Their Own Strange Personalities, Different from Any Human
1. If you subscribe to this newsletter, you will almost certainly like the new USA show Mr. Robot.
"Creator Sam Esmail, who is Egyptian, has said in interviews that the show was inspired in part by the Arab Spring and the revolutionary spirit of his 20-something tech-savvy Egyptian cousins caught up in the uprising. 'These are young people who are tech-savvy, who use technology to their advantage to channel the anger against the status quo and try and make a change to better their lives. That is something that’s beautiful and fascinating to me, and that’s what I really, really want the show to be about,' Esmail said."
+ Seriously, it's so good.
2. The simulator that helps Marines learn to survive a helicopter crash into the water.
"If you’re a United States Marine, you may have practiced all these things inside a helo dunker, a device that simulates a helicopter’s crash landing into water. A group of Camp Lejeune Marines recently took a ride in the helo dunker to prepare for a sudden fall from the sky (not all photos are from this training evolution)."
3. Google's not going to test their modular phone in Puerto Rico after all.
Google’s Project Ara is an effort to design a modular smartphone system that lets you customize your phone’s hardware and design by swapping out modules to add or remove cameras, batteries, storage, or even screens. The company’s been working on the technology for a few years, and had planned to launch a marketing pilot in Puerto Rico before the end of 2015 in order to see how the project is received in a test market. Now it looks like those plans have been scrapped… or at least changed."
"The field of artificial intelligence is moving quickly, and computers seem to be getting smarter every day. To track their progress, people usually focus on Turing tests of pure utility: Can a machine see, hear, or drive as well as a human? But maybe these intelligent computers aren’t just utilitarian tools. Couldn’t they have feelings, personalities, even psychological idiosyncrasies? Could they have their own strange personalities, different from any human?"
5. The way we think about genomes may be changing.
"Some members of GA4GH are working to rewrite the fundamental way we map the human genome, replacing a widespread model that pegs DNA sequences to a 'reference map' with a more flexible way of traversing the genome based on graph theory. Others want to attach standardized metadata to genomic databases, telling researchers at a glance where a specific piece of DNA data comes from, how it was collected, and what’s interesting about it. These are ambitious projects that will require scientists the world over to reexamine the vast troves of data they’ve already captured and characterized."
On Fusion: Iranian hackers broke into what they thought was a Chevron gas pump — but it was a honeypot.
1. wired.com 2. thebrigade.com | @chrismichel 3. liliputing.com 4. medium.com 5. bio-itworld.com
Their Own Strange Personalities, Different from Any Human