How Much Water Should A Person Drink?

Water Canada

Live Science: How Much Water Do You Really Need To Drink?

You are what you eat — but if you want to get literal about it, you are mostly what you drink. So, how much of that should be water?

About 60 percent of the average adult human body is made of water, according to a National Institutes of Health report. This includes most of your brain, heart, lungs, muscles and skin, and even about 30 percent of your bones. Besides being one of the main ingredients in the recipe for humankind, water helps us regulate our internal temperature, transports nutrients throughout our bodies, flushes waste, forms saliva, lubricates joints and even serves as a protective shock absorber for vital organs and growing fetuses.

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CSN Editor: The answer is .... Drink up when you're thirsty, and drink more when you sweat more. Your body will take it from there.

The Pentagon Wants To Build A Real 'SkyNet'?

Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. John Richardson, gives a keynote address during the Naval Future Force Science and Technology (S&T) Expo, July 21, 2017. This is a slide from his presentation.

Patrick Tucker, Defense One: The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System

Service chiefs are converging on a single strategy for military dominance: connect everything to everything.

Leaders of the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines are converging on a vision of the future military: connecting every asset on the global battlefield.

That means everything from F-35 jets overhead to the destroyers on the sea to the armor of the tanks crawling over the land to the multiplying devices in every troops’ pockets. Every weapon, vehicle, and device connected, sharing data, constantly aware of the presence and state of every other node in a truly global network. The effect: an unimaginably large cephapoloidal nervous system armed with the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.

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SCN Editor: A must read on what could be the weapon systems of the future.

The Pentagon Is Using Software To Hunt Down Terrorists

Marcus Weisgerber, Defense One: The Pentagon’s New Artificial Intelligence Is Already Hunting Terrorists

After less than eight months of development, the algorithms are helping intel analysts exploit drove video over the battlefield.

Earlier this month at an undisclosed location in the Middle East, computers using special algorithms helped intelligence analysts identify objects in a video feed from a small ScanEagle drone over the battlefield.

A few days into the trials, the computer identified objects — people, cars, types of building — correctly about 60 percent of the time. Just over a week on the job — and a handful of on-the-fly software updates later — the machine’s accuracy improved to around 80 percent. Next month, when its creators send the technology back to war with more software and hardware updates, they believe it will become even more accurate.

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CSN Editor: The age of using software to pinpoint and target the enemy is now with us .... and it does not take much of an imagination to know that this is only going to become more effective (and deadlier) with time.

This Is How Machines Learn (Video)

Google Street View May Give An Indication On How People Vote

Timnit Gebru led the research effort at Stanford University that analyzed 50 million images and location data from Google Street View, the street-scene feature of the online giant’s mapping service. Credit Cody O'Loughlin for The New York Times

New York Times: How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue

What vehicle is most strongly associated with Republican voting districts? Extended-cab pickup trucks. For Democratic districts? Sedans.

Those conclusions may not be particularly surprising. After all, market researchers and political analysts have studied such things for decades.

But what is surprising is how researchers working on an ambitious project based at Stanford University reached those conclusions: by analyzing 50 million images and location data from Google Street View, the street-scene feature of the online giant’s mapping service.

For the first time, helped by recent advances in artificial intelligence, researchers are able to analyze large quantities of images, pulling out data that can be sorted and mined to predict things like income, political leanings and buying habits. In the Stanford study, computers collected details about cars in the millions of images it processed, including makes and models.

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CSN Editor:  The politicians and their campaign managers are going to love this.

Science In Review 2017

FEE: 2017 Was a Year of Amazing Advances for Humanity

The end of 2017 is barely a week away. So now is the perfect time to reflect on the positive difference humanity has made to the world over the past 12 months. How have we advanced as a species?

We often underestimate the progress we make because it is incremental: an algorithm here, a genetic tweak there… but all these things combine to improve our future.

As Kevin Kelly from Wired wrote, “Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of Science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year… That few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization… [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect.”

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CSN Editor: It has been an interesting year.

