(토요모임) [May, 7, 2016] Saturday meeting topic

[Scarlet]

Howdy ! 

It's me Scarlett !   

This week we have 4 topics. 

◈ Career development : 3 Steps to Mapping Your Career Path

◈ Public Figure : The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...

◈ Technologies : Students used mind control to race drones for the very first time 

Elon Musk opens AI GYM to train machines on Atari games

◈ Environment : This biodegradable water bottle breaks down when it’s empty

Hope you enjoy the topics. 

With luv 

Scarlett

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3 Steps to Mapping Your Career Path

By Hallie Crawford July 2, 2015, at 11:00 a.m.

This exercise will help you determine who you are, where you're going and how you'll get there.

You are your greatest asset, and as an extension of that, your job is one of your best assets, too.

Like any asset, your career is something you must take care of and nurture so that it keeps its worth over the long haul. When you treat your job like an asset – one you will give to, but also one that you want to work for you in return – you will be better able to make the right decisions about your career in the long term.

In order for your career to be an asset, it must be fulfilling to you and provide the rewards you want – financial and otherwise. And in return, you must remain challenged and marketable to continue to be successful.

How can you make sure your career is truly an asset, and treat it as such? Making a strategic career plan is a critical first step.

What is a career plan? A career plan is a map we develop to plan for where we want to be in the future. To begin, you must understand and be able to visualize where you see yourself in the business world in one year, three years and five years. (Start by envisioning where you see yourself in five years, and then work your way back.) Review your career plan quarterly to ensure you are on track and make adjustments as necessary to your plan.

When you are ready to work on your career plan, start the process by informally working through the following three exercises. Simply journal about these for 30 minutes to get some thoughts down on paper.

What you come up with will help you formulate your more formal strategic plan. It will also get your thoughts and ideas flowing first, so that you can shape them into that structured plan. Sometimes if we sit down and try to create a structured plan right away, it stifles our creativity and our ability to think outside the box. So begin with a free-flowing exercise using the questions below:

 Who are you? 

Self-awareness is critical to having a successful career plan that will leave you feeling fulfilled. Your values, strengths, interests and compensation are building blocks that make up the cornerstone of fulfillment in your career.

Other building blocks to a successful career include your education, experience and knowledge of your personality type and the right work environment for you. Knowing these things about yourself helps you understand the elements you want in a career and personal brand.

Action tip: First, identify your career values by asking yourself which work tasks you truly enjoy. Also identify your strengths and interests. Then clarify how you can honor your career values in a job long term; which strengths you want to use on a regular basis and how often during the course of your workday; and finally, which interests you want to incorporate into a job.

 Where are you going? 

To answer this question, you need to define what success means to you. Is it becoming an entrepreneur, helping others in some way, being part of a thriving department in a large organization or something else?

By identifying what success means to you, you may find that your current job is not giving you what you want. For example, if you are not using any of your strengths in your current job, or if your work lacks meaning, it's not the right fit. Or if success to you means also having a family, and your current job is impeding that, it's not a long-term fit.

If you will not make as much money as you'd like to on your current trajectory, you need to eval‎uate whether or not that's OK with you. The key is understanding what you want and need and actively choosing your course based on those criteria.

Action tip: Write down what success means to you, and then ask yourself if your current job and its long-term trajectory will help you achieve that success. 

 How will you get there? 

This is where your one-, three- and five-year plans will start taking shape. Based on what you wrote about above, start to identify what action steps you need to take. Consider the experiences and skills you will need to acquire over the next few years to achieve what you want. Brainstorm how networking, training or education can help you achieve those goals. Think about what skills you can acquire or perfect, such as communication skills, motivating others or managing change. What kind of support system do you need to create to get there? Which friends and family members can help keep you on track?

It's also important to identify any roadblocks you may encounter on your way to career success for each year's plan. Think about how you can handle them or even avoid them if possible. Take a few minutes in this step to brainstorm all possible ways you can achieve your goals, and just get your ideas on paper.

Action tip: In this final step, keeping your five-year vision in mind, write down five big goals, and two or three action steps under each goal to start framing your more formal plan. Next, talk to a supportive friend, partner or family member about your plan this week. Using their feedback and input, make changes to your thoughts, then get started on your formal plan! 

