Category: News

Technology Review has an article on Belkin’s purchase of Zensi, a maker of sensors to track domestic energy and water usage (which would be a useful supplement to the data gathered by smart meters, allowing more fine grained understanding and tuning of household power consumption) – Home Sensor Startup Snapped Up.

If you knew how much electricity your plasma television used or how much water your dishwasher drank at different times of day, would you change your habits to conserve more and spend less on utilities? Researchers at the University of Washington, Duke University, and Georgia Tech believe that you might. Several years ago they invented sensors that could track the electricity consumption and water usage throughout an entire building via a single point on each system. In 2008, the researchers founded a company called Zensi to commercialize the technology, and last week, they sold that company to Belkin, an electronics hardware manufacturer.

A line of easy-to-install sensors for homes could be commercially available within the next year, says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and co-inventor of Zensi’s sensors. Data from such sensors could lead to itemized utility bills–and customers who are more aware of the energy sinks in their homes, he says.

Right now it’s impossible for a consumer to get an accurate gauge of energy use without deploying numerous expensive sensors. But cost reductions in key technologies have made the concept of watching every device in a home more feasible, says Ivo Steklac, executive vice president of sales and strategy at Tendril, a Boulder, CO-based, energy-monitoring startup. The key technologies are high-speed analog-to-digital conversion devices, digital signal processing algorithms, low-power communications, and ubiquitous Internet access and connectivity, Steklac says.

The concept behind Zensi’s technology is simple: a single sensor is plugged into a wall outlet, where it “listens” to the high-frequency electrical noise produced in the wiring when different devices are turned on. Each electrical device has a signature that is unique to the kind of device it is, its brand, and its location within a house. This information, in turn, reveals its energy consumption. MIT professor Fred Schweppe, and others tested a similar idea more than a decade ago. In the case of plumbing, a sensor is connected to the hose spigot on the side of a house. When a toilet is flushed or a sink is turned on, the sensor detects the characteristic change in pressure.

Data from the electricity and water sensors is sent via the Internet to a base station for analysis. The algorithms differentiate between different devices and calculate electricity and water usage.

With dividend yields on Canadian banks stocks in the 3.2% to 4.3% range, they are roughly three times greater than selected U.S. peers. That puts Canada in a very favourable position given that long-term historical levels have dividends on both sides of the border at similar levels.

All other things being equal, the situation dramatically favours Canadian bank valuations, according to Brad Smith, analyst at Stonecap Securities. Of course, all other things are not equal.

He explains that the bulk of the yield differential that has developed in the past few years is a direct result of a collapse in earnings among U.S. banks. This has forced them to recapitalize and dramatically cut dividend payout rates. In fact, from a long-run average of almost 45%, payout ratios at U.S. banks has plunged to just over 20%. During the same period, payout ratios for Canadian bank stocks have risen from the 30% range to approximately 50% these days.

“While the maintenance of payout ratios by domestic banks reflects the well documented capital and credit profile strength from which they entered the recent period of global credit stress, it also dictates that future dividend growth will to a large extent be tied to earnings growth,” Mr. Smith told clients.

Assuming that U.S. banks can grow their earnings at comparable rates to their Canadian counterparts, which is somewhat conservative given the potential for the U.S. economy to recovery from a much deeper recession, and assuming that banks on both sides of the border see a return to historically normalized payout ratios, the analyst expects Canadian bank dividends will grow at a compound rate of just under 3%. Meanwhile, U.S. bank dividends could grow at a compound rate of just over 20%.

So while current yields favour Canadian bank valuation, the potential for rapid dividend growth amid a North American economic recovery strongly favours forward returns for U.S. banks.

“This view intensifies if the one believes that a recovery will be accompanied by a general increase in interest rates,” Mr. Smith said.

Jonathan Ratner

Well — this is big news.

