert state.

Cook joined President Joe Biden onsite this week to celebrate its forthcoming contribution to US chip manufacturing. In an announcement first reported by CNBC, Cook shared that Apple would be shifting away from imported chips in favor of Arizona-made chips once the factory was in production. “Now, thanks to the hard work of so many people, these chips can be proudly stamped ‘Made in America,’” Cook said. “This is an incredibly significant moment.”

Apple’s relationship with the new factory isn’t much of a surprise given recent rumors. Apple has sourced all of its chips from TSMC for a while now, meaning the semiconductor manufacturer’s decision to build another Arizona location quickly gave way to a benevolent opportunity for Apple. The fab, which will start with its 4nm chips and eventually rope in 3nm, gives Apple a chance to prove it’s invested in sourcing domestic parts and creating jobs here in the States.  ... ' 

Chip Makers, Once in High Demand, Confront Sudden Challenges

 Supply Chains, Designs,Contexts

Chip Makers, Once in High Demand, Confront Sudden Challenges

By The New York Times, October 28, 2022

A few months ago, makers of computer chips seemed on top of the world.

Customers could not get enough of the small slices of silicon, which act as the brains of computers and are needed in just about every device with an on-off switch. Demand was so strong — and U.S. dependence on a foreign manufacturer so worrying — that Democrats and Republicans agreed in July on a $52 billion subsidy package that included grants to build new chip factories in America.

U.S. chip makers such as Intel, Micron Technology, Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries pledged huge expansions in domestic manufacturing, betting on a growing need for their products and the prospects of federal subsidies.

But lately, supplies of some semiconductors are piling up, which could spell good news for consumers but not for industry executives. Their bold investment plans are running into a sudden and unexpected slowdown in consumer demand for electronic gadgets, new U.S. restrictions on sales to customers in China, rising inflation and the unusual prospect of a simultaneous shortage of some chips and glut of others.

From The New York Times    

Virtualizing Nuclear War?

Happy thoughts here, not sure talking or virtualizing does much.  But consider all the war games that have been played,    Including civilians.   Serious stuff.

Nuclear War Simulator Creator Says Public Must Know Potential Destruction

Newsweek, Aristos Georgiou, October 19, 2022

A computer scientist created a nuclear war simulator to demonstrate atomic weapons' destructive potential to the public. Christopher Minson said Russia's war in Ukraine has elevated traffic to his website, which hosts a map tool for modeling an attack on the U.S. involving approximately 1,200 nuclear warheads. Minson based the tool on databases of warhead yields and targets derived from declassified information; he then compiled a database of census data, and mapped populations to target sites. Minson said the system correlates this data and executes a two-hour attack, calculating casualties from known impact and population size, and modeling the spread of fallout. "It is critical that the public understands this threat," he said. "They need to see, clearly and viscerally, just how universal and destructive a nuclear war would be."  ... 

ESnet Launches Next-Generation Network to Enhance Collaborative Science

Better Networks Built for Research.

ACM TECHNEWS

ESnet Launches Next-Generation Network to Enhance Collaborative Science

By Berkeley Lab News Center, October 18, 2022

“ESnet6 represents a transformational change in the way networks are built for research, with improved capacity, resiliency, and flexibility,” said ESnet executive director Inder Monga.

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) has rolled out the latest generation of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) high-performance science network, dubbed ESnet6.

ESnet links all DOE's national laboratories, DOE-funded researchers, and its scientific instruments and supercomputing centers so that data can move quickly between them.

ESnet6 features bandwidth of over 46 terabits per second, a dedicated fiber optic cable footprint spanning 15,000 miles, and network backbone links ranging from 400 gigabits per second to 1 terabit per second, among other things.

Said ESnet's Inder Monga, "ESnet6 provides the foundation for the future of the DOE mission science as we enter an age where discoveries will rely on the integration of scientific experimental facilities, supercomputers, and global science teams operating together as if they are colocated: one instrument in one location. ESnet6 interconnects all of these resources to create a holistic science discovery system."

From Berkeley Lab News Center

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A Wearable Reasoner

Reasonable thought, but how well does it work in varying  contexts.  Need to be wearable? Good demo included.

Wearable Reasoner: Towards Enhanced Human Rationality through a Wearable AI Assistant  in Media.MIT

We present "Wearable Reasoner," a proof-of-concept wearable system capable of analyzing if an argument is stated with supporting evidence or not to prompt people to question and reflect on the justification of their own beliefs and the arguments of others.  

In an experimental study, we explored the impact of argumentation mining and explainability of the AI feedback on the user through a verbal statement evaluation task. The results demonstrate that the device with explainable feedback is effective in enhancing rationality by helping users differentiate between statements supported by evidence and those without. When assisted by an AI system with explainable feedback, users significantly consider claims given with reasons or evidence more reasonable than those without. Qualitative interviews demonstrate users' internal processes of reflection and integration of the new information in their judgment and decision making, stating that they were happy to have a second opinion present, and emphasizing the improved evaluation of presented arguments. 

Left: Overview of Wearable Reasoner system. Right: Envisioned use cases of Wearable Reasoner for detecting empty claims (arguments presented without evidence) in political speech, advertisements, or high stake meetings.