Article source: http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2015/07/02/3-steps-to-mapping-your-career-path

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<Questions>

Q1. What is your job and job assignment in your work place? Do you think you are fully activated in your workplace with your strength? 

Q2. What is the 'Success' mean to you? Plz describe it in detail. 

Q3. Do you think your current job and its long-term trajectory will help you achieve that success? 

Q4. What is your final goal in your work in 5 year? How about your plan in 10 year? 

Q5. Do you have a strategic career plan? Please share it with us.

Q6. What are you preparing to enhance your personal brand identity? For instance, what activities are you  keeping up to build up better human network and to enhance your experience and knowledge related to your job?

Q7. When you are choosing your career, what is the most important component among your values, apptitude, interests and compensation?

Q8. What is the most important factor to make better performance in your work place among your education, experience and knowledge of your personality type and the right work environment for you? Why? 

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Elon Musk 

Elon Musk founded and runs two moonshot tech companies: Tesla Motors and SpaceX. At Tesla he's busy trying to bring fully-electric vehicles to the mass market. At SpaceX, a literal moonshot, he's trying to revolutionize space tech to enable people to live on other planets. Musk's meteoric rise has been anything but smooth, though. In June 2015 one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets exploded two minutes after launch, resulting in a total loss. Six months later a Falcon 9 rocket was able to successfully land upright after visiting space, but when SpaceX tried to land a rocket on a floating ocean barge in January 2016, one of its legs didn't lock and the rocket tipped over and exploded. Still, the company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station, and funding rounds have valued the company north of $10 billion. Back on the ground, Tesla is following up its smash-hit Model S sedan with an electric SUV, the Model X. Deliveries are expected to begin in the second half of 2016. The South African-born Musk emigrated to Canada at age 17 and then to the U.S. as a transfer student to the University of Pennsylvania. He made his first fortune as a cofounder of Paypal. He's also the chairman of SolarCity, the publicly-traded solar panel designer and installer run by his cousin, Lyndon Rive. In 2013 Musk unveiled the Hyperloop, a design for a high-speed transportation system that would send riders through tubes in pods. In June 2015 SpaceX announced it would hold a competition for students and independent engineering teams to design pods and test them on the company's one-mile track.

Article source : http://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/

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The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...

TED2013 · 21:04 · Filmed Feb 2013

Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a man with many plans. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX sits down with TED curator Chris Anderson to share details about his visionary projects, which include a mass-marketed electric car, a solar energy leasing company and a fully reusable rocket.

0:11 Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car?

0:20 Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

0:51 CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help?

1:01 EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most preval‎ent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant.

1:48 CA: That scale delivers efficiency.

1:50 EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport.

2:06 CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video -- So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle?

2:18 EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range.

3:12 CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently -- by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency.

3:23 EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge.

3:41 CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations.

3:47 CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter)

3:55 EM: I mean, you can certainly drive -- if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number.

4:06 CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car?

4:16 EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive.

4:44 CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle?

4:53 EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there.

5:34 CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes?

5:49 EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going.

6:43 CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common -- don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything.

6:56 EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that?

7:26 EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

8:08 CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here?

8:24 EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas.

8:32 (Applause)CA: How?

8:34 EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble.

8:38 CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest -- those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas.

9:19 CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front.

9:24 EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease?

9:33 EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal.

9:47 CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that -- I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit?

10:02 EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill.

10:31 CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility.

10:38 EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses.

11:05 CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar?

11:15 EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is?

11:31 EM: More from solar than any other source.

11:33 CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with?

11:37 EM: With a friend who will remain nameless.

11:40 CA: Just between us. (Laughter)

11:44 EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source.

11:53 CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter)

12:08 EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?"

12:28 CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened?

12:33 EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket.

12:58 CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond?

13:08 EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.

13:40 CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this?

13:51 EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but --

14:10 CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me.

14:16 EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent.

14:21 EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause)

14:28 CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this.

14:37 EM: Right, so the big innovation—

14:38 CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here.

