An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning -- the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI -- or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action. "People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends -- that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans," he says. "We don't have that, but people are talking as if we do." Jordan should know the difference, after all. The IEEE Fellow is one of the world's leading authorities on machine learning. In 2016 he was ranked as the most influential computer scientist by a program that analyzed research publications, Science reported. Jordan helped transform unsupervised machine learning, which can find structure in data without preexisting labels, from a collection of unrelated algorithms to an intellectually coherent field, the Engineering and Technology History Wiki explains. Unsupervised learning plays an important role in scientific applications where there is an absence of established theory that can provide labeled training data.

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Apple said Wednesday that it will build a battery-based renewable energy storage facility in Central California near a solar energy installation that already provides energy for all of its facilities in the state. From a report: Apple said the project will store 240 megawatt-hours of energy, or enough to power more than 7,000 homes for one day. It is located next to the California Flats solar installation in southeastern Monterey County, about 100 miles southeast of Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters. The site sends 130-megawatts of electricity directly to Apple's California facilities during daylight hours but does not provide power during dark hours. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, told Reuters in an interview the company intends to develop what it believes will be one of the largest battery-based storage systems in the United States. "The challenge with clean energy -- solar and wind -- is that it's by definition intermittent," Jackson told Reuters. "If we can do it, and we can show that it works for us, it takes away the concerns about intermittency and it helps the grid in terms of stabilization. It's something that can be imitated or built upon by other companies."

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Hmmmmmm writes: Russia has registered the world's first coronavirus vaccine for dogs, cats, minks, foxes and other animals, the country's agriculture safety watchdog said Wednesday. Called Carnivak-Cov, the vaccine was developed by scientists at the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, also known as Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia's Tass News Agency said. Rosselkhoznadzor deputy head Konstantin Savenkov said Wednesday that this would be the world's first authorized for widespread animal inoculations. The vaccine could be mass produced as soon as April, although the agency did not say when it would be on the market. 'Carnivak-Cov, a sorbate inactivated vaccine against the coronavirus infection is the world's first and only product for preventing covid-19 in animals,' Savenkov told Tass News. Two U.S. companies, New Jersey-based veterinary pharmaceutical company Zoetis and the North Dakota-based Medgene Labs, have also been developing coronavirus vaccines for use among minks and other animals. Scientists in Russia launched clinical trials in October and tested the vaccine on dogs, cats, foxes, including Arctic foxes, and minks, among other animals. Mass production of the vaccine could begin in April, according to Savenkov.

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The Pentagon announced that Microsoft has won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented-reality headsets for the U.S. Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88 billion over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson said. From a report: The deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a futuristic product resulting from years of research, beyond core areas such as operating systems and productivity software. It follows a $480 million contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, in 2018. The new deal will involve providing production versions. The standard-issue HoloLens, which costs $3,500, enables people to see holograms overlaid over their actual environments and interact using hand and voice gestures. An IVAS prototype that a CNBC reporter tried out in 2019 displayed a map and a compass and had thermal imaging to reveal people in the dark. The system could also show the aim for a weapon. "The IVAS headset, based on HoloLens and augmented by Microsoft Azure cloud services, delivers a platform that will keep soldiers safer and make them more effective," Alex Kipman, a technical fellow at Microsoft and the person who introduced the HoloLens in 2015, wrote in a blog post. "The program delivers enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing and decision-making in a variety of scenarios."

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Downing Street sources reject reports the COP26 meeting in Glasgow will be postponed until next year.

Hitachi said on Wednesday it will buy U.S. software company GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion, including repayment of debt, as the Japanese industrial conglomerate pivots from electronics hardware to digital services. From a report: The deal is the biggest Japanese outbound acquisition of a U.S. hi-tech company on record, according to Refinitiv data. The acquisition is part of Hitachi's ongoing business portfolio overhaul, which includes the $7 billion acquisition of ABB's power grid business last year and a series of divestitures of its domestic hardware subsidiaries. Hitachi's stock tumbled 7% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, its sharpest daily fall in more than a year, on the news.

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Apple is aiming to announce a mixed-reality headset at an in-person event sometime in the "next several months," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. From a report: In a newsletter outlining the possible future of the company's WWDC conference taking place in an in-person format, Gurman says that Apple aims to release a mixed-reality headset, the first major new device since 2015, at an in-person sometime in the "next several months." Apple last held an in-person event in September of 2019. All events since have been held digitally due to the global health crisis. "Sometime in the next several months, the company is poised to announce a mixed reality headset, its first major new device since 2015. If possible, Apple won't want to make such a critical announcement at an online event. It wants employees, the media, its partners and developers in the room," the report said.