Based on recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), argument mining, and computational linguistics, we envision the possibility of having an AI assistant as a symbiotic counterpart to the biological human brain. As a "second brain," the AI serves as an extended, rational reasoning organ that assists the individual and can teach them to become more rational over time by making them aware of biased and fallacious information through just-in-time feedback. To ensure the transparency of the AI system, and prevent it from becoming an AI "black box,'' it is important for the AI to be able to explain how it generates its classifications. This Explainable AI additionally allows the person to speculate, internalize and learn from the AI system, and prevents an over-reliance on the technology. .... ' 

Google Machine Learns with ML for Sheets (ML forSpreadsheet?)

Very interesting update  ... like the idea, will look at it.   Click through for more. 

Google brings machine learning to online spreadsheets with Simple ML for Sheets

Sean Michael Kerner@TechJournalist  in Venturebeat

December 7, 2022 4:16 PM

Icon for Google Sheets  ...   Simple ML for Sheets

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Spreadsheets are widely used by organizations of all sizes for all kinds of basic and complex tasks.

While simple calculations and graphs have long been part of the spreadsheet experience, machine learning (ML) has not. ML is often seen as being too complex to use, while spreadsheet usage is intended to be accessible to any type of user. Google is now trying to change that paradigm for its Google Sheets online spreadsheet program.

Why adopting LC/NC tools enables an organization’s citizen developers and makes skilled developers more valuable - Low-Code/No-Code Summit

Today Google announced a beta release of the Simple ML for Sheets add-on. Google Sheets has an extensible architecture that enables users to benefit from add-ons that extend the default functionality available in the application. In this case, Google Sheets benefits from ML technology that Google first developed in the open-source TensorFlow project. With Simple ML for Sheets, users will not need to use a specific TensorFlow service, as Google has developed the service to be as easily accessible as possible.

“Everything runs completely on the user browser,” Luiz Gustavo Martins, Google AI developer advocate, told VentureBeat. “Your data doesn’t leave Google Sheets and models are saved to your Google Drive so you can use them again later.”  ... ' 

San Francisco Now Says No to Armed Robots

Mentioned the earlier decision here a week ago, and predicted it would NOT last in SF's policing environment.  It has now quickly been reversed.  

San Francisco decides killer police robots aren’t such a great idea

Explosive robots were approved for the SFPD arsenal, then the protests started.

By Ron Amadeo - 12/7/2022, 1:26 PM  in ArsTechnica

The robot police dystopia will have to wait. Last week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to authorize the San Francisco Police Department to add lethal robots to its arsenal. The plan wasn't yet "robots with guns" (though some police bomb disposal robots fire shotgun shells already, and some are also used by the military as gun platforms) but to arm the bomb disposal robots with bombs, allowing them to drive up to suspects and detonate. Once the public got wind of this, the protests started, and after an 8–3 vote authorizing the robots last week, now the SF Board of Supervisors has unanimously voted to (at least temporarily) ban lethal robots.  ... ' 

Dealing with Tsunami of Data

Continues.

RisingWave Emerges to Tackle Tsunami of Real-Time Data

Alex Woodie in Datanami

Only the most advanced companies have overcome the technical complexity involved with processing streaming data in real time. One of the vendors aiming to reduce this complexity and make stream data processing available to the masses is RisingWave Labs, which today announced $36 million in financing.

The early days of stream data processing brought us stand-alone systems that were capable of acting upon vast streams of data, and doing so with low latency and reliability. Stream processing frameworks like Apache Storm made headway in addressing these challenges and led the way to more sophisticated frameworks like Apache Flink and others.

Things got significantly more complex when companies realized they needed to know something about the past to take the best action on the newest data, which necessitated the integration of stream processing frameworks with databases or data lakes, where the historical record lived as persisted data. Architectural blueprints, such as the Lambda and Kappa architectures, were proposed to address this unique challenge, but the technical complexity in keeping these dual-path systems running are immense.

Today we’re seeing the emergence of a new category of product–the streaming database–aimed at solving this problem. Instead of running data through a dedicated stream processing framework like Storm or Flink, the backers of streaming databases think that all the data processing–including the business end of a streaming big data pipeline like Kafka, Kinesis, or Pulsar–can be handled by the SQL query engine contained in a relational database.

RisingWave is a Postgres-compatible database developed to process data streams in the cloud (Image courtesy RisingWave Labs)

That’s the approach taken with RisingWave, a new open source streaming database that emerged just over a year ago. Yingjun Wu, a former AWS and IBM engineer, created RisingWave as a cloud-native database with the goal of providing the bernefits of stream processing without the technical complexity inherent with stream processing frameworks.

“Existing open-source systems are very costly to deploy, maintain, and use in the modern cloud environment,” Wu, who is the CEO of RisingWave Labs, says in a press release today. “Our goal is not to build yet another streaming system that is 10X faster than existing systems, but to deliver a simple and cost-effective system that allows everyone to benefit from stream processing.”

Developed in Rust, RisingWave is a Postgres-compatible database can do many of the things that stream processing frameworks do, but within the context and control of a familiar relational database running in the cloud and the SQL language, according to Wu, who has a PhD from National University of Singapore and was also a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon University.