In this week’s new issue of PEOPLE Magazine — on newsstands everywhere Friday — Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock confirms her plans to divorce husband Jesse James in the wake of a headline-grabbing cheating scandal and introduces the world to the new love of her life – her adopted son Louis Bardo.

(She selected that name because she heard Louis Armstrong’s song “What A Wonderful World” playing in her head when she first saw him.)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sandra — who won an Oscar for her portrayal of an adoptive mom in the inspirational hit The Blind Side –reveals that she and her estranged husband adopted the baby boy in January and that, in the wake of allegations of James’ infidelity, she has filed for divorce and plans to raise the 3 1/2-month old child as a single mother.

Sandra and Jesse began the adoption process four years ago and brought Louis home at the beginning of th year but decided to keep the news to themselves until after the Oscars, where Sandra won the Best Actress gong for her performance in The Blind Side.

Their family, including Jesse’s children Sunny, 6, Jesse Jr., 12, and Chandler, 15 were instrumental in keeping the adoption news under wraps until now.

TomDispatch has an article by Noam Chomsky which makes an interesting link between the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and the extraction of gas offshore (and also gives one time Australian foreign minister Gareth “Biggles” Evans a serve while he is at it) – Eyeless in Gaza.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008–9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons. Near-universal opinion asserts the contrary, claiming that Israel was acting in self-defense. That is utterly unsustainable, in light of Israel’s flat rejection of peaceful means that were readily available, as Israel and its U.S. partner in crime knew very well. That aside, Israel’s siege of Gaza is itself an act of war, as Israel of all countries certainly recognizes, having repeatedly justified launching major wars on grounds of partial restrictions on its access to the outside world, though nothing remotely like what it has long imposed on Gaza.

One crucial element of Israel’s criminal siege, little reported, is the naval blockade. Peter Beaumont reports from Gaza that, “on its coastal littoral, Gaza’s limitations are marked by a different fence where the bars are Israeli gunboats with their huge wakes, scurrying beyond the Palestinian fishing boats and preventing them from going outside a zone imposed by the warships.” According to reports from the scene, the naval siege has been tightened steadily since 2000. Fishing boats have been driven steadily out of Gaza’s territorial waters and toward the shore by Israeli gunboats, often violently without warning and with many casualties. As a result of these naval actions, Gaza’s fishing industry has virtually collapsed; fishing is impossible near shore because of the contamination caused by Israel’s regular attacks, including the destruction of power plants and sewage facilities.

These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza’s territorial waters. Industry journals report that Israel is already appropriating these Gazan resources for its own use, part of its commitment to shift its economy to natural gas. The standard industry source reports:

“Israel’s finance ministry has given the Israel Electric Corp. (IEC) approval to purchase larger quantities of natural gas from BG than originally agreed upon, according to Israeli government sources [which] said the state-owned utility would be able to negotiate for as much as 1.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the Marine field located off the Mediterranean coast of the Palestinian controlled Gaza Strip.

“Last year the Israeli government approved the purchase of 800 million cubic meters of gas from the field by the IEC…. Recently the Israeli government changed its policy and decided the state-owned utility could buy the entire quantity of gas from the Gaza Marine field. Previously the government had said the IEC could buy half the total amount and the remainder would be bought by private power producers.”

The pillage of what could become a major source of income for Gaza is surely known to U.S. authorities. It is only reasonable to suppose that the intention to appropriate these limited resources, either by Israel alone or together with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority, is the motive for preventing Gazan fishing boats from entering Gaza’s territorial waters.

There are some instructive precedents. In 1989, Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas granting Australia rights to the substantial oil reserves in “the Indonesian Province of East Timor.” The Indonesia-Australia Timor Gap Treaty, which offered not a crumb to the people whose oil was being stolen, “is the only legal agreement anywhere in the world that effectively recognises Indonesia’s right to rule East Timor,” the Australian press reported.

