Quote:China Unseats Japan As Second Largest Industrial Manufacturer – UN

Quote:The Dark Side Of Facebook, Where People Lie, Steal, And Make Millions

Alyson Shontell Jun 16 2014, 11:40 AM

Quote:Deleting and stealing Facebook pages is just the beginning, though. Another common tactic is trying to get innocent Facebookers in trouble with law-enforcement authorities.



Once, when some of the Facebook hackers were in a battle with Fyk, they spread a rumour on the social network, branding him a pedophile.



“He said he was going to kill my friend, so we said he was a pedophile and he got spammed and everyone who likes his page thinks he’s a pedophile now,” Anthony said with a laugh. “It’s just silly little internet things that drive him insane, and it’s nothing illegal. I have my freedom of speech to say anything like that, but we don’t do anything in terms of black-hat illegal activity.”



When we mentioned the laws against defamation, Anthony backtracked. “Probably somewhere along the lines of that, but it wasn’t me who did it, so I’m not really worried, and I forgot who even did it,” he said.



In Anthony’s defence, Fyk is not entirely blameless for the ongoing hostilities. Occasionally, the millionaire has lost his temper and said things he likely regrets.

Quote:[color="#0000FF"]The battles among Facebook gangs have also included real-world sabotage. Anthony details some of the ugliness, which he said he doesn’t partake in but has seen firsthand.



“It was not uncommon to see stories of kids’ computers getting infected by rogue viruses and 25 gigabytes of child porn being put on their computers and a swat team being sent to their house,” he said over Skype. “It’s not uncommon for people’s personal bank details to get leaked, and it’s not uncommon for Social Security numbers to get leaked.”[/color]

Quote:Japan plans carbon offset scheme with India: report

AFP



Tuesday, Jun 17, 2014

TOKYO - Japan is set to offer India a carbon offset scheme that would see Tokyo's environmental technology used by the rising Asian giant to help reduce its emissions, a report said.



The scheme would see Japanese firms earn carbon credits in return for helping developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the Nikkei newspaper said in its Monday evening edition, adding India was a likely early partner.



The joint crediting mechanism (JCM) would encourage Japanese firms to participate by allowing them to promote technologies such as energy-efficient furnaces and air-conditioning systems, in developing countries with huge market potential such as India.



The Nikkei report comes as Japan struggles to further cut its greenhouse gas emissions, with businesses claiming many factories, vehicles and household appliances are already fitted with energy-efficient technologies.



[...]

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, who will visit Tokyo next month, will agree to speed up talks on the matter, the newspaper reported.



(If only Modi would allow me to tag along to Nippon, I'd promise to be his new best friend for the entire duration of the trip: pack his suitcase for him, carry it around, chauffeur him to the airport, join his team of heavies/bodyguards. Even eat his (Hindu vegetarian) airplane food for him - and I hate airplane food (though I usually try to finish it anyway, since wasting food is to be avoided) which makes this The charity offer of the year. Sacred blessed Nihon and its supremely kallai heathens, as dear to me as the Daoists. :love: Sigh.)



Japan has already signed JCM agreements with 11 developing countries, including Indonesia, Mongolia and Kenya.

Tokyo hopes carbon credits from the scheme could be used to come closer to its target of reducing Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by 3.8 per cent against the 2005 level.



Japan, which had relied on nuclear for over a quarter of its power, jacked up imports of fossil fuels to keep the lights on after the quake-tsunami disaster forced a shutdown of the country's reactors.



About 88 per cent of Japan's energy came from fossil fuels in the past fiscal year to March, according to the white paper released Tuesday.

Quote:7 dead as police, religious party workers clash in Pakistan's Lahore

AFP

Tuesday, Jun 17, 2014

LAHORE, Pakistan - At least seven people were killed on Tuesday when the Pakistani police clashed with followers of a fiery preacher in the eastern city of Lahore, hospital officials said.



The clashes involved supporters of Canadian-Pakistani Tahir-ul-Qadri who held [color="#0000FF"]a major anti-corruption march last year prior to the May 2013 election[/color] that saw the country's first democratic handover of power.