“[RisingWave] consumes streaming data, performs continuous queries, and maintains results dynamically in the form of a materialized view,” Wu says in a blog post earlier this year. “Processing data streams inside a database is quite different from that inside a stream computation engine: streaming data are instantly ingested into data tables; queries over streaming and historical data are simply modeled as table joins; query results are directly maintained and updated inside the database, without pushing into a downstream system.”

The open source project, which available on GitHub via an Apache 2.0 license, is being adopted by organizations for a range of uses, including real-time analytics and alerting; IoT device tracking; monitoring user activity; and online application data serving. The company, which changed its name from Singularity Data three weeks ago, recently unveiled the beta of a hosted commercial version of RisingWave; it’s slated to become generally available next year.  ... ' 

Concerns about TikTok

And it continues

FBI Director Raises National Security Concerns About TikTok

By Associated Press on December 03, 2022

FBI concerns over TikTok

FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.”

Wray said the FBI was concerned that the Chinese had the ability to control the app’s recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.” He also asserted that China could use the app to collect data on its users that could be used for traditional espionage operations.

{ Report: TikTok Harvested MAC Addresses By Exploiting Android Loophole }

“All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Those concerns are similar to ones he raised during congressional appearances last month when the issue came up. And they’re being voiced during ongoing dialogue in Washington about the app.

Concerned about China’s influence over TikTok, the Trump administration in 2020 threatened to ban the app within the U.S. and pressured ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company. U.S. officials and the company are now in talks over a possible agreement that would resolve American security concerns, a process that Wray said was taking place across U.S. government agencies.

“As Director Wray has previously said, the FBI’s input is being considered as part of our ongoing negotiations with the U.S. Government,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in an emailed statement. “While we can’t comment on the specifics of those confidential discussions, we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns and have already made significant strides toward implementing those solutions.”

TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. The TikTok statement Friday noted that ByteDance is a private company and that “TikTok Inc., which offers the TikTok service in the United States, is a U.S. company bound by U.S. laws.”

At a Senate hearing in September, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas responded to questions from members of both parties by saying that the company protects all data from American users and that Chinese government officials have no access to it.

“We will never share data, period,” Pappas said.

Read: China-Made TikTok App Riddled With Security Holes: Researchers  ... 

Social Commerce: The f\Buture of How Consumers Interact with Brands

 McKinsey: Social commerce: The Future of how Consumers Interact with Brands

Authors:

  Camilo Becdach is a partner in McKinsey’s Southern California office, where Zachary Kubetz is a consultant; Marc Brodherson is a senior partner in the New York office, where James Nakajima is a consultant; Alex Gersovitz is a consultant in the Bay Area office; Daniel Glaser is a partner in the Munich office; and Max Magni is a senior partner in the New Jersey office.

October 19, 2022 | Article

Browsing and shopping directly on social media platforms is a core feature of e-commerce in China. Now, this dynamic new way of buying is poised for rapid growth in the United States.

A two-hour live shopping event on TikTok brings in more than a week’s worth of sales at a flagship store.1 An interactive, shoppable Instagram live stream garners 40,000 comments. Augmented-reality (AR) lenses let Snapchat users “try on” makeup and send the images to friends.

Welcome to the dynamic world of social commerce, where consumers explore products and complete transactions through social media and content creation platforms, all in an app. This emerging form of shopping removes friction from the buying process, creates a more engaging journey for the consumer, and presents new opportunities for brands to generate consumer interest.

Already enormously popular in markets such as China, social commerce remains a small but rapidly growing segment in the United States (Exhibit 1). In 2021, $37 billion in goods and services were purchased through social-commerce channels.2

Exhibit 1

Social commerce is a small but rapidly growing segment in the United States.

We strive to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to our website. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you. Please email us at: McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.com

By 2025, that figure is expected to swell to nearly $80 billion, or 5 percent of total US e-commerce.3 Globally, the social-commerce market is expected to grow to more than $2 trillion by 2025.4

Discover NeXT Commerce

Social commerce is more than just a new shopping experience. It represents a paradigm shift in how consumers interact with brands: where, when, and how they shop. For consumer brands, this creates opportunities for a much more interactive, entertaining, and experiential journey (see sidebar, “Discover NeXT Commerce”). For example, leading brands are working with platforms such as TikTok to forge new relationships with consumers, shifting from traditional advertising strategies to fun, engaging content that is less overtly promotional. This content can be used to highlight unique product features or explain product complexities simply. For example, rather than watching an ad for a new skin-care formula, your favorite celebrity can invite you behind the scenes into their daily skin-care routine, showing you how they use the branded product and why they love it. Consumers can then buy the product directly within the platform, whether it’s on Instagram or TikTok or through YouTube Shopping.

The winning ingredients for social commerce in China

The evolution of social commerce in China offers a glimpse of the possibilities.5 By forging partnerships with wildly popular social influencers and participating in live-stream shopping—an experience that combines instant purchasing of a featured product and audience participation through chat or reaction buttons—brands in China have achieved conversion rates of almost 30 percent on social platforms.6 This is up to ten times higher than conversion in conventional e-commerce. Last year, goods and services purchased through live-stream shopping in China represented $132 billion, or 5 percent of total e-commerce gross merchandise value (GMV).7 More broadly, Chinese consumers spent more than double that amount—$352 billion (or 13 percent of total e-commerce)—on all social commerce. ... .' 