If Great Scientists Had Logos

If great scientists had logos https://t.co/Xmwg8qjQd8 pic.twitter.com/ucK6VHMOXj

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 29, 2017

This Has Got To Be The Worst Job In Technology

Shaka Tafari saw graphic photos of bestiality or people killing dogs while working as a contractor for messaging app Whisper. Photo: Nick Agro for The Wall Street Journal

Lauren Weber and Deepa Seetharaman, Wall Street Journal: The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook

Social-media giants hire legions of contractors to hunt for pornography, racism and violence in a torrent of posts and videos

By her second day on the job, Sarah Katz knew how jarring it can be to work as a content moderator for Facebook Inc. FB 1.10% She says she saw anti-Semitic speech, bestiality photos and video of what seemed to be a girl and boy told by an adult off-screen to have sexual contact with each other.

Ms. Katz, 27 years old, says she reviewed as many as 8,000 posts a day, with little training on how to handle the distress, though she had to sign a waiver warning her about what she would encounter. Coping mechanisms among content moderators included a dark sense of humor and swiveling around in their chairs to commiserate after a particularly disturbing post.

She worked at Facebook’s headquarters campus in Menlo Park, Calif., and ate for free in company cafeterias. But she wasn’t a Facebook employee. Ms. Katz was hired by a staffing company that works for another company that in turn provides thousands of outside workers to the social network.

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CS Editor: This has got to be the worst job in technology .... by far.

Two Microsoft Employees Are Claiming That Microsoft Gave Them PTSD

FOX News: Two employees are suing Microsoft, alleging their jobs gave them PTSD

Two Microsoft employees claim the company made them look at photos and videos "designed to entertain some of the most twisted and sick minded people in the world." Now they're suing.

Courthouse News reports Henry Soto and Greg Blauert were part of Microsoft's online safety team whose job was to figure out what online content should be taken down and when it should be reported to police.

In that position, Soto and Blauert say they had to look at images of child pornography, murder, bestiality, and "indescribable sexual assault." They filed a lawsuit against Microsoft last month, accusing the company of negligence, disability discrimination, and violation of the Consumer Protection Act.

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CSN Editor: They are claiming that Microsoft didn't warn them about what to expect in the job and didn't provide psychological support. I find this hard to believe. Unless they have lived in a bubble for most of their life .... everyone knows that the internet has a lot of garbage that is not for the faint of heart.

Tweet For Today

Demonstration of 4 color printing with acrylic slides pic.twitter.com/q2BBqWdurU

— World and Science (@WorldAndScience) January 16, 2017

The Riemann Hypothesis

Jørgen Veisdal, Medium: The Riemann Hypothesis, explained

In loving memory of John Forbes Nash Jr.

You remember prime numbers, right? Those numbers you can’t divide into other numbers, except when you divide them by themselves or 1? Right. Here is a 3000 year old question:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, p. What is p? 31. What is the next p? It’s 37. The p after that?41. And then? 43. How, but… …how do you know what comes next?

Present an argument or formula which (even barely) predicts what the next prime number will be (in any given sequence of numbers), and your name will be forever linked to one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, akin to Newton, Einstein and Gödel. Figure out why the primes act as they do, and you will never have to do anything else, ever again.

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This Professor Is Teaching The NSA's Best Hackers

PPP group photo after winning @Defcon CTF 2016 pic.twitter.com/BpDYmMH7nA

— David Brumley (@thedavidbrumley) August 8, 2016

Cyber Scoop: Meet the man responsible for teaching some of the NSA’s best young hackers

The National Security Agency is an enormous organization by nearly any corporate standard, with more than 35,000 employees. Former Deputy Director Chris Inglis once joked that the spy agency is “the biggest employer of introverts.” More frequently though, the NSA refers to itself as the largest employer of mathematicians. In recent years, while the U.S. has continuously confronted new threats in cyberspace, the agency has increasingly become a training ground for young, talented, highly educated computer security professionals.

Underlining the NSA’s race to hire the best and brightest is a list of 213 universities that the spy agency has designated as “National Centers of Academic Excellence.”

These schools offer a myriad of computer security training programs, each providing a stepping stone into the secretive agency. In this context, Carnegie Mellon University is to the NSA what the University of Alabama is to the NFL. And Professor David Brumley is CMU’s Nick Saban.

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CSN Editor: His Twitter page is interesting (the link is here).