14:43 EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for —

15:08 CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land?

15:12 EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours.

15:22 CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.

16:00 CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic.

16:12 CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars.

16:28 EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars -- being the only realistic option -- and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species.

16:48 CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going?

16:56 EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests.

17:12 CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter)

17:21 CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then --

17:30 EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters.

18:05 CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so -- Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you?

18:33 EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot.

18:44 CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right.

18:46 CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and -- and this is the critical thing -- feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that -- could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done.

19:30 EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.

20:35 CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED.

20:43 EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause)

20:49 Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Article source : https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity/transcript?language=en

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<Questions>

Q1. Do you know Elon Musk? What do you know about him? 

Q2. How would you define sustainable development? 

Q3. Do you have a mentor? Why did you choose him/ her as your mentor?

Q4. Have you ever heard about Teslar, Solar city or SpaceX? Can you explain those projects to us? 

Q5. Elon musk makes our society accelerate to develop more technologies. Do you think what would be the merits and demerits to technology development facilitation?

Q6. How do you think about the public figure Elon Musk who is challenging various new technological fields? Do you think would he upgrade our world into better status or jeopardize our society?  

Q7. Which value is more important for you between speed and direction? Now, are your life heading to the right direction? 

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Students used mind control to race drones for the very first time 

Danielle Muoio / Apr. 25, 2016, 4:20 PM

Racing drones has become fairly common place in engineering departments at universities, but students from the University of Florida took it to a new level by controlling the flying robots with their minds.

The students controlled the drones using technology called brain-computer interface, Juan Gilbert, endowed professor and chair of UF's computer and information science and engineering program, explained in a video posted Friday. 

When people are hooked up to BCI technology, it gives them the ability to control an external device with their mind — sort of like mastering the force or telekinesis. It's actually the same technology that gave a paralyzed man the ability to walk again.

The students wore electroencephalogram (EEG) headbands that are able to measure electrical impulses from the brain. A computer program built by the University of Florida's computer science and engineering department relayed these brain signals into commands for the drone, like "fly forward."

"We're starting a new trend in society, there will be future brain-drone competitions," Gilbert said in the video. "We're starting out with a simple little race right now, who knows where this will go."

Article source : http://www.techinsider.io/students-control-drones-using-their-brains-2016-4?utm_content=buffer007ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-ti

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Elon Musk opens AI GYM to train machines on Atari games

: Billionaire says initiative will help computers think like humans

- OpenAI Gym includes 'environments' in which AI can learn

- This includes playing classic board games and 59 Atari games  

- Musk has previously claimed AI is 'more dangerous than nukes' 

By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 00:08 GMT, 29 April 2016 | UPDATED: 00:51 GMT, 29 April 2016

Elon Musk's OpenAI has created a 'gym' to let developers train their AI systems on Atari games.

The open source code, which is still in development, includes 'environments' to create situations in which AI can learn. The environments include playing classic board games, controlling a robot in simulation and playing 59 Atari games like Asteroids, Air Raid, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Pitfall.

The hope is that the tasks will give OpenAI and others a way to rank and improve various AI approaches, and unveil new ways to teach machines to learn. OpenAI will also feature a leaderboard of the most successful systems.

But instead of showing a list of high scores, the leaderboard will rank systems based on their versatility.

'It's not just about maximising score; it's about finding solutions which will generalise well,' a how-to guide from OpenAI explained.

'Solutions which involve task-specific hardcoding or otherwise don't reveal interesting characteristics of learning algorithms are unlikely to pass review.' The code also includes board games such as Go and physics simulators to help machine learning systems understand how to walk.

The research is based on reinforcement learning, which 'studies how an agent can learn to achieve goals in a complex, uncertain environment'. According to OpenAI, reinforcement learning research has been 'slowed down' and the gym is 'an attempt to fix both problems'. The non-profit is co-chaired by Musk and technology venture capitalist Sam Altman, who has backed Reddit and was unveiled in December. 'Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,' a blog post on OpenAI's website said.  

Musk told Backchannel 'As you know, I've had some concerns about AI for some time.'