Photonic Chips

 New developments in Photonic Chips

Caltech's Nanophotonic Chip 'Squeezes' More Out of Light

By Caltech, October 18, 2022

The photonic chip can generate and measure quantum states of light in ways previously only possible with bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.

Credit: Natasha Mutch and Nicolle R. Fuller, Sayo Studio

Electronic computing and communications have advanced significantly since the days of radio telegraphy and vacuum tubes. In fact, consumer devices now contain levels of processing power and memory that would be unimaginable just a few decades ago.

But as computing and information processing microdevices get ever smaller and more powerful, they are running into some fundamental limits imposed by the laws of quantum physics. Because of this, the future of the field may lie in photonics—the light-based parallel to electronics. Photonics is theoretically similar to electronics but substitutes photons for electrons. They have a huge potential advantage in that photonic devices may be capable of processing data much faster than their electronic counterparts, including for quantum computers.

Currently, the field is still very active in fundamental research and lacks crucial devices that are needed to become practical. However, a new photonic chip developed at Caltech may represent a critical breakthrough for the field, especially for enabling photonic quantum information processors. It can generate and measure quantum states of light in ways that were previously only possible with bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.

From Caltech  View Full Article     

Why Synthetic Data Is Key to Paving the Way for Smart Cities

Good thoughts here for other applications as well

Why Synthetic Data Is Key to Paving the Way for Smart Cities

By Spiceworks, November 18, 2022

Illustration of a futuristic smart city.

Gartner predicts synthetic data will overshadow real-world data in artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2030. It saves valuable time and energy while also providing the opportunity to counteract incumbent bias in the base data.

Of course, model training should not be limited to one data source or the other. Synthetic and real-world data can be complementary in efficiently progressing training at a lower cost, with greater applicability and without privacy or bias issues. But, it stands that synthetic data is essential for developing smarter AIs capable of recognizing and preventing corner cases in smart cities.

The potential for uniting synthetic and real-world data in the pursuit of smart cities is highly promising for the future of smarter AI.

From Spiceworks

View Full Article    

MIT is Working on Self-Assembling Robots

We Met in the past at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld. 

MIT Is Working on Self-Assembling Robots

By Ryan Whitwam on November 28, 2022 at 7:00 am

Today, humans build robots, but in the future, robots could be programmed to build more of themselves. Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) have created robotic subunits called “voxels” that can self-assemble into a rudimentary robot, and then collect more voxels to assemble larger structures or even more robots.

The researchers, led by CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, concede that we’re still years away from a true self-replicating robot, but the work with voxels is answering some vital questions that will help us get there. For one, the team has shown that it’s feasible to make the assembler bot and the structural components of whatever you’re building can be made of the same subunits — in this case, voxels.

Each robot consists of several voxels connected end-to-end. They use small but powerful magnets to latch onto additional subunits, which they can use to assemble new objects or make themselves larger. Eventually, a human operator might simply be able to tell these self-assembling robots what they want to be built, allowing the machines to figure out the specifics.

For example, if one robot isn’t enough to build the required structure, it can make a copy of itself from the same voxel components to split the work. When building something large, the robots could also decide to make themselves bigger and thus more efficient for the task. It could also be necessary for large robots to split into smaller ones for more detailed work.

The voxels (a term borrowed from 3D modeling) are based on components developed for previous MIT experiments. However, those voxels were simply structural pieces. The voxels used in the new research have been enhanced with the ability to share power and data when connected. The add-on voxel components don’t have any moving parts, though. All the movement and smarts come from the base units, which are like feet that allow the robot to inch along the magnet-studded substrate.  ... ' 

Longtermism

Also been following: 

Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts to reduce existential risks to humanity.[1]

Sigal Samuel from Vox summarizes the key argument for longtermism as follows: "future people matter morally just as much as people alive today; ... there may well be more people alive in the future than there are in the present or have been in the past; and ... we can positively affect future peoples' lives."[2] These three ideas taken together suggest, to those advocating longtermism, that it is the responsibility of those living now to ensure that future generations get to survive and flourish.[3]   .... '

See also 'Pascals Mugging' :    

See also Sabine Hossenfelder  on  Youtube

All about EVs and their Needs

Is much of the things I have thought about. 

The EV Transition Explained: Charger Infrastructure 

How many, where, and who pays? By Robert N. Charette  in Spectrum IEEE, More at link....

The ability to conveniently charge an EV away from home is a top concern for many EV owners. A 2022 survey of EV owners by Forbes indicates that 62 percent of respondents are so anxious about their EV range that travel plans have been affected. While “range anxiety” may be overblown, the need for an extensive and reliable external charging infrastructure is not.

The EV Transition Explained

This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the major technological and social challenges that must be addressed as we move from vehicles with internal-combustion engines to electric vehicles at scale. In reviewing each article, readers should bear in mind Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman’s admonition: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

Infrastructure terminology can itself be confusing. For clarity, bear in mind that a charging station is a specific physical location which has one or more charging posts. A charging post itself may have one or more ports, where each port can charge a single EV. Each post may have multiple types of service connectors to support different EV charging connector standards. And a port may supply varying power levels.