A Human-Powered Paper Centrifuge

Americans Love Their Internet And Smartphones

The Pew Research Center survey found 77 percent of American adults owning a smartphone in late 2016, more than double the level of 2011, when 35 percent said they used such devices

Phys.org: Smartphone, internet use at record high in US: survey

More than three-fourths of American adults now use a smartphone, helping to boost internet adoption to a record level, a survey showed Thursday.

The Pew Research Center survey found 77 percent owning a smartphone in late 2016, more than double the level of 2011, when 35 percent said they used such devices.

The rise was fueled by a "sharp uptick" in smartphone use by those with low incomes and those 50 and older, Pew said.

"Smartphones are nearly ubiquitous among younger adults," said Pew researcher Aaron Smith, noting that 92 percent of adults under 29 own one.

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CSN Editor: I am surprised that only 77% own a smartphone .... I thought it was closer to 90%.

The European Parliament Wants To Give Robots Legal Status By Calling Them 'Electronic Persons'

The report proposes a kill switch on robots. © Francois Lenoir / Reuters

RT: Robot kill switches & legal status: MEPs endorse AI proposal

A European Parliament committee has voted in favor of a draft report that proposes granting legal status to robots, categorizing them as “electronic persons”.

The draft report, approved by 17 votes to two and two abstentions by the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs, proposes that “The most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause.”

Authored by Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux, the report proposes definitions and outlines rules to govern how robots interact with humans “now that humankind stands on the threshold of an era” that it claims will see artificial intelligence (AI) “unleash a new industrial revolution.”

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WNU Editor: I will not be surprised if this is past by the EU parliament.

A U.S. Bee Species Has Been Placed On The Endangered Species List.

AFP: Bee placed on endangered list after US habitat loss

Miami (AFP) - US officials for the first time have placed a bee found in the continental United States on the endangered species list.

Authorities said Wednesday the move was taken after a precipitous decline in the rusty patched bumblebee population, due to pesticides, disease and climate change.

These once common bumblebees are now "balancing precariously on the brink of extinction," said a statement from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Abundance of the rusty patched bumble bee has plummeted by 87 percent, leaving small, scattered populations in 13 states and one province," down from 28 states in the 1990s.

The final rule listing the rusty patched bumble bee as endangered appeared in the January 11 edition of the Federal Register and takes effect on February 10.

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CSN Editor: I expect other bee species to be placed on this list.

Tweet For Today

This is how a dental implant is installed pic.twitter.com/NlckkkOt0I

— Science World (@ScienceworId) January 11, 2017

An AI Robot To Combat Loneliness

Elli.Q reminds lonely elderly people to take medication, talk to family and stay active

The Telegraph: AI robot 'friend' launched to chat and play games with lonely elderly

A talking robot which chats to elderly people, reminding them to take their medication and stay active, has been launched in London.

Elli.Q, which is one of the most advanced social companion robots in the world, has been designed to convey emotion through different speech tones, lights and body language to be as engaging as possible.

The little robot suggests activities such as reading, going for a walk, playing games to keep mentally active or phoning friends and family.

And she is programmed to learn what her owner enjoys, gradually tailoring her programming to fit.

Elli.Q has been developed by Intuition Robotics to prevent older people feeling socially isolated, and keep them connected to family and friends.

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CSN Editor: I can see this being valuable for seniors who live alone.

World Economic Forum Warns That Artificial Intelligence Needs Strong Governance

Computer Weekly: World Economic Forum warns of AI business risk

Ahead of its annual meeting in Davos, the World Economic Forum warns that artificial intelligence needs strong governance

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2017 has highlighted risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI).

Based on a survey of 750 experts, the report warned that AI, biotech and robotics have among the highest benefits to society, but they also require the most legislation.

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CSN Editor: No one is ready for the large scale unemployment that the adoption of AI would create.

The World Economic Forum Releases Its Top Global Risks For 2017

CNBC: Top five global risks for 2017: WEF

The World Economic Forum's (WEF) flagship annual report surveyed 750 experts to identify the most significant global concerns. Here are the top five:

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Update: Zero Hedge has a good summary .... These Are The Top Global Risks For 2017 According To The World Economic Forum (Zero Hedge).

CSN Editor: The World Economic Forum's report is here.