Asked about his willingness to recognize the Indonesian conquest and to rob the sole resource of the conquered territory, which had been subjected to near-genocidal slaughter by the Indonesian invader with the strong support of Australia (along with the U.S., the U.K., and some others), Evans explained that “there is no binding legal obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force,” adding that “the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force.”

It should, then, be unproblematic for Israel to follow suit in Gaza.

A few years later, Evans became the leading figure in the campaign to introduce the concept “responsibility to protect” — known as R2P — into international law. R2P is intended to establish an international obligation to protect populations from grave crimes. Evans is the author of a major book on the subject and was co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which issued what is considered the basic document on R2P.

In an article devoted to this “idealistic effort to establish a new humanitarian principle,” the London Economist featured Evans and his “bold but passionate claim on behalf of a three-word expression which (in quite large part thanks to his efforts) now belongs to the language of diplomacy: the ‘responsibility to protect.’” The article is accompanied by a picture of Evans with the caption “Evans: a lifelong passion to protect.” His hand is pressed to his forehead in despair over the difficulties faced by his idealistic effort. The journal chose not to run a different photo that circulates in Australia, depicting Evans and Alatas exuberantly clasping their hands together as they toast the Timor Gap Treaty that they had just signed.

A free speech fight that was part of a recent battle in Washington State over a controversial civil union law will be heard by the Supreme Court Wednesday in a case that examines the breadth of “anonymous speech” protection.

The high court has often ruled that the sweeping reach of the First Amendment’s speech protection also covers the rights of people to speak under the cloak of anonymity..

Wednesday’s case presents the justices with the unique question of whether people who sign a petition forcing a state-wide referendum are entitled to keep their identities under wraps.

Last May, lawmakers in Olympia passed a law expanding the rights of same-sex partners. In response, a group called Protect Marriage Washington circulated a petition forcing the issue onto the November ballot. Washington, similar to other states, allows voters to overturn state laws by referendum.

The state requires a sufficient number of names on the referendum petition to place the matter before the voters. Protect Marriage Washington submitted more than 138,500 names to the Secretary of State who verified the petition and placed the issue on that November’s ballot.

During the petition gathering process, several groups supportive of the civil union measure announced their intentions to use a state open records law to obtain the petition list and publish those names on the internet. Referendum supporters expressed concern that the people who signed the petition could be subject to retributive attacks. They pointed to violence associated with the contentious fight over California’s Proposition 8 and went to court to stop the names from becoming public.

A trial court judge initially enjoined the state from releasing the names but the Ninth Circuit U.S Court of Appeals ruled the names should be made public. The lower courts disagreed over the level of First Amendment protection petition signers are entitled.

Referendum supporters argue an abridgement of their ability to remain anonymous violates “core political speech.” The groups seeking access to the names argue “there is no right, fundamental or otherwise, to secrecy in the legislative process.”

15 years ago the Supreme Court sided with an Ohio woman who anonymously distributed leaflets opposing a tax hike. In writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “when a law burdens core political speech, we apply ‘exacting scrutiny,’ and we uphold the restriction only if it is narrowly tailored to serve an overriding state interest.”

The most famous example of anonymous political speech in American speech is the collection of essays now known as the Federalist Papers. Many of those writings were published anonymously by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.

Coincidently, Wednesday’s case is the last one the justices have scheduled for its current term, thus making it likely that it will be the last one heard by Justice Stevens, who earlier this month announced his retirement effective when the Court begins its summer recess.

In taking the case, the high court stayed the Ninth Circuit’s disclosure order pending its ruling which is expected in a couple of months. As for the November referendum, Washington voters with a 53% majority decided to uphold the civil union law.

The Age has an interesting article on house prices and population growth – Taiwanese solution to soaring house prices: don’t have kids.