The more power delivered, the faster the EV charges. The charging times will vary by model and state of the EV battery. Ford says that a F-150 Lightning “using a 150 kW+ DC fast charger, the standard-range 98 kWh pack can charge from 15-80% in about 44 minutes,” while Hyundai says its IONIQ 5 EV using a 350 kW charger, “can charge from 10 percent to 80 percent in just 18 minutes.”

Level 1, 2, and 3 Chargers

Level 1 (L1) chargers plug directly into a standard residential 120-volt AC outlet and supply an average of 1.3 to 2.4 kilowatts. This provides somewhere between 3 to 5 miles of EV range per hour. An empty battery electric vehicle (BEV) battery may take up to 40 to 50 hours to charge the U.S. Department of Transportationsays, and a plug-in-hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) 5 to 6 hours.

Level 2 (L2) chargers operate at 208 V (in commercial applications) or 240 V (in residential applications) and deliver from 3 to 19 kW of AC power, with most delivering about 7.6 kW. This provides somewhere between 18 and 25 miles of EV range per hour. An empty BEV battery may take 4 to 10 hours to charge, while a plug-in-hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) 1 to 2 hours. ... 

Level 3 (L3) or direct current fast chargers (DCFCs) supply between 50 and 350 kW of power and can charge a BEV to 80 percent in 20 to 40 minutes, and 100 percent in 60 to 90 minutes. Most PHEVs cannot use L3 chargers.

Finding a 350-kilowatt charging port is not easy to do. As of this spring, 88 percent of the 46,000 EV public charging stations having some 115,000 plus charging ports that only support L2 charging, according to US News & World Report. Tesla is upgrading its 1,500 Supercharger stations in the United States to 300 kW, as well as open charging to non-Tesla vehicles, but some 40 percent of DC fast chargers operate at only 50 kW currently.

Forecasts concerning how many chargers and the types needed vary greatly, depending on the assumptions about the number and types of EVs in operation in the US and elsewhere. For example, the International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that there will be 25 million EVs on the road in the United States by 2030, and there will need to be 1.3 million workplace Level 2, 900,000 public Level 2, and 180,000 DC fast charging ports.

Most experts agree the number of chargers needed in the United States within the decade is at least 20 times as many as exist today.

The Edison Electric Institute estimates that there will be 26 million EVs on the road, and it assumes that there will need to be 1.2 million L2 workplace, 2 million public L2, and 140,000 DC fast charging ports. On the other hand, if the United States meets the Biden Administration’s goal of making half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles, including battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, or fuel cell electric vehicle—that is 48 million EVs—there will need to be 553,000 L2 workplace, 675,000 public L2 and 533,000 DC fast charging ports according to McKinsey & Co.  ... ' 

Hard to Crack Hardware

Fascinating development using Logic locks and Spin alignment. 

Hard-to-Crack Hardware

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia)

November 14, 2022

A team of researchers at Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has created an integrated circuit logic lock that could advance cyberattack-resistant electronic devices. The researchers based the logic lock on a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), which uses spintronics to function.

 The MTJ's electronic output relies on the spin alignment of the electrons inside it, and only generates the correct output for the circuit when it receives the appropriate key signal input. KAUST's Yehia Massoud said, "With the advancement in fabrication methods, the possibility of using emerging spintronic device structures in the chip design has increased. These properties make spintronic devices a potential choice for exploring hardware security."

Researchers Develop Scaled-up Spintronic Probabilistic Computer

 OK, technically new to me, but worth a tag here.    I note mention of 'Simulated Quantum Annealing Algorithm'  which was demonstrated to us.  Will follow with further examples as found.

Researchers Develop Scaled-up Spintronic Probabilistic Computer

Tohoku University (Japan), December 7, 2022

Scientists at Japan's Tohoku University, Italy's University of Messina, and the University of California, Santa Barbara have engineered a scaled-up probabilistic computer (p-computer) with stochastic spintronic devices. The researchers demonstrated how stochastic magnetic tunnel junction (sMTJ)-based probabilistic bits (p-bits) can be integrated with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to implement larger p-bit networks in hardware. They also executed a simulated quantum annealing algorithm in heterogeneous MTJ + FPGA p-computers with systematic assessments for hard combinatorial optimization problems. The researchers benchmarked sMTJ-based p-computer performance against that of classical computing hardware, including graphics processing units and Tensor Processing Units, and found it yields superior throughput and power consumption compared to conventional technologies.

ML Facilitates 'Turbulence Tracking' in Fusion Reactors

Another example.  Struck by the number of ways that machine learning can be used.  Not really surprising since it is finding directed patterns that can be leveraged in useful context.    From advertising to fusion power.

ML Facilitates 'Turbulence Tracking' in Fusion Reactors  

MIT News  By Adam Zewe, November 2, 2022

A multi-institutional team of scientists used computer vision models to track turbulent filaments or "blobs" appearing on the fringe of fuel used in nuclear fusion reactors. The researchers trained four blob-tracking computer vision models on a synthetic video dataset of plasma turbulence, which were able to identify such blobs in actual video clips with more than 80% accuracy in some instances, as well as estimating the blobs' sizes and motion. Said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Theodore Golfinopoulos. "Now, we have a microscope and the computational power to analyze one event at a time. If we take a step back, what this reveals is the power available from these machine learning techniques, and ways to use these computational resources to make progress."

