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POPSFuture 'Top 10' Hot Careers in 2012 5) Simulation Engineering By 2012, an increase in processing power and rich data will make simulations more realistic, and user-friendly. Simulation engineers will be working on bringing us closer to “Star Trek’s” Holodecks—the ultimate total immersion simulation. Simulations will be in every industry and every engineering field, 6) Boomer Caregiving 7) Genetic Counseling 8) Brain Analysts 9) Space Tourism 10) Roboticists
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POPSArtificial brain predicts death-row executions Since the direct approach had failed, the researchers turned to an artificial neural network (ANN) - an intelligent computer system, modelled after the human brain - that is able to deduce how various factors within a jumble of data relate to each other. The system can then take what it has learned and make predictions about a new set of data.To find out which factors might be linked to executions, the researchers first "trained" their ANN by entering the profiles of 1000 death row inmates between 1973 and 2000. Half of this sample of prisoners had been executed and the other half had survived. Each profile contained 18 factors, including the inmate's sex, age, race, marital status, educational level and information on their capital offences.
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POPSMilitary Hush-up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified "It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy...a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn't be done any other way. It's a regrettable change in policy."
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POPSSweden's Ultra-Modern Underground Data Center
When asked the motivation behind Pionen, Jon Karlung, CEO of Bahnhof said “Rather than just concentrating on technical hardware we decided to put humans in focus. Of course, the security, power, cooling, network, etc, are all top notch, but the people designing data centers often (always!) forget about the humans that are supposed to work with the stuff.” “Since we got hold of this unique nuclear bunker in central Stockholm deep below the rock, we just couldn't’t build it like a traditional – more boring – hosting center,” he said. “We wanted to make something different. The place itself needed something far out in design and science fiction was the natural source of inspiration in this case – plus of course some solid experience from having been a hosting provider for more than a decade.” Regarding the design of the facility, he said “I’m personally a big fan of old science fiction movies. Especially ones from the 70s like Logan’s Run, Silent Running, Star Wars...
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POPSSecurity Services Want Your Personal Data, Clippers! The plan will need international cooperation since many of the new CSPs are based abroad, notably in the US. "International cooperation"... as in global? Nice. .:) They say the planned new legislation would apply only to communications data - such addresses and names - but not to the actual contents of the communications. Intercepting the contents would still need ministerial warrants. Warrants? For eavesdropping, spying, invasion of privacy and data collecting? AAAhahaha, good one! That is SO old school. .:lol: Clearly concerned about a public backlash against the plan, officials stress that the government is not building up a single central database containing personal information of everyone in the country. Sure. We believe you. Yessiree! We sure do. We even get to pay for it ourselves! Won't that be fun. .:D
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POPSThe Terrifying Future of Computing Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr -- Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.
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POPSWatch Satellite Data In Action Unfortunately you may have to play this through once before watching but I think most of you will find it worth your time. You can make this full screen by clicking the middle button in the lower right corner. This clip is an audio visual "Living Atlas" journey of our world, showing the beauty and fragility of planet Earth as seen through satellite data.
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POPS'Eureka machine' works (it is not April 1st) The Cornell machine uses a computer program that can search through huge amounts of data and look for underlying patterns. For example, a falling apple will abide by Newton's second law, which is often stated as F=ma, where F is the force acting on an object, m is its mass, and a is its acceleration. When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls, the machine would be able to work out the equation. Lipson tested the machine by giving it information from basic lab experiments, such as swinging pendulums and tiny cars that moved up and down tracks on a cushion of air. After crunching through the data, the machine pinged and displayed several laws of motion and conservation of momentum. The system runs its own checks to decide whether the laws it has found are likely to be interesting.
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POPSThe future of Mind Control research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room—or in another building. And it’s not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that’s moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it’s seeing.” That kind of extension could lead to new spectrums of scale and force, not to mention new kinds of sensory input altogether. Instead of merely imagining that you’re grasping a nanotool with virtual fingers, you could learn to pilot it like a minuscule spaceship—only with your mind. And if that device had any sensors, you might be able to process the data as though it were a tiny camera.
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POPSGoogle's Secret Weapon: MapReduce As the inventors of MapReduce noted in a recent paper, "It has been used across a wide range of domains within Google including: large-scale machine learning problems; clustering problems...; extracting data to produce reports of popular queries; extracting properties of Web pages for new experiments and products...; processing of satellite imagery data; language model processing for statistical machine translation, and; large-scale graph computation." Or in other words, the tasks Google performs are similar to the functions performed by the brain: learning, categorization, vision and language.
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POPS86 Percent Of Americans Could Be Overweight Or Obese By 2030 “The health care costs attributable to obesity and overweight are expected to more than double every decade. This would account for 15 to 17 percent of total health care costs spent,” Wang says. “Due to the assumptions we made and the limitations of the available data, these figures are likely an underestimation of the true financial impact.”