Africa
Who is the least trustworthy MP in the Commons?
Ukip's only MP, Douglas Carswell, is the least friendly and trustworthy in the House of Commons, a social media survey has found. The newly appointed Shadow Health Secretary, Diane Abbott, was the most patronising, the same survey found. Artios, an artificial intelligence company, 'blind tested' 1,000 UK adults with social media content from an equal cross section of political parties. The highest rating for trustworthiness was only 14 per cent for a post by Prime Minister David Cameron. Lib Dem MP Greg Mudholland scored as the most friendly.
Generating Models of a Matched Formula With a Polynomial Delay
A matched formula is a CNF formula whose incidence graph admits a matching which matches a distinct variable to every clause. Such a formula is always satisfiable. Matched formulas are used, for example, in the area of parametrized complexity. We prove that the problem of counting the number of the models (satisfying assignments) of a matched formula is #P-complete. On the other hand, we define a class of formulas generalizing the matched formulas and prove that for a formula in this class one can choose in polynomial time a variable suitable for splitting the tree for the search of the models of the formula. As a consequence, the models of a formula from this class, in particular of any matched formula, can be generated sequentially with a delay polynomial in the size of the input. On the other hand, we prove that this task cannot be performed efficiently for linearly satisfiable formulas, which is a generalization of matched formulas containing the class considered above.
DataProphet secures foreign investment
Daniel Schwartzkopff, commercial director and DataProphet co-founder, says the start-up is looking towards the European and North American markets for further expansion. Yellowwoods Capital Holdings, a member of the European-based global investment and private equity focused Yellowwoods Group, has acquired a significant interest in DataProphet, where the local start-up will act as the advanced analytics partner for the group. The group's local investments include Hollard Insurance, Clientele and Nandos, among others. While the actual value of the investment into the start-up remains under wraps, DataProphet commercial director and co-founder, Daniel Schwartzkopff, says the business has hit multimillion-dollar status. "As a private fund, our investor partners would prefer us not to discuss the amount. It can be disclosed, however, that DataProphet was priced at a multimillion-dollar valuation," he explains.
Women In Gaming: How Virtual Reality Could Spur Social Change In The Video Game Industry
With virtual reality, the video game industry is undergoing its biggest change since consoles made their way into living rooms. It may also stir social change, bringing new opportunities to female developers, whose scarce representation in the industry nowhere near reflects the true number of female gamers. "What we're seeing in the VR space, the spark of excitement around this particular type of technology that has suddenly become cost-effective and also added creative potential," Tracy Fullerton, director of USC Games, told International Business Times at the Games for Change festival in New York last week. "I think there's a tremendous energy and interest. That's always good because there will be opportunities there, and a broad range of them." As of 2014, female developers made up just 22 percent of the industry, with 2 percent identifying as transgender or androgynous, according to an International Game Developers Association workplace study.
The founder of one of London's best-known VC funds is moving to Africa and closing his coworking space
Federico Pirzio-Biroli, the founder of London VC fund Playfair Capital, is planning to move to Africa to become an angel investor there, and the fund is closing its coworking space at Warner Yard in Clerkenwell. Playfair Capital specialises in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and has invested in well-known startups such as restaurant app Dojo, DueDil, Vinaya, Stripe, Streethub, Hassle, and Stratajet. Pirzio-Biroli told Business Insider that he worked at NGOs in Africa before becoming a technology investor, so this is a logical move for him. He says that angel investing in Africa can make a big difference to economies there, whereas London is now flooded with early stage funding for technology startups. The Playfair Capital fund isn't going to close its doors completely - instead Pirzio-Biroli is handing over control to his remaining staff and preparing to become a limited, rather than general, partner. My decision to move to East Africa was made in November.
Here's A Tragic Thing You Didn't Know About Helen Mirren
The Luftwaffe would use the doodlebugs to attack London, where actress Helen Mirren's parents lived during the war. "They were by far the worst because [as Mirren's mother told her] you would hear them coming over and if you heard the drone -- the buzz up there in the sky -- if you heard that noise stop, that's when it was dropping its load," said Mirren during a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "So you would just pray it went over your head." Mirren recalled this memory from her family's history as she was promoting her movie "Eye in the Sky," in which she plays a British colonel tasked with deciding whether to use a drone strike in Nairobi, Kenya. Her character has tracked the location of an extremist meeting, but must choose whether to take out the terrorists at the cost of killing a young girl who is selling bread right outside their headquarters.
The two biggest threats to mankind, according to Stephen Hawking
Professor Stephen Hawking says he believes pollution and human "stupidity" remain the biggest threats to mankind, while also expressing his concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The world's leading theoretical physicist argued "we have certainly not become less greedy or less stupid" in our treatment of the environment over the past decade, during an interview on Larry King Now, which is hosted on Ora TV. Professor Hawking said: "Six years ago, I was warning about pollution and overcrowding, they have gotten worse since then. The population has grown by half a billion since our last interview, with no end in sight. "At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.
4 Totally Creepy Disruptive Health Care Technologies That Will Change Everything
Fahad Aziz is the Co-founder of Caremerge, an "award-winning technology company revolutionizing communication and coordination of care for seniors." As an industry leader in the tech space, Aziz has his finger on the pulse of disruptive healthcare tech. He says a few technologies are poised to seriously upend'business as usual' in healthcare in the near future, and they are not necessarily what you'd expect. In 2012, Vinod Khosla predicted that in time, "technology will replace 80% of what doctors do." He is spot on, according to Aziz.
Philip Guo - Python Tutor: The First Three Years
For the past six years, I've been developing Python Tutor (pythontutor.com), Thousands of people use it every day to run tens of thousands of pieces of code in seven languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, C, and C . This tool has also become a platform for HCI, educational technology, and computing education research. Most recently, it formed the basis for my faculty job applications that got me a job at UC San Diego. How did this project grow from nothing to its current state? I've been wanting to write a "history of Python Tutor" article for a while now but never found a good time to do so.
Ray Kurzweil's Wildest Prediction: Nanobots Will Plug Our Brains Into the Web by the 2030s
I consider Ray Kurzweil a very close friend and a very smart person. Ray is a brilliant technologist, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google focused on AI and language processing. As reported, "of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate." Two weeks ago, Ray and I held an hour-long webinar with my Abundance 360 CEOs about predicting the future. During our session, there was one of Ray's specific predictions that really blew my mind. "In the 2030s," said Ray, "we are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we'll be able to expand our ...