In Taipei the other day, a crane drove up to the front of the Parliament building. It lowered a man sitting in a plastic container shaped like a house, and suspended him in the air in a protest against the high price of real estate. Through a microphone, he urged onlookers to rise up against high housing prices, declaring: ”People without homes, slaves to property, stand up!” …

This matters because housing is not just an asset like shares or bonds. It is where we live. It’s natural for investors to prefer the security of bricks and mortar. But as governments throughout the region are discovering, it is also natural for people to want to own a home – and to turn against governments that allow prices to soar out of their reach. In Taiwan, the costs have become particularly serious, as we shall see. Their would-be home buyers – ”snails without shells” as they call themselves – have reacted by scrapping the other big expense facing young couples: children.

At home, the Rudd government last week reversed its 2008 liberalisation of foreign investment rules on real estate, and set up a unit to ensure the rules are obeyed. It also set up a joint working party with the states to ask why housing prices have soared out of reach. But that will work only if it tackles the single biggest cause: the tax-driven growth of rental investors, whose borrowing has grown 30-fold in 20 years, squeezing out home owners. …

Taiwan has become rich very fast, largely by inching its way into a central role in global IT and communications manufacturing. This year, the International Monetary Fund estimates, its GDP per head will overtake that of its one-time colonial master, Japan. Its economy is almost as big as Australia’s, and growing twice as fast. Yet its new wealth shows only fleetingly amid the grimy, cramped apartments built in earlier, poorer times.

Taiwan is in the grip of a housing crisis worse than ours. It is a rich country, but wages and most prices are roughly half the levels here – because the government, like China’s, holds down the exchange rate to keep its manufacturing globally competitive. …

Why can’t they build more apartments? Because ownership of those grimy old apartment blocks is fragmented among dozens of occupants and investors. To demolish, even to upgrade, a developer must buy them all out, which is prohibitively expensive in time and money. There are classy new apartments on the urban fringe, on greenfields sites, but too few to meet the demand from occupiers and investors. So prices have soared.

So the snails save hard to buy a shell, and do without other things. That means, above all, they do without children, or with just one child. By 2008, Taiwan’s fertility rate was the lowest in the world. Its women bear on average just 1.05 children over their lifetimes. The cost of housing is not the only reason, but analysts say it is the main one.

But not having children creates even bigger costs ahead. Right now, Taiwan has 6.8 people of working age for every retiree. But preschools are already closing for lack of children, and the population is set to shrink dramatically. By 2032, demographers project, Taiwan will have just 2.5 potential workers for every retiree – and by 2056, just 1.4. If nothing changes, Taiwan – like China, Japan and Korea – will slowly become economically unviable.

So far, that hasn’t happened here. But if governments keep subsidising investors to outbid first home buyers and low income earners, it will. Snails want shells. Taiwan – and soon, possibly China – are showing us what else can go wrong when the price of shells soars out of the snails’ reach.

The Greeks are mainly responsible for their current predicament. But the German government has made the country’s situation worse with its lectures and reluctance to provide assistance. Chancellor Angela Merkel is mainly to blame for the fact that German taxpayers now have to suffer.

“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” This piece of wisdom, known as Murphy’s Law, currently applies extraordinarily well to economic policy in the euro zone.

On the one side there are the Greeks, who clearly still do not have their financial statistics under control and who produce one false report after another about the country’s budget deficit. On the other side are the Germans, who delight in hindering a rapid and unambiguous European response to the Greek crisis — in the process driving the cost of a solution through the roof.

Continue reading at Der Spiegel >>

Join the conversation about this story »

Do you work in a corrupt industry? The Daily Beast took a look at data gathered by Transparency International, a “global anti-corruption think tank,” and put together a list of America’s most corrupt professions. Everyone may be hating on Wall Street right now, but the worst offenders according to the criteria used are utilities. In second and third place were Wall Street and telecommunications, and media came in fifth, well before banking, insurance, or retail.