TSMC to Produce 4nm Chips at Arizona Fab in 2024

Been asked to give some Comment on Supply Chain Aspects of Chip Availability.   Comments?

TSMC to Produce 4nm Chips at Arizona Fab in 2024    By Josh Norem on December 2, 2022 in ExtremeTech

It was previously reported that Apple has been urging TSMC to begin producing some of its more advanced chips in America. This would allow Cupertino to claim it’s using American-made silicon in its devices, a first for Apple. A new report confirms this will indeed be happening, but TSMC won’t be making 3nm chips at first, contrary to earlier reports. Instead, it will be focusing on its N4 process, which should be online in 2024. By then, that will be far from bleeding-edge technology, but the company will eventually produce 3nm chips in Arizona as well.

News of TSMC’s plans comes from notable Apple reporter Mark Gurman and company of Bloomberg. Previously TSMC was expected to start production of 5nm chips in Arizona, but it has apparently jettisoned that notion in favor of N4 production, which is a more advanced version of its process. It still falls under the 5nm family of products but offers improved efficiency and performance. The company is investing $12 billion into the fab in order to get production started by 2024. It will reportedly announce its plans next week during a presser with President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Apple CEO Tim Cook will be at the event as well.... ' 

End Of Internet?

Legal thoughts,  reasonable?

ACM OPINION

Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?

By The Atlantic, October 4, 2022

The Texas law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against social media platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint.

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals's recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can't moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that's censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn't merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, "the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I've ever read." It's also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.  ... ' 

From The Atlantic    

Scientists Use Machine Learning to Accelerate Materials Discovery

 The considerable value of materials discovery.

Scientists Use Machine Learning to Accelerate Materials Discovery

By Argonne National Laboratory, October 6, 2022

The final product of the machine learning algorithm: metastable phase diagrams for carbon.

Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have recently demonstrated an automated process for identifying and exploring promising new materials by combining machine learning and high performance computing. The approach could help accelerate the discovery and design of useful materials.

Using the single element carbon as a prototype, the algorithm predicted the ways in which atoms order themselves under a wide range of temperatures and pressures to make up different substances. From there, it constructed a series of what scientists call phase diagrams — a kind of map that helps guide their search for new and useful states of matter. The study is published in Nature Communications.

"We trained a computer to probe, question, and learn how carbon atoms could be organized to create phases that we might not find on earth or that we don't fully understand, thereby automating a whole step in the materials development process," says Pierre Darancet, an Argonne scientist and author on the study. "The more of this process a computer can handle on its own, the more materials science we can get done."

From Argonne National Laboratory  View Full Article   

Personalized Finger Joint Implants from a 3D Printer

 From Fraunhofer

Personalized Finger Joint Implants from a 3D Printer

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany)

December 1, 2022

Germany's FingerKIt consortium uses artificial intelligence (AI) to three-dimensionally (3D)-print personalized finger joint implants to replace an individual’s diseased or injured joints. FingerKit combines the expertise of five institutes in Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft research organization to produce implants from metallic or ceramic materials. AI-based software converts two-dimensional X-rays into 3D models of finger bones and fixes any malposition. Researchers then employ AI to extrapolate individual implant designs from the finger model, which is 3D-printed via metal binder jetting and sintering. The researchers initially calculated that this process could potentially save up to 60% of the time typically required for the process, from identifying the need for an implant to fitting it in the patient.

Stewart Brand Rethinking Silicon Valley

Met Stewart Brand Way back when, through company connections at the Institute for the Future.  Spent quite a while those days at Stanford and the Silicon Valley, visiting AI startups, seeking to discover AI.   Bringing it back to the Enterprise.  Was always interesting

 Rethinking Silicon Valley: Stewart Brand's Lost Journal, By John Markoff

Communications of the ACM, November 2022, Vol. 65 No. 11, Pages 32-34  10.1145/3530988

Stewart Brand,  Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.O)

During the fall of 2000 I visited the Special Collection room in Green Library at Stanford University, eager to read Stewart Brand's personal journals. I was researching the political and cultural world surrounding three computer science laboratories that were located adjacent to Stanford during the decade during which the technologies that led to the creation of the personal computer industry and the modern Internet emerged.

On my initial visit I came away disappointed and it would take almost another two decades before I discovered a missing piece of the puzzle that reframes the early history and impact of Silicon Valley.

Although he has not a technologist, Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, is an intriguing figure in the history of the modern computing world and the Valley. He was the author of a seminal article in Rolling Stone magazine, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," which had been the first hint a wider non-technical audience had of the emerging digital world. He would be the first writer to use the term "personal computer" in his 1974 book II Cybernetic Frontiers. A decade later Brand would help organize the first Hackers conference as well as establishing an early online community known as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL).

