I hope Jordan's experience growing up and taking ownership of her differences helps encourage everyone to know a physical difference isn't the end of a world,

So many of the cartographers I've gotten to know while writing about maps seem to genuinely love their jobs. It's one of those professions with a disproportionate number of people who are really happy to be there. I suspect that one reason for this could be that many of them have loved maps since they were kids, and they've managed to turn that love into a career. This collection of childhood maps made by eight professional cartographers backs up that theory. I interviewed each of them about their early mapmaking, how they found their way into cartography, and what they love about their jobs today. Their stories all have their individual quirks, but there are some common threads.

The French military is developing a new, unusual defense weapon to combat terrorism. Four golden eagles, d'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis are being trained to attack drones that enter into restricted French air space according to the Washington Post. Terrorists are beginning to experiment with drones in Iraq and the French presidential palace has had numerous drones fly within its restricted air space in recent years. Terrorists are reportedly using store bought drones and turning them into weapons. Jean-Christophe Zimmermann, a French air force general, told Reuters the military chose to use eagles for defense to avoid using guns.

A timeline outlining the evolution of Windows 10 has confirmed that two major updates are in the pipeline for 2017. The company is known to be working on a drastically different-looking user interface for the operating system, known as Project Neon, which is likely to arrive with the second update. The timeline, which doesn't reveal any specific dates, was spotted by onMSFT at Microsoft's Ignite conference in Australia. However, the Creators update – the first of the two – is currently being tested by Windows Insiders and looks set to land in April. The graphic shows that Microsoft plans to release the second update to consumers towards the end of the year, before a stage dubbed'production' kicks off in 2018.

ManageEngine conducted a survey to understand what IT pros need from an advanced analytics tool. The survey looked at the critical areas of analytics and reporting for service desk management around incident management, asset management and change management. Service desk managers and CIOs are key decision makers who need insight from their data to formulate better strategies. For instance, by tracking including technician performance, service desk responsiveness, IT user preferences, customer satisfaction, SLA violation rate, and other critical metrics, they can better analyze costs, trends, manage resources, and improve overall service quality. And 38.7 percent use live dashboard to check data, while 18.8 percent use pre-built reports.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming part of our everyday language as more organizations integrate the technology into the products and services they offer. The latest to do so is eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), which according to the company will help its sellers become more competitive. The company has been supporting its sellers, many of whom are small to medium sized businesses, with AI driven investments for the past five years. To date, it has been embedded and distributed across 30 domains to help sellers with everything from delivery time to fraud detection, wrote President and CEO of eBay, Devin Wenig in a post on he company's official blog. The pricing and inventory AI solution is a great example.

One morning in the summer of 2015, I sat in a featureless office in Berkeley as a young computer programmer walked me through how he intended to save the world. The world needed saving, he insisted, not from climate change -- or from the rise of the far right, or the treacherous instability of global capitalism -- but from the advent of artificial superintelligence, which would almost certainly wipe humanity from the face of the earth unless certain preventative measures were put in place by a very small number of dedicated specialists such as himself, who alone understood the scale of the danger and the course of action necessary to protect against it. This intense and deeply serious young programmer was Nate Soares, the executive director of MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the safe -- which is to say, non-humanity-obliterating -- development of artificial intelligence. As I listened to him speak, and as I struggled (and failed) to follow the algebraic abstractions he was scrawling on a whiteboard in illustration of his preferred doomsday scenario, I was suddenly hit by the full force of a paradox: The austere and inflexible rationalism of this man's worldview had led him into a grand and methodically reasoned absurdity. In researching and reporting my book, To Be a Machine, I had spent much of the previous 18 months among the adherents of the transhumanist movement, a broad church comprising life-extension advocates, cryonicists, would-be cyborgs, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, neuroscientists looking to convert the human brain into code, and so forth -- all of whom were entirely convinced that science and technology would allow us to transcend the human condition.

While US-based companies like Alphabet, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft typically dominate US artificial-intelligence headlines, China's government is now accelerating the country's own contributions to the field. China's National Development and Reform Commission, a government agency tasked with planning economic and social strategies, will fund search giant Baidu's development of a national deep-learning research lab, according to a post on Baidu's Chinese WeChat account. The amount of funding was not disclosed, but Beijing-based Baidu will work with Tsinghua and Beihang universities, as well as other research Chinese institutions. One important caveat: The laboratory won't be a physical structure, but instead a digital network of researchers working on problems from their respective locations, according to the South Morning China Post. The research will focus on computer vision, biometric identification, intellectual property rights, and human-computer interaction.

A worker demonstrated facial recognition security features on the MasterCard Inc. stand at the Mobile World Congress in this arranged photograph in Barcelona, Spain, on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016. Why did Apple acquire RealFace the AI facial recognition company? Why did Apple acquire RealFace the AI facial recognition company? There are many reasons, however the biggest reason may be the one few see today. Today it was announced [1] Apple acquired the Israeli facial recognition AI company Real Face.

Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year. And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it's been a rough year. But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx's digital transformation prognostications were close to spot on! As is our tradition, each year we review last year's predictions and make all new fresh ones!