[color="#800080"](Curious as to what the timing for the Paki 'anti-corruption march' is in comparison to the christo-communist AAP's hijacking of Swami/Yogi/Baba Ramdev's Hindu anti-corruption movement..)[/color]



"We received seven dead bodies including two women. All of them had bullet wounds," said Dr Abdul Rauf, medical superintendent at the city's Jinnah Hospital.

Quote:AsiaOne

Sunday, Jun 15, 2014



[color="#0000FF"]The World Cup which is held every four years is finally here![/color]



Not surprisingly, Chinese national soccer team didn't make it again, but if there were a "world cup" for the hottest soccer babes, the Chinese babes might have won, said a forum post in China Daily.

[color="#800080"](Although not the point of posting the excerpt: concerning the last part of that sentence: China's women, or at least those in the business, are on record to consider sports modelling/whatever it's called to be a mere source of income, and to feel highly annoyed at it, and not being able to wait to get out of it. I should hunt that article down again.

Can't blame them though. Few things I'd turn down for money either. Though I'm thinking a stint as a hitman might involve parting with fewer (ethical) principles: there's at least less chance of tacky clothes... :horrors[/color]



[...]

Quote:Japan plans carbon offset scheme with India: report

AFP



Tuesday, Jun 17, 2014

TOKYO - Japan is set to offer India a carbon offset scheme that would see Tokyo's environmental technology used by the rising Asian giant to help reduce its emissions, a report said.

Quote:Google Is Working On A Super-Fast 'Quantum' Computer Chip



AFP Sep. 3, 2014, 6:01 AM



San Francisco (AFP) - Google said it is working on a super-fast "quantum" computer chip as part a vision to one day have machines think like humans.



The Internet titan on Tuesday added renowned researcher John Martinis and his team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to the Quantum Artificial Intelligence team at Google, according to director of engineering Hartmut Neven.



The new hires are part of a "hardware initiative" to design and build chips operating on sub-atomic levels in ways making them exponentially faster than processors currently used in computers,



"With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs," Neven said of the quest for a transformative new chip.



Last year, Google's artificial intelligence lab partnered with US space agency NASA on quantum computing research.





Read more: businessinsider.com/afp-google-working-on-super-fast-quantum-computer-chip-2014-9#ixzz3CGgMmafw

Quote:IBM Builds A Scalable Computer Chip Inspired By The Human Brain



Photo: Some of the applications for IBM's cognitive computing system. (Credit: IBM)



“I’m holding in my hand a chip with one million neurons, 256 million synapses, and 4096 cores. With 5.4 billion transistors, it’s the largest chip IBM has built.”



Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha sounds positively giddy as he talks to me on the phone. This is the third time I’ve talked to him about his long-term project – an IBM project with the goal of creating an entirely new type of computer chip, SyNAPSE, whose architecture is inspired by the human brain. This new chip is a major success in that project.



“Inspired” is the key word, though. The chip’s architecture is based on the structure of our brains, but very simplified. Still, within that architecture lies some amazing advantages over computers today. For one thing, despite this being IBM’s largest chip, it draws only a tiny amount of electricity – about 63 mW – a fraction of the power being drawn by the chip in your laptop.



What’s more, the new chip is also scalable – making possible larger neural networks of several chips connected together. The details behind their research has been published today in Science.



“In 2011, we had a chip with one core,” Modha told me. “We have now scaled that to 4096 cores, while shrinking each core 15x by area and 100x by power.”



Each core of the chip is modeled on a simplified version of the brain’s neural architecture. The core contains 256 “neurons” (processors), 256 “axons” (memory) and 64,000 “synapses” (communications between neurons and axons). This structure is a radical departure from the von Neumann architecture that’s the basis of virtually every computer today (including the one you’re reading this on.)



Photo: An IBM cognitive computing chip. (Credit: IBM)



Work on this project began in 2008 in a collaboration between IBM and several universities over the years. The project has received $53 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The first prototype chip was developed in 2011, and a programming language and development kit was released in 2013.



“This new chip will provide a powerful tool to researchers who are studying algorithms that use spiking neurons,” Dr. Terrence J. Sejnowski told me. Sejnowski heads Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. He’s unaffiliated with IBM’s project but is familiar with the technology. “We know that such algorithms exist because the brain uses spiking neurons and can outperform all existing approaches, with a power budget of 20 watts, less than your laptop.”