William English, who was chief engineer for Douglas Engelbart's legendary oNLine System (NLS) project at Stanford Research Institute told me that he invited Brand to participate in the demonstration that Engelbart was preparing to give at the ACM/IEEE Joint Fall Computer Conference held in San Francisco in December 1968. English had seen an early multimedia (at that time "multimedia" meant three slide projectors, an audio tape, and a single shared projection screen) production Brand created titled "America Needs Indians," and wanted his expertise to help prepare for the watershed event that Steven Levy would later describe as "The Mother of All Demos."

Brand would operate a camera in Menlo Park, relaying a video feed to the stage where Engelbart sat in front of a huge screen with a keyboard, mouse and chord keypad, introducing the world's leading computer scientists and engineers to interactive computing.

Later, however, I realized that Brand's actual role in helping prepare for the Demo had been minimal and I found no mention of the event in his journal, which at that point was filled with observations more in tune with a 30-year-old in the midst of the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the 1960s counterculture.

Although Brand had been a prominent figure during the 1960s and 1970s, he was famously resurrected by Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech when he commended Brand's philosophy of life highlighted on the closing page of The Whole Earth Epilog to the new graduates: "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish."

He might have remained a historical figure, however in 2017, with Donald Trump's election, the national zeitgeist shifted abruptly and Silicon Valley went from being able to do no wrong, to doing no right. Two books that appeared that year, Franklin Feuer's World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech and Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy both opened their accounts of Silicon Valley with biographical sketches describing Brand as Silicon Valley's first "digital utopian." Feuer and Taplin, and the following year the historian Jill Lapore in These Truths: A History of the United States, all attempt to make the case that there is a straight cultural through-line from Brand to an unregulated Silicon Valley that has brought about the perilous state of the world today—underscored by the role of social media and the Internet in fomenting both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

They all make the claim that the Valley's original ideology—or sin depending on your point of view—can be traced back to Brand and the Catalog, expanding on his opening argument in the Catalog: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it. A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."  ... ',

Quantum Computing Feat Is Modern Twist on 150-Year-Old Thought Experiment

 Most interesting, quite technical, thought here .... still pondering

Quantum Computing Feat Is Modern Twist on 150-Year-Old Thought Experiment

UNSW Sydney Newsroom (Australia)

November 30, 2022

Engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales, Sydney (UNSW Sydney) used a updated version of the 150-year-old Maxwell's demon concept to reset a quantum bit to its "0" state. UNSW Sydney's Andrea Morello said the demon in this case is a fast digital voltmeter observing the temperature of an electron drawn randomly from a warm pool, which is colder than the pool and "corresponds to a high certainty of it being in the '0' computational state." The researchers used a real-time decision-making processor within the voltmeter to decide whether to retain the electron for further computations. Morello said the experiment improved the accuracy of quantum computer resetting 20-fold, reducing preparation errors from 20% to 1%.  ... ' 

Buzzfeed, Again?

 Remember talking to these folks, long ago.   As a means of gathering data about retail trends.  Never congealed.   A revisit of current activity.

The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed built a digital media empire in part by aggregating viral content from social media. A decade later, what’s next?    By Mia Sato

Nina* was scrolling Apple News in July 2021 when she came across a headline that looked familiar. Even before opening the story, she had a feeling she might be in it.

The BuzzFeed article, titled “People Are Sharing Non-Obvious Signs That Are Actually A Cry For Help, And It’s Eye-Opening,” was taken from a Reddit thread posted earlier in the day asking how to recognize when someone is struggling with mental health issues. The story pulled in more than a dozen Reddit responses to create a numbered list. A comment Nina had left was right at the top.

“I posted something extremely personal and it happened to be the first quote in their article which was one of the top articles of the day on Apple News,” Nina told The Verge in an email. (Nina requested a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) “That’s scary. I had no idea, I didn’t know my username would be linked with it, and it was a total accident I stumbled upon it.”

When Nina asked other Redditors about BuzzFeed’s sourcing practices, she found a sense of resignation but also open frustration — a sense of theft. BuzzFeed was “sleazy,” some said, and most journalism was a “clickbait fiesta.” Even a few conspiracy theories emerged, like the suggestion that BuzzFeed writers planted r/AskReddit questions for upcoming stories. (BuzzFeed spokesperson Matt Mittenthal says the outlet doesn’t do this, instead crowdsourcing responses from readers.)

BuzzFeed built an empire on posts like this — mining Reddit, Tumblr, and other social media sites for content with the potential to go viral, repackaging it for a broader audience, and collecting the resulting traffic from Facebook shares. In the early to mid-2010s, the strategy seemed all but unstoppable: cute animals and feel-good photos subsidized a ferociously ambitious hard news division, and BuzzFeed’s ability to drive internet culture sparked outright jealousy from others in the media.

“I hate myself because I don’t work at BuzzFeed,” the letter read

An anonymous note sent to The Awl’s advice columnist in 2015 captured BuzzFeed’s cultural cachet: “I hate myself because I don’t work at BuzzFeed,” the letter read. “BuzzFeed is the most widely recognized media brand among young people, and will inevitably eclipse the major media organizations and one day become a super-hegemonic media power the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

But what worked in 2015 is a far cry from what works in 2022. On Monday, BuzzFeed reported earnings for the fourth time as a public company, recording $103.7 million in revenue for the latest quarter, above its own projections. But the rest of the news was dire: BuzzFeed lost $27 million, and the time audiences spent with its content plunged 32 percent from a year ago — its fourth straight quarterly decline. The company expects revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 to dip compared to last year as well.

