A fire has destroyed a 90-foot-long lifelike robotic dinosaur that was set to be part of an exhibit at a New Jersey theme park. Exhibit creator Guy Gsell tells The Record newspaper (http://bit.ly/1T90hJZ The Field Station: Dinosaurs exhibit is moving to the park this month after operating in Secaucus (sih-KAW'-kuhs) since 2012. Its creator says a welder was putting finishing touches on the Argentinosaurus when a spark started the blaze. The dinosaur was burned to its skeleton.

While CRISPR, nanobots and head transplants are making headlines as medical breakthroughs, a number of new technologies are also making progress tackling some of the toughest age-old diseases still plaguing millions of people in the poorest parts of the world. In low income countries, over 75% of the population dies before the age of 70 due to infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, lung infections, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases, malaria, and increasingly, cardiovascular diseases. Over a third of deaths in low income countries are among children under age 14 primarily due to pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, malaria and neonatal complications. In the developed world, those living in extreme poverty, such as homeless populations, also die on average at age 48. Over the last year, artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology have all generated a number of new solutions that have the potential to dramatically reduce these problems.

Let's suppose you've agreed to a rather odd travel program, where you're going to be suddenly transported to a randomly selected country, and your job is to figure out where you end up. So, here you are in some new country, and all countries are equally likely. You make a list of places and probabilities that you're in those places (all equally likely at about 1/200 for 200 countries). You look around and appear to be in a restaurant. Some countries have more restaurants (per capita/per land area) than others, so you decrease the odds that you're in Algeria or Sudan and increase the odds that you're in Singapore or other high-restaurant-density places. That is, you just multiply the probability that you were in a country with the probability of finding oneself in a restaurant in that country, given that one were already in the country, to obtain the new probability. After a few moments, the waitress brings you sushi, so you decrease the odds for Tajikistan and Paraguay and correspondingly increase the odds on Japan, Taiwan, and such places where sushi restaurants are relatively common. You pick up the chopsticks and try the sushi, discovering that it's excellent. Japan is now by far the most likely place, and though it's still possible that you're in the United States, it's not nearly as likely (sadly for the US). Those "probabilities" are getting really hard to read with all those zeros in front. All that matters is the relatively likelihood, so perhaps you scale that last column by the sum of the whole column. Now it's a probability again, and it looks something like this: Now that you're pretty sure it's Japan, you make a new list of places inside Japan to see if you can continue to narrow it down. You write out Fukuoka, Osaka, Nagoya, Hamamatsu, Tokyo, Sendai, Sapporo, etc., all equally likely (and maybe keep Taiwan too, just in case). Now the waitress brings unagi. You can get unagi anywhere, but it's much more common in Hamamatsu, so you increase the odds on Hamamatsu and slightly decrease the odds everywhere else. By continuing in this manner, you may eventually be able to find that you're eating at a delicious restaurant in Hamamatsu Station -- a rather lucky random draw.

Every child gets a vision and hearing check in school on a regular basis. Dr. Moshe Fried, an Israeli plastic surgeon, believes an annual skin check is necessary as well, starting in the teens. This is why he agreed to be the medical consultant for Emerald Medical Applications' DermaCompare, a free smartphone app that can detect changes in marks and moles over time. The app alerts the user to changes that ought to be screened for cancer. "The skin is the biggest organ in the body," said Fried.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, no longer simply exists in science fiction movies and books. Scientists warn AI has and will continue to change almost every aspect of how people conduct business and live. Researchers say artificial intelligence can be a threat, as well as helpful, to humans. From the iPhone personal assistant Siri, to doing searches on the Internet, to the autopilot function, simple artificial intelligence has been around for some time, but is quickly getting more complex and more intelligent. "If we are going to make systems that are going to be more intelligent than us, it's absolutely essential for us to understand how to absolutely guarantee that they only do things that we are happy with," said Stuart Russell, computer science professor at the University of California Berkeley.

IT services provider Accenture announced its deal to acquire OPS Rules, an analytics consulting company based in the US. The acquisition of OPS Rules enables Accenture to expand its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities. Last year, Accenture also acquired Gapso, an analytics services and solutions provider in Brazil that assists enterprises to solve supply chain and logistics challenges. OPS Rules, founded in 2012, specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. The US head-quartered Accenture aims to add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop innovative analytics approaches for clients.

Important advances have been made in the fuzzy quantification field. Nevertheless, some problems remain when we face the decision of selecting the most convenient model for a specific application. In the literature, several desirable adequacy properties have been proposed, but theoretical limits impede quantification models from simultaneously fulfilling every adequacy property that has been defined. Besides, the complexity of model definitions and adequacy properties makes very difficult for real users to understand the particularities of the different models that have been presented. In this work we will present several criteria conceived to help in the process of selecting the most adequate Quantifier Fuzzification Mechanisms for specific practical applications. In addition, some of the best known well-behaved models will be compared against this list of criteria. Based on this analysis, some guidance to choose fuzzy quantification models for practical applications will be provided.

The news and information ecosystem is in the midst of change -- again. Mobile-first consumption is on the rise, smart homes are becoming mainstream and connected cars will soon take over the roads of major cities around the world. Smart devices will require "smart content." It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes the backbone of the media industry of the future. Today, most people find information via search or social.

The problem is that if robot labor is cheaper and more reliable than human labor, why bother with the latter? The payback period for industrial robots (the time it takes for their extra costs to be paid off) is falling sharply. For a welding robot to be used in a Chinese factory, for example, the period has fallen from 5.3 years in 2010, to 1.7 years in 2015, say analysts from Citi. By 2017, they say it could be as low as 1.3 years. And more robots in factories equals fewer jobs for humans.

WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) is expanding its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities by acquiring OPS Rules, a boutique analytics consulting company that specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. When the acquisition is completed, Accenture will add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop fresh and innovative analytics approaches for clients across many industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2012, OPS Rules has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Richardson, Texas. OPS Rules is led by David Simchi-Levi, a Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and renowned supply chain and operations analytics expert.