It’s important to note, though, that the SyNAPSE system won’t replace the computers of today – rather, they’re intended to supplement them. Modha likened them to co-processors used in high performance computers to help them crunch data faster. Or, in a more poetic turn as he continued talking to me, he called SyNAPSE a “right-brained” computer compared to the “left-brained” architecture used in computers today.



“Current von Neumann machines are fast, symbolic, number-crunchers,” he said. “SyNAPSE is slow, multi-sensory, and better at recognizing sensor data in real-time.”



So to crunch big numbers and do heavy computational lifting, we’ll still need conventional computers. Where these “cognitive” computers come in is in analyzing and discerning patterns in that data. Key applications include visual recognition of patterns – something that Dr. Modha notes would be very useful for applications such as driverless cars.



As Sejnowski told me, “The future is finding a path to low power computing that solves problems in sensing and moving — what we do so well and digital computers do so awkwardly.”



And that’s what IBM is looking to do with SyNAPSE – finding the patterns that normal computers can’t. As Modha put it, “Google Maps can plot your route, but SyNAPSE can see if there’s a pothole.”



What gives the SyNAPSE an advantage in pattern recognition is that, unlike a traditional computer, which crunches data sequentially, its brain-inspired architecture allows for more parallel processing. For example, in a facial recognition app, one core of the chip might be focused on nose shape, one on hair texture and color, one on eye color, etc. Each individual core is slower than a traditional processor, but since they run simultaneously in parallel, the chip as a whole can perform this type of operation much more quickly and accurately.



Other potential applications for the chip include use in cameras to automatically identify interesting items in cluttered environments. Modha’s team also believes that the chip could be quite useful in natural language processing – being able to parse out and obey commands from people. Kind of like the computers on Star Trek that understood when they were in use and when people were just talking among themselves.



It probably won’t be long before we see more of these applications in action. The scalable chip that IBM developed was built using conventional fabrication techniques for other chips – it just requires some different workflow.



Already over 200 programs have been developed for the chip, thanks to a simulation of the architecture running on supercomputers at at the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Those simulations allowed IBM to develop a programming language for the chip even before it existed.



“We’ve been working with IBM for the last 18 months and are extremely impressed with their achievement,” Prof. Tobi Delbruck of the Institute of Neuroinformatics at UZH-ETH Zurich told me. “Applications like real time speech and vision that run continuously on battery power may finally be within reach.”



“It’s too soon to say who will win the race to implement practical realizations of brain-like computing in silicon,” Delbruck added. “but IBM’s solution is a serious contender.”



Now that this new chip architecture has been developed and a fabrication technique setup, Modha said that the technology now is “like the 4 minute mile. Now that someone’s done it, a lot of people can do it.”



To help facilitate the development of the chip, both on the hardware and software side, IBM has developed a teaching curriculum for universities, its customers, its employees, and more.



On the hardware end, Modha’s next goal is the development of what he calls a “neurosynaptic supercomputer.” This would be a traditional supercomputer that uses both traditional and SyNAPSE chips – a computer with both a left and right brain, as it were – enabling it both to crunch numbers and quickly analyze real-time patterns as the data’s crunched.



One question that Modha couldn’t answer, though, what what the new chip means for video games – nobody’s programmed one for SyNAPSE yet.



“That’s an interesting question,” he laughed. “But we’re too busy for games!”



Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.

Quote:Ships, aircraft, and even entire cities may become fusion-powered a lot sooner than you might have imagined. That's the word from aerospace giant Lockheed Martin...

Quote:Fusion Energy: Hope or Hype? David H. Bailey | Posted 10.23.2014 | Science

It was with great interest that we read this week of two claimed breakthroughs in the area of fusion energy, by the U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin and a separate team of Italian and Swedish scientists.

Quote:Fusion Energy: Hope or Hype? David H. Bailey | Posted 10.23.2014 | Science

It was with great interest that we read this week of two claimed breakthroughs in the area of fusion energy, by the U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin and a separate team of Italian and Swedish scientists. We will continue to monitor both of these developments.