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One of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has now been applied to antimatter atoms for the first time. From a report: Laser cooling, which slows the motion of particles so they can be measured more precisely, can make antihydrogen atoms slow down by an order of magnitude. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom is made out of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada's national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used an antihydrogen trapping experiment called ALPHA-2 at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to create clouds of about 1000 antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. The team developed a laser that shoots particles of light called photons at the right wavelength to slow down any anti-atoms that happen to be moving directly towards the laser, slowing them down bit by bit. "It's kind of like we're shooting a tiny ball at the atom, and the ball is very small, so the slowing down in this collision is very small, but we do it many times and then eventually the big atom will be slowed down," says Fujiwara. The group managed to slow the anti-atoms down by more than a factor of 10.

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Today is the first time I've lived in a place where weed became legal, on the day it happened. I've been to places where it is legal (Calif, WA, Colorado, Mass to name a few).It's one of those "did you ever think you'd live to see it" days. Weird that tomorrow is April 1.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips -- bits of silicon wafer and microscopic circuitry that help run nearly all our electronic devices. Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. promised a way out, toward self-reliance in the face of increasingly tough U.S. curbs on this technology. The private company once boasted on its website that it would raise a total of $20 billion to churn out 60,000 leading-edge chips a year. None of that would come to pass. Hongxin's unfinished plant in the port city of Wuhan now stands abandoned. Its founders have vanished, despite owing contractors and investors billions of yuan. The company is one of six multibillion-dollar chip projects to fail in the last two years. Their rise and fall is a cautionary tale in an industry that is flush with state cash but still scarce on expertise -- and a preview of the expensive and winding road China will have to take toward semiconductor self-sufficiency, now a national security priority.

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'Fake' accounts claiming to be Amazon workers have been praising their working conditions on Twitter. From a report: Votes are currently being counted in Alabama to decide whether Amazon warehouse workers will form a union. But last night, a series of anti-union tweets were sent from accounts claiming to be staff. Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake. Most of the accounts were made just a few days ago, often with only a few tweets, all related to Amazon. "What bothers me most about unions is there's no ability to opt out of dues," one user under the handle @AmazonFCDarla tweeted, despite a state law in Alabama which prevents this. "Amazon takes great care of me," she added. Another account - which later changed its profile picture after it was revealed to be fake - said: "Unions are good for some companies, but I don't want to have to shell out hundreds a month just for lawyers!" Many of the accounts involved used the handle @AmazonFC followed by a first name. Amazon has previously used this handle for its so-called Amazon Ambassadors - real employees who are paid by the firm to promote and defend it on Twitter. Further reading: Amazon Loses Effort To Install Camera To Watch Counting of Ballots in Pivotal Union Vote.

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OMG there's another. Much more ambitious.

President Biden will unveil an infrastructure plan on Wednesday whose $2 trillion price tag would translate into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, repairs to the 10 most economically important bridges in the country, the elimination of lead pipes and service lines from the nation's water supplies and a long list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run. From a report: Biden administration officials said the proposal, which they detailed in a 25-page briefing paper and which Mr. Biden will discuss in an afternoon speech in Pittsburgh, would also accelerate the fight against climate change by hastening the shift to new, cleaner energy sources, and would help promote racial equity in the economy. The spending in the plan would take place over eight years, officials said. Unlike the economic stimulus passed under President Barack Obama in 2009, when Mr. Biden was vice president, officials will not in every case prioritize so-called shovel ready projects that could quickly bolster growth. Many of the items in the plan carry price tags that would have filled entire, ambitious bills in past administrations, The Times reports. Among them: A total of $180 billion for research and development, $115 billion for roads and bridges, $85 billion for public transit, and $80 billion for Amtrak and freight rail. There is $42 billion for ports and airports, $100 billion for broadband and $111 billion for water infrastructure -- including $45 billion to ensure no child ever is forced to drink water from a lead pipe, which can slow children's development and lead to behavioral and other problems.

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The best platforms are ones with lots of users. For example, the Finder on the Mac needs a simple scripting language. Starting with Lotus 1-2-3, spreadsheets had macro languages. Programmable editors are popular because writers love to get their writing environment just-so. The theory of Frontier was to pour lots of attention into the scripting language, and make it work across all apps. We did a pretty fair job. It didn't get as much attention as it deserved because Apple got in the way. We shouldn't give up on this ideal. It's still possible.

Someone has built a drone big enough to carry a human.