Oceania
Exploring the Uncharted World of Artificial Intelligence
The market is a massive, irrational, and fluid amalgamation of all information available in the public domain, at least according to the efficient market hypothesis. The famous quote, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," holds significance, because it illustrates the perpetual struggle that we face in trying to understand its inner machinations. The market is both a byproduct of human innovation, as well as a microcosm of the world we live in. Just as we can't definitively know how the market will move, we can't definitively know how the choices we make will affect the world we live in. Therein lays the real challenge, in which we take everything we think we know and make an analytical decision, because afterward all that is left is to wait and see if it was the right call.
Introducing the Bots Landscape: 170 companies, 4 billion in funding, thousands of bots
Since Facebook announced a bot developer framework and distribution platform in April, the media has been hyperventilating over its impact. I know we're a big part of this, and I don't apologize. Bots, as a new (or revisited) paradigm for human-computer interaction, are here, and we're observing hundreds of companies, billions in funding, and thousands of bots flying in your browsers and messaging apps. You can download the full landscape here, and more rich data is coming soon. This article is part of the Bots Landscape.
RoBattle the seven ton self driving robot tank that can kill on command
It is a terrifying vision of the future of battle. Called RoBattle, this heavy duty combat and support robot is strapped with a'robotic kit' consisting of vehicle control, navigation, RT mapping and autonomy, sensors and mission payloads. In addition to ambushing and attacking on command, this combat ready platform, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), can raise its body four feet in the air to tackle obstacles or crouch down 23 inches to hide from enemies. It may be focused on the sky, but Israel Aerospace Industries has stepped down on land to develop the newest member of its unmanned ground robotic systems family. RoBattle is a combat and support robot equipped with a'robotic kit' of vehicle control, navigation, RT mapping and autonomy, sensors and mission payloads RoBattle, is an semi-autonomous combat and support robot designed to assist ground soldiers in the field.
Lancaster scientist explores how humans might translate an extraterrestrial language
Aliens may look like giant jellyfish with orange bottoms, a leading space scientist has claimed. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a satellite expert and government adviser, said it is likely that there is extra-terrestrial life - it is just more alien than you'd imagine. Rather than being the little green men so beloved of Hollywood directors, they may look like football-field sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly or bottom. Generated from silicon, rather than the carbon that is the basis of life as we know it, the creatures are able to live off light absorbed through their'skin' and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths. In physical terms, for example, wings and eyes have independently emerged among animals through evolution at several different times over, and birds in ecologically isolated New Zealand have evolved behaviours typically seen in mammals elsewhere.
Official coordinates change to reflect how Australia's moved 5ft north in 22 years
The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years, making the country's co-ordinates slighty out of sync. To fix this, Australia is going to adjust its official latitude and longitude, putting the majority of the country back into alignment with the world's GPS systems. The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years The movement of the Earth's tectonic plates makes land slide and causes a build up of tension.
Moon Express to send lander to the lunar surface in historic move
A Florida-based company has won U.S. government permission to send a robotic lander to the moon next year. The move is the first time the United States has cleared a private space mission to fly beyond Earth's orbit. The Federal Aviation Administration's unprecedented go-ahead for the Moon Express mission also sets a legal and regulatory framework for a host of other commercial expeditions to the moon, asteroids and Mars. The Florida-based company Moon Express, which is partnering with Nasa, hopes to send scientific payloads to the Moon, in the hopes to eventually provide commercial services. Artist's impression of Moon Express lander on surface of the moon pictured The moon is a'treasure chest' of lucrative materials.
Experts warn that hackers could soon take over your SEX TOYS
Not even your vibrator is safe from hackers - who could take it over remotely. Experts have warned that the new generation of dildos are vulnerable because they are connected to the Internet. They said that hackers could exploit the web connection which links up to an app and allows your partner to pleasure you from anywhere in the world. Hacking a vibrator raises the prospect of a total stranger being in control during a person's most intimate moment. Computer security researchers said that such a hack could constitute a sexual assault if it were to take place.
To Understand Religion, Think Football - Issue 39: Sport
The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.
A Study of Proxies for Shapley Allocations of Transport Costs
Aziz, Haris, Cahan, Casey, Gretton, Charles, Kilby, Philip, Mattei, Nicholas, Walsh, Toby
We survey existing rules of thumb, propose novel methods, and comprehensively evaluate a number of solutions to the problem of calculating the cost to serve each location in a single-vehicle transport setting. Cost to serve analysis has applications both strategically and operationally in transportation settings. The problem is formally modeled as the traveling salesperson game (TSG), a cooperative transferable utility game in which agents correspond to locations in a traveling salesperson problem (TSP). The total cost to serve all locations in the TSP is the length of an optimal tour. An allocation divides the total cost among individual locations, thus providing the cost to serve each of them. As one of the most important normative division schemes in cooperative games, the Shapley value gives a principled and fair allocation for a broad variety of games including the TSG. We consider a number of direct and sampling-based procedures for calculating the Shapley value, and prove that approximating the Shapley value of the TSG within a constant factor is NP-hard. Treating the Shapley value as an ideal baseline allocation, we survey six proxies for it that are each relatively easy to compute. Some of these proxies are rules of thumb and some are procedures international delivery companies use(d) as cost allocation methods. We perform an experimental evaluation using synthetic Euclidean games as well as games derived from real-world tours calculated for scenarios involving fast-moving goods; where deliveries are made on a road network every day. We explore several computationally tractable allocation techniques that are good proxies for the Shapley value in problem instances of a size and complexity that is commercially relevant.
Preterm Birth Prediction: Deriving Stable and Interpretable Rules from High Dimensional Data
Tran, Truyen, Luo, Wei, Phung, Dinh, Morris, Jonathan, Rickard, Kristen, Venkatesh, Svetha
Preterm births occur at an alarming rate of 10-15%. Preemies have a higher risk of infant mortality, developmental retardation and long-term disabilities. Predicting preterm birth is difficult, even for the most experienced clinicians. The most well-designed clinical study thus far reaches a modest sensitivity of 18.2-24.2% at specificity of 28.6-33.3%. We take a different approach by exploiting databases of normal hospital operations. We aims are twofold: (i) to derive an easy-to-use, interpretable prediction rule with quantified uncertainties, and (ii) to construct accurate classifiers for preterm birth prediction. Our approach is to automatically generate and select from hundreds (if not thousands) of possible predictors using stability-aware techniques. Derived from a large database of 15,814 women, our simplified prediction rule with only 10 items has sensitivity of 62.3% at specificity of 81.5%.