“The Most Corrupt Professions” [Daily Beast]

Turns your android phone into a Wi-Fi Analyzer!! Shows the Wi-Fi channels around you. Helps you to find a less crowded channel for your wireless router.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Multiple interfaces
• Easy to use and understand
• Small file size

Cons

• Eats battery life

Features:

I used to use a keychain fob to find out if I was near a wireless network. This app allows for me to get this ugly thing off my keychain and find out exactly what’s around me. The first screen you see shows a scrolling line graph of the wireless networks around you and their signal strength. With a quick finger swipe, you see a bar graph with not only the signal strength, but also the channels that the Wi-Fi networks are using, great if you’re trying to find a less crowded channel for your own network. The next screen is a gauge to show you the strength of just one access point, helpful if you’re trying to track those nasty signal drops and dead zones in your house. The screen to the right shows the details of each network including the SSID, MAC address, signal, strength, security type, and channel. The last screen shows you which channel on your current access point is the best choice for the least amount of interference.

All of these screens have helpful options such as sorting, snapshots, and filters. You can also change settings such as the scan interval, the specific channels you’re looking for, keeping the screen on, and letting the program turn on Wi-Fi by itself when you access it.

Usefulness:

As a tech on the go, this piece of software is really a lifesaver. When I need to check my mail, I don’t have to pull out my seven pound laptop just to find that all the wireless points in the area are locked down. (Yes, I know I could use my phone, but sometimes I just don’t have time to write a long email on that tiny keyboard).  When I’m at a clients house it’s a great diagnosing tool to find out where issues with their wireless may exist.

This piece of software, although geared toward the technician, is useful to anyone on the go who needs to find a network while they’re traveling in the wild.

Ease of Use:

WiFi Analyzer has a very easy to use interface. Nothing is overly technical. I don’t feel like every graph would be useful for everyone, but the ones each individual would use would not be hard to decipher and navigate.

Frequently Used:

I use it almost every day. I believe any technician would. However, the average user would most likely use this when they were working offsite and traveling.

Interface:

I can’t think of a way to improve it, but I also don’t design software. There is a unrefined feel to it that I would like to see improved, but I’m not sure exactly what the improvement would be.

GUANTANAMO BAY — This morning, attorneys for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen charged with murder, conspiracy and material support for terrorism, will attempt to persuade a military judge to exclude from his military commission every statement Khadr made to a U.S. interrogator. They will argue, as they have in their motion, that Khadr’s youth (15 years old at the time of his capture), the confusion caused by the circumstances of his detention and the broad implications of that treatment render all his statements inadmissible. Right now, a judge has no guidance for ruling in this dispute outside of the Military Commissions Act of 2009 — unless he’s a speed-reader. And its provisions on this question reflect the influence of a man who has since become chief commissioning officer of the military commissions.

Section 948r of the Act is what Col. Pat Parrish, the military judge, will have to apply to Khadr’s case. It’s meant to exclude any “statement obtained by the use of torture or by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Sub-section (d), however, provides guidance about other statements not directly produced by such coercion and how “voluntary” a judge should consider them — precisely the question at stake in tomorrow’s pre-trial hearing.

The judge “shall consider the totality of the circumstances” around how a defendant provided such a statement. That includes “the circumstances of the conduct of military and intelligence”; the “characteristics of the accused, such as military training, age, and education level”; and “the lapse of time, change of place, or change in identity of the questioners between the statement sought to be admitted and any prior questioning of the accused.”

Interestingly, that’s a standard proposed by Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, then the Navy’s judge advocate general, last July to a Senate panel. During a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee during the drafting of the Military Commissions Act of 2009, MacDonald argued that there needed to be a broader standard for admissible evidence than fruit-of-the-poisoned-tree-concerned senior officials from the Justice and Defense departments wanted:

To assist our practitioners in the field, I recommend that you develop a list of considerations to be evaluated in making this determination.

Those considerations should include the degree to which the statement is corroborated, the indicia of reliability in the statement itself and to what degree the will of the person making the statement was overborne. [snip]

I am worried that a military judge that has a voluntariness standard imposed upon them is going to look at a statement taken at the point of a rifle, when a soldier goes in, breaks down the door, and takes a — takes a statement from a detainee, I’m worried that they’re going to apply a voluntariness standard to that. And I would argue, that’s an inherently coercive environment, when you have a rifle pointed at you.