BuzzFeed’s ability to reflect, amplify, and create massive cultural moments by giving a staff of hundreds free rein to invent new formats led to a $1.7 billion valuation in 2016. It built a Pulitzer-winning newsroom with BuzzFeed News, popularized a genre of simple and stylized cooking content with Tasty, and launched a slate of beloved shows like BuzzFeed Unsolved and Another Round.

Today, BuzzFeed’s high-profile hosts have moved on, its news division has been gutted, and its core website pays contractors flat rates starting around $100 per post to chase trending topics. The company’s valuation is down to just $237 million, and dozens of current and former employees are suing BuzzFeed for losing out on millions, saying they weren’t able to sell their shares during the brief financial bright spot after the company went public last year. They now watch from the outside as the company’s value plummets and newer, more ruthless competitors native to the platforms themselves generate viral chum faster and more cheaply.   ... ' 

Five Ways to Conquer Supply Chain Disruption With S&OP Technologies

Have recently looked at analyzing disruption scenarios.  

Five Ways to Conquer Supply Chain Disruption With S&OP Technologies

November 18, 2022 Sponsored by Logility  in SupplyChainBrain

Supply chains large and small are under siege by constant disruption. Companies find themselves struggling to serve customers, source materials, manage costs, handle supply constraints and shortages and, above all, gain visibility into what’s next. 

Thanks to technology, however, the headlines aren’t all bad. The latest generation of sales and operations planning (S&OP) applications are providing better tools for managing supply chains internally. And they’re enabling companies to plan collaboratively beyond the four walls of the enterprise. These new S&OP platforms utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support better, faster and more inclusive decision-making. 

Following are five emerging areas of rapid development in S&OP, underscoring how companies today are using the technology, what they’re getting out of it, and why this new inclusive ecosystem approach to what was once a status process can be transformational. 

 Functional collaboration is essential. 

The chaos of the last few years has been unprecedented. But for supply chain, there’s some good news coming out of the current environment. As a corporate function, supply chain is now front and center in the C-suite, no longer a secondary player in the boardroom. 

At the same time, the C-suite is morphing to include more parties at the table — a greater cross-functional mix of players from all walks of the organization. Sales, finance, operations, marketing and supply chain are working together more closely than ever, ushering in the development of next-generation S&OP technology platforms. 

The C-suite is investing in S&OP platforms that are capable of covering the supply chain end to end — designed, in essence, to work the fragility out of their operations and build in more real-time resiliency. Indeed, all internal and external resources must be coordinated and integrated for a successful aggregate plan. 

 Technology is increasingly in focus. 

To operate in this new environment, enterprises now recognize the criticality of having a single data set — one version of the truth, designed with different “views” and supported by AI, ML, scenario planning and analytics, probability analytics and other smart decision and analytics tools. 

Decision-making gets smarter when it’s augmented by powerful analytics, ML and AI. As Gartner analyst Amber Salley observed, “With the capabilities we have today, we can solve problems in a matter of seconds. We’ve come a long way.” Now S&OP platforms are hardwired with AI and ML, as well as gamification, pattern-recognition algorithms and scenario-building and assessment capabilities. 

The bottom line: Managing with five disparate systems cobbled together through data translation layers and application interfaces is no longer sufficient to operate a world-class supply chain. And forget spreadsheets; they’re not integrated databases but rather reside on individual desktops and the like. As one consultant commented, “Why do people keep using them? Because spreadsheets are easy, and everybody knows how to use them.”  

 Process decision points are becoming more frequent. 

Planning and process decision points are moving from, at best, a once-a-month schedule to a continuous flow. A set, rigid periodic planning cadence schedule is no longer sufficient. 

The process of S&OP is rapidly transforming to a far more dynamic, real-time capability. Early versions of S&OP were about balancing supply and demand on an almost entirely tactical basis and, as noted earlier, reliant on spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were the tools most people used to muscle their way through this onerous tactical process.  

Today’s S&OP platforms provide sense-and-respond intelligence analytics on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. As Gartner explains in a framework for designing a supply chain strategy and process matrix, this enables companies to gather data and transactions and plan, forecast, measure, decide, collaborate, design, simulate and execute operations.  

 These better processes, which consider longer-term, strategic goals as well as shorter-term tactical ones, can be much more focused on generating profitable growth. Advanced S&OP technology also empowers supply chain executives to look at the level of risk and take steps to mitigate it.  

 Scenario planning is becoming vital. 

Today’s S&OP technologies enable effective scenario planning. Companies can “game” different strategic scenarios and, using AI and ML, see how these myriad scenarios will play out in their supply chains. They can operationalize scenarios and aggregate or disaggregate them to see how they might impact performance and profitability throughout the enterprise. This eliminates or greatly reduces the risk factors involved in making strategic business decisions. 

Scenario planning creates a proactive means of managing risk and results. Adoption of scenario-based planning moves businesses away from the old paradigm of waiting for something to happen and then responding — hopefully successfully — but always at a cost in the form of lost sales, market share, or business opportunity.   ...  '