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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

"We demonstrated the high-speed, non-deformation catching of a marshmallow. The marshmallow is a very soft object which is difficult to grasp without deforming its surface. For the catching, we developed a 1ms sensor fusion system with the high-speed active vision sensor and the high-speed, high-precision proximity sensor. Generally, a tactile feedback is used to grasp various kinds of soft objects without deforming. However, the robot hand tends to deform the object surface with only tactile feedback. By slowing the grasping speed, the deformation becomes smaller. However, grasping time becomes longer. The 1ms sensor fusion system enabled seamless, high-sensitive sensing from non-contact to contact state. The robot hand could control fingertip position dynamically and precisely based on the visual and the proximity feedback. By the proximity feedback, contact to the object was detected before deforming its surface, and grasping motion is stopped. The robot hand could catch the marshmallow even if the position and posture of it were different. http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/fusion/... SHOW MORE "

Human beings are naturally creative tool users. When we need to drive in a nail but don't have a hammer, we easily realize that we can use a heavy, flat object like a rock in its place. When our table is shaky, we quickly find that we can put a stack of paper under the table leg to stabilize it. But while these actions seem so natural to us, they are believed to be a hallmark of great intelligence-only a few other species use objects in novel ways to solve their problems, and none can do so as flexibly as people. What provides us with these powerful capabilities for using objects in this way?

"We've developed an approach to generate 3D adversarial objects that reliably fool neural networks in the real world, no matter how the objects are looked at."

Optimization is a key tool in machine learning, where the goal is to achieve the best possible objective function value in a minimum amount of time. Obtaining any form of global guarantees can usually be done with convex objective functions, or with special cases such as risk minimization with one-hidden over-parameterized layer neural networks (see the June post). In this post, I will consider low-dimensional problems (imagine 10 or 20), with no constraint on running time (thus get ready for some running-times that are exponential in dimension!).

Charles Darwin was very likely the first person to have understood nature in terms of a game played across deep time. I have wondered how much further the Chess-playing naturalist might have taken this metaphor if, like Kawabata, he had studied Go. Unlike Chess, where the objective is to expose and capture the King by eliminating pieces, in Go the objective is to capture territory by surrounding enemy pieces, called stones, and by protecting unclaimed area.

" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

Two billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was still very young. However, thousands of huge galaxies, rich in stars and dust, were already formed. An international study, led by SISSA-Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, now explains how this was possible. Scientists combined observational and theoretical methods to identify the physical processes behind their evolution and, for the first time, found evidence for a rapid growth of dust due to a high concentration of metals in the distant Universe. The study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, offers a new approach to investigate the evolutionary phase of massive objects.

A sweeping effort to map a hospital's microorganisms has found that infectious pathogens hide in a place that's all about cleaning: the sink. Niranjan Nagarajan at the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues sampled bacteria from bed rails, sinks and other sites in a Singapore hospital. Microbes that tend to grow in slimy 'biofilms' and cause hospital-acquired infections were prevalent on sink traps and faucet aerators, whereas skin-dwelling bacteria were abundant on objects, such as door knobs and bed rails, that are often touched. Frequently touched sites harboured multidrug-resistant microbes such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which might persist in the hospital environment for more than eight years, the team suggested.