And I’m concerned the judge is going to look at that under a strict voluntariness standard and say, that statement doesn’t come in. I would rather see this as part of a totality of the circumstances leading to, is the statement inherently reliable?

And what I’ve proposed is a series of factors that would give the judge more guidance, perhaps, on how to do that analysis.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, replied, “If you have actual language on your factors, you might want to share it with us.” MacDonald pledged to do just that.

It’s unclear how the considerations listed in the “totality of the circumstances” language will apply to Khadr’s case. Age is an explicit consideration, and one Khadr’s lawyers are pushing for. However, the “totality of the circumstances” might also mean that the “change in place” of Khadr’s questioners between Afghanistan and Guantanamo — or their “change in identity” during his Guantanamo detention — might inhibit the defense’s ability to contend nothing Khadr said was voluntary. Parrish will consider the question this week. (Maybe not necessarily starting tomorrow as scheduled, though, now that the commission Manual has just been issued.)

Oh, and Vice Admiral MacDonald’s newest job? Chief commissioning authority for the military commissions. After all, he’s clearly had more influence than anyone who isn’t an administration official or legislator over the Military Commissions Act of 2009.

Newspaper mad scientist Rupert Murdoch is apparently jumping on the James Cameron bandwagon, because now his British tabloid The Sun is going to go 3D, Deadline Hollywood Daily reports.

According to the post, the paper’s 3D edition will require readers to don those eye-crossing glasses to view ads and editorial in 3D. We’ll see how long this takes to get to Murdoch’s New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

What do you think? Pathetic gimmick or… pathetic gimmick?

News Corp Newspaper To Publish In 3D [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

In the current market, getting bidders to visit a exclusive resident spot in Malibu, California has become very difficult for listing agents. One agent has recognized this and is offering an incentive that may be difficult for a wealthy enthusiast to turn down.

If you drop $4,399,333 for his client’s 6,000 sq-ft home, he will throw in a rare Ferrari F40. Only 213 units of the 200 mph F40 supercar made it to the United States and according to Michael Sheehan, a Ferrari historian, a F40 can still fetch around $350,000. He said a low mileage F40 can demand nearly $600,000.

The odometer reading on the Ferrari F40 on the car in Malibu right now? 734 miles – making it one of the lowest-mileage F40s available on the open market.

– By: Kap Shah

Source: Wheels

Our friends at egotv.com compiled this list of bad places to celebrate the betrothal of a buddy. While this list is by no means exhaustive, it does demonstrate that, even if you’re going to Vegas for the sixth bachelor party of the year, at least it’s the devil you know.

See the rundown of cities here.

Related posts:

1. Make Your Bachelor Party Memorable – With Automatic Weapons
2. The Best Las Vegas Hotels for Bachelor Parties
3. The Best And Worst Places To Find A Job

Flexibly securing hazardous areas with optoelectronics

Compared to conventional safety doors, optoelectronic safety guards often provide for a more flexible machine operation. The operator’s flexibility is even enhanced, when safety light curtains with comfortable parameterizable muting and blanking functions are used.

The “blanking” feature enables an area in the protection field to be blanked out without a stop signal being triggered. In this way, a conveyor belt or an auxiliary or support construction of the machine can be positioned in this area. The “floating blanking” feature provides for enhanced flexibility. With this function, light beams can be blanked at non-permanently defined positions. This is useful, when objects such as movable electrical cables are located inside the protection field. The blanking is moving up or down together with the object to be blanked – this explains the “floating” designation. If the object size changes, the safety light grid is switched off.

In the SLC 420 series, all light beams except the synchronisation beam can be used for blanking. Different blanking functions are available: a fixed blanking and a dynamic blanking. The chosen mode depends on the duration of the presence of the object (permanently either temporarily) in the protection field. In this way, the user can flexibly adjust the blanking function to the individual application.

