A quick look at census data (more than 11,000 people turn 65 each day in the U.S.), along with my own rough calculations, suggest that several hundred people are turning 70 each day in the great state of California, and every 10 minutes or so, one or more of them email me about their license renewal adventures with the DMV. I get the usual, always entertaining horror stories about testing: ("They put in ridiculous questions that do not pertain to driving," said 75-year-old Dahana Klerer of Newport Beach, who flunked twice and added, "I'm not a stupid person but they make you feel really stupid.") California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age -- and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults. "I had no problem," said 79-year-old Ruth Gleason of Ridgecrest, who added: "Thank you and Steve Gordon at the DMV for working to alleviate the test-taking fears for over-70 CA drivers."

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. "Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. "That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work. "I talked to a lot of people about doing a Fallout movie or TV show and I kept saying no to everybody," Howard says. "I loved the work that Jonah had done in movies and in TV, and in a couple interviews he did, he mentioned his love of games ... I said to somebody, he's perfect.

This paper demonstrates that some non-classical models of human decision-making can be run successfully as circuits on quantum computers. Since the 1960s, many observed cognitive behaviors have been shown to violate rules based on classical probability and set theory. For example, the order in which questions are posed in a survey affects whether participants answer 'yes' or 'no', so the population that answers 'yes' to both questions cannot be modeled as the intersection of two fixed sets. It can, however, be modeled as a sequence of projections carried out in different orders. This and other examples have been described successfully using quantum probability, which relies on comparing angles between subspaces rather than volumes between subsets. Now in the early 2020s, quantum computers have reached the point where some of these quantum cognitive models can be implemented and investigated on quantum hardware, by representing the mental states in qubit registers, and the cognitive operations and decisions using different gates and measurements. This paper develops such quantum circuit representations for quantum cognitive models, focusing particularly on modeling order effects and decision-making under uncertainty. The claim is not that the human brain uses qubits and quantum circuits explicitly (just like the use of Boolean set theory does not require the brain to be using classical bits), but that the mathematics shared between quantum cognition and quantum computing motivates the exploration of quantum computers for cognition modeling. Key quantum properties include superposition, entanglement, and collapse, as these mathematical elements provide a common language between cognitive models, quantum hardware, and circuit implementations.

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday outlined a global effort run by "machine-learning" artificial intelligence is essentially spying on individual facilities in every country in the world to measure their emissions of greenhouse gases and target the world's largest emitters. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gore formally introduced attendees to the initiative known as Climate Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions, or Climate TRACE. The initiative has led to a website that allows for real-time tracking of emissions in any area of the world, which Gore said is allowing climate activists, reporters and others to identify high-priority industries and regions for emissions reduction programs. "It's a non-profit coalition that uses artificial intelligence to process data from 300 existing satellites and from 30,000 land, sea and air base sensors and multiple internet data streams to use artificial intelligence to create machine-learning algorithms to zoom in on every single significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution," he said of Climate TRACE. Gore showed how Climate TRACE uses these inputs to zoom in on specific facilities and assess how much they contribute to GHG emissions.

Cameron Willden supports engineers and scientists across many different product lines at W.L. Gore, focusing on manufacturing and new product development. He responds to some of the learning objectives covered in a keynote by author David J. Hand and provides his own perspective based on years in industry. You can watch the keynote and the panel discussion at any time. Need some help demystifying machine learning and artificial intelligence? We have upcoming livestreams and on-demand videos on this topic.

"Although scientists have a good understanding how much carbon is in the atmosphere, it's surprisingly tough to trace where those emissions come from," says Gavin McCormick, the founder of a nonprofit called WattTime that also makes technology that enables smart devices to automatically reduce emissions. The startup is working with several other climate and tech organizations and the former vice president Al Gore on the new project. Right now, McCormick says, most emissions data is self-reported, and it can sometimes take years for the data to be gathered. "We think that technology, in particular AI and satellites, have the potential to change that pretty profoundly, which can influence sort of any sector that depends on really knowing where emissions are coming from to make good decisions," he says. "The time lag in current data makes it often non-actionable," says Gore, who has been helping structure the project to have the maximum impact on the climate crisis and enlisting partners for financial and strategic support.

Old school, new school: The Tampa Bay Rays have two pitchers who have started 20 games this year. One is their ace, Blake Snell, whose 2.03 earned-run average ranks second in the American League. The other is Ryne Stanek, a reliever turned “opener” — in his case, a right-hander who works the first inning or so, followed by a left-hander. In a year in which the Rays lost starters Anthony Banda, Jose DeLeon and Brent Honeywell to Tommy John surgery and traded starters Chris Archer and Nathan Eovaldi, the team leads the AL in ERA since May 19, when Sergio Romo debuted as Tampa Bay’s first “opener.” There is no pitching statistic more derided in sabermetrics than wins for a pitcher.

In the wake of the Parkland school shooting, President Trump is meeting with video game executives and members of congress to discuss the role of simulated violence and the impact on America's youth. They called it the "Filthy 15." Fifteen songs from 15 bands or artists that the Parents Music Resource Center found offensive due to explicit content. The PMRC's leaders were Susan Baker, wife of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker, and Tipper Gore. Gore was wife of then-Sen. The acts in question were Prince, AC/DC, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Black Sabbath, Sheena Easton and Vanity.

AI platform Globality is giving small and medium businesses access to broader opportunities. In a post-Brexit, "America First" world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion, and globalization has become something of a dirty word. Since the 1990s, global trade has helped lift over a billion people out of poverty, driven sustained economic growth, lowered consumer prices, and delivered unprecedented freedoms to much of the world's population. Still, middle-income earners have seen their living standards stagnate, while many of the great leaps forward in automation are destroying the jobs of those least able to cope, with vastly greater levels of disruption feared. Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace. Small and medium-sized businesses, which constitute the bulk of the world's economy and drive most job creation, find it more difficult to make valuable connections that can lead to international trade opportunities and contracts with large organizations.

If farmers want to know how healthy crops are, perhaps they shouldn't trust their eyes. Matt Free -- a manager at Evergreen FS, an agriculture company -- learned that lesson this year. His team provides crop protection services such as fertilizers and herbicides to farmers across Illinois. After a year-long test of a variety of new technologies, Evergreen FS found artificial intelligence could identify trouble, such as fungus growth and water shortages, in corn and soybean crops weeks before the naked eye would ever realize it. The tech, which comes from startup Ceres Imaging, offers farmers an AI analysis of photos taken from planes flying several thousand feet above fields. Previously, the technology was only available for orchards and vineyards.