These functions become ever more popular in actual practice; as a matter of fact, the flexible production trend also extends to the non-contact safety guards. Safety Control GmbH – the Centre of Competence of the Schmersal Group for optoelectronic safety guards – now has developed a new series of safety light curtains, for which the blanking function can be parameterized without PC software or programming device. In the SLC 421 series, these functions are defined in the teach-in mode using external command devices.

AGME design and manufacture special purpose machines for assembling ball joints. The assembly, marking and control processes are automated as much as possible. In this way the assembled parts are very homogeneous and human errors are avoided.

These machines are capable of performing the following operations:

• Marking of components
• Automatic feeding of components
• Assembly of ball pin, plastic seat, housing and closing cap
• Part presence control
• Component greasing
• Housing rolling with control of time, force and course
• Assembly of springs and sealing boot
• Rotating, tilt and break away torque control
• Air seal check
• Component final control with artificial vision

With the IBS Belt-Cleaning-System you are entering a new dimension of belt cleaning.

With PDC Primary diagonal cleaner and SDC Secondary diagonal cleaner, we developed a scraper system which ensures a special protection of the belts:

• Extremely low surface pressure
• Low wear and tear of scrapers and belts
• Significantly improved cleaning performance with almost maintenance-free operation

Please contact us: www.ibstec.de / [email protected]

Blue-White has re-engineered the junction box and connectors on their Flex-Pro A3 Peristaltic Metering Pump. With the Flex-Pro A3s’ Newly Engineered Terminal Block – complete with color-coded overlays – making connections is fast and efficient. Plus, the Flex-Pros’ New junction box provides extra working room.
There are no loose wires. The Flex-Pro A3s New terminal block board, located within the junction box, utilizes eleven pluggable terminal blocks. The easy-to-understand, color coded overlay clearly identifies terminals and connections. Just follow the handy overlay guide. The Flex-Pro A3 Junction Box has five cable glands, and the A3 is equipped with water-tight connectors.
With Flex-Pro A3s’ thoughtfully designed user-friendly connectors you choose what’s right for your installation – hardwire or corded.
The Flex-Pro A3 Peristaltic Metering Pump has Outputs to 33.3 GPH/126 LPH, and Output Pressure ratings to 125 psi/8.6 Bar.

New Scientist has an interesting article on whether single cells can be considered intelligent. The piece is by biologist Brian Ford who implicitly raises the question of how we define intelligence and whether it is just the ability to autonomously solve problems. If so, then individual cells such as neurons might be considered ‘intelligent’ even when viewed in isolation.

However, he finishes on a bit of an odd flourish:

For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and “artificial intelligence” a grandiose misnomer.

It’s odd because it reads like blue-sky speculation when, in fact, the idea that neurons could work like “a vast community of microscopic computers” is an accepted and developed idea in the field supposedly doomed by this idea – namely, artificial intelligence.

Traditionally, AI had two main approaches both of which emerged from the legendary 1956 Dartmouth Conference.

One was the symbol manipulation approach, championed by Marvin Minsky, and the other was the artificial neural network approach, championed by Frank Rosenblatt.

Symbol manipulation AI builds software around problems where data structures are used to explicitly represent aspects of the world. For example, a chess playing computer would have a representation of the board and each of the pieces and in its memory and it works by running the simulation to test out and solve problems.

In contrast, artificial neural networks are ideal for pattern recognition and often need training. For example, to get one to recognise faces you put a picture into the network and it ‘guesses’ whether it is a face or not. You tell it whether it is right, and if it isn’t, it adjusts the connections to try and be more accurate next time. After being trained enough the network learns to make similar distinctions on pictures it has never seen before.

As is common in science, these started out as tools but became ideologies and a fierce battle broke out over which could or couldn’t ever form the basis of an artificial mind.

At the time of the Dartmouth Conference, the neural network approach existed largely as a simple approach called the perceptron which was good at recognising patterns.

Perceptrons were hugely influential until Minksy and Seymour Papert published a book showing that they couldn’t learn certain responses (most notable a logical operation called a XOR function).

This killed the artificial neural network approach dead – for almost three decades – and contributed to what is ominously known as the AI winter.

It wasn’t until 1986 when two young researchers called David Rumelhart and James McClelland solved the XOR problem and revived neural networks. Their approach was called ‘parallel distributed processing‘ and, essentially, it treats simulated neurons as if they are a ‘a vast community of microscopic computers’ just as Brian Ford proposes in his New Scientist article.

Artificial neural networks has evolved a great deal and the symbol manipulation approach, although still useful, is now ironically called GOFAI or ‘Good old fashioned artificial intelligence’ as it seems, well, a bit old fashioned.

How we define intelligence is another matter and saying that individual cells have it is actually quite hard to easily dismiss.

Artificial intelligence seem cursed though, as true intelligence is usually defined as being just beyond whatever AI can currently do.

Link to NewSci on intelligence and the single cell (thanks Mauricio!)

New Scientist has an interesting article on whether single cells can be considered intelligent. The piece is by biologist Brian Ford who implicitly raises the question of how we define intelligence and whether it is just the ability to autonomously solve problems. If so, then individual cells such as neurons might be considered ‘intelligent’ even when viewed in isolation.

However, he finishes on a bit of an odd flourish:

For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and “artificial intelligence” a grandiose misnomer.

It’s odd because it reads like blue-sky speculation when, in fact, the idea that neurons could work like “a vast community of microscopic computers” is an accepted and developed concept in the field supposedly doomed by this idea – namely, artificial intelligence.

Traditionally, AI had two main approaches both of which emerged from the legendary 1956 Dartmouth Conference.

One was the symbol manipulation approach, championed by Marvin Minsky, and the other was the artificial neural network approach, championed by Frank Rosenblatt.

Symbol manipulation AI builds software around problems where data structures are used to explicitly represent aspects of the world. For example, a chess playing computer would have a representation of the board and each of the pieces and in its memory and it works by running the simulation to test out and solve problems.

In contrast, artificial neural networks are ideal for pattern recognition and often need training. For example, to get one to recognise faces you put a picture into the network and it ‘guesses’ whether it is a face or not. You tell it whether it is right, and if it isn’t, it adjusts the connections to try and be more accurate next time. After being trained enough the network learns to make similar distinctions on pictures it has never seen before.

As is common in science, these started out as tools but became ideologies and a fierce battle broke out over which could or couldn’t ever form the basis of an artificial mind.

At the time of the Dartmouth Conference, the neural network approach existed largely as a simple set-up called the perceptron which was good at recognising patterns.

Perceptrons were hugely influential until Minksy and Seymour Papert published a book showing that they couldn’t learn certain responses (most notable a logical operation called a XOR function).

This killed the artificial neural network approach dead – for almost three decades – and contributed to what is ominously known as the AI winter.

It wasn’t until 1986 when two young researchers, David Rumelhart and James McClelland, solved the XOR problem and revived neural networks. Their approach was called ‘parallel distributed processing‘ and, essentially, it treats simulated neurons as if they are a ‘a vast community of microscopic computers’ just as Brian Ford proposes in his New Scientist article.

Artificial neural networks has evolved a great deal and the symbol manipulation approach, although still useful, is now ironically called GOFAI or ‘Good old fashioned artificial intelligence’ as it seems, well, a bit old fashioned.

How we define intelligence is another matter and saying that individual cells have it is actually quite hard to dismiss when they seem to be solving a whole range of problems they might never have encountered before.

Artificial intelligence seem cursed though, as true intelligence is usually defined as being just beyond whatever AI can currently do.

Link to NewSci on intelligence and the single cell (thanks Mauricio!)

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