He also revealed he wants to use AI to make us 'superhuman'

'If you think about how you use, say, applications on the internet, you've got your email and you've got the social media and with apps on your phone — they effectively make you superhuman and you don't think of them as being other, you think of them as being an extension of yourself. 

'So to the degree that we can guide AI in that direction, we want to do that.'

OpenAI's list of donors include PayPal Holding Inc co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn Corp co-founder Reid Hoffman and Musk himself among others.

They have committed $1 billion for the fledgling firm, but OpenAI said it expects to spend a 'tiny fraction' of that amount in the next few years. 

Other backers include Amazon.com's cloud unit Amazon Web Services, Indian IT giant Infosys and Greg Brockman, former chief technology officer of payments startup Stripe.

'I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI,' said Musk. 'If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.' The organisation is a non for profit, and uses computing time from Amazon.

'Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact,' the team said.

'We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely.' 

The organisation has pledged to try and combat 'surprises' from  other firms.

'Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach.

'When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.'

Article source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3564752/Elon-Musk-opens-AI-GYM-train-machines-Atari-games-Billionaire-says-initiative-help-computers-think-like-humans.html

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<Questions>

Q1. How do you think about the concept of controlling drone with mind control tech?

Q2. If you can have one of the supernatural powers, which one do you want to have? Why?

1. Psychokinesis/ Psychokinesis is also known as Telekinesis and mind over matter, and it is the ability to move or manipulate objects with the mind.

2. Extra Sensory Perception/ Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is the ability to gather information without the use of the 5 senses (hence it is also sometimes called sixth sense).

3. Telepathy/ Telepathy is the ability to communicate with others with the mind. Within the field of parapsychology this is considered to be a form of ESP.

4. Clairvoyance/ Clairvoyance is the transfer of information without the use of the senses – it differs from telepathy in that there is no transfer of information from one person to another.

5. Pyrokinesis/ Pyrokinesis is the ability to ignite or extinguish fires with the mind.

6. Psychometry/ Psychometry is the ability to “read” information from objects.

7. Precognition/ This is the ability to foresee events. 

8. Bilocation/ Bilocation is the alleged ability to be in two places at the same time.

9. Postcognition/ Postcognition is the opposite of precognition; it is the ability to see an event after it has occurred. 

10. Astral Projection/ Astral projection is the ability to spiritually separate from your body and travel vast distances with the mind alone. 

Q3. Elon Musk takes the use of AI technology as 'summoning the demon'. How do you think about the AI tech.? Do you think what are the advantages and disadvantages of this? 

Q4. Do you know any newly released tech. which would be useful for human society? Please share it with us.

Q5. If you have supernatural power to control other's mind, what would you like to do with that? Why? 

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This biodegradable water bottle breaks down when it’s empty

Written by Joe Myers/ Content Producer, Formative Content

Published Friday 1 April 2016

Your water bottle could one day start to biodegrade the moment you finish drinking, if a visionary piece of design becomes reality.

The brainchild of Icelandic product design student Ari Jónsson, the bottle holds its shape until you’ve drained it. As soon as it’s empty, the bottle will start to decompose.

As he argued in Dezeen Magazine: “Why are we using materials that take hundreds of years to break down in nature to drink from once and then throw away?”

How does it work?

The bottle is made from a powdered form of agar – a substance obtained from algae. When this powder is mixed with water it becomes a jelly-like material, which can be moulded into a shape of your choosing.

Jónsson explained in an article with Co.Exist that the mix of algae and water produces the perfect lifespan for the bottle. It needs liquid to hold its shape, but once it’s empty it begins to break down.

e argues that the water is entirely safe to drink, although it might take on a bit of a salty taste after a while. You could even eat the bottle, which is said to taste a bit like “seaweed jello”.

At the moment the design is little more than a concept, but Jónsson hopes it will get people thinking about the problem and consider developing their own solutions.

The problem with plastics

The production and use of plastic poses a significant environmental challenge. In 2014, the world produced 311 million tonnes of plastic, much of which ended up in landfill or the ocean.

According to a World Economic Forum report, by 2050 the oceans are predicted to contain more plastic than fish. Equally, the plastics industry is set to consume a fifth of the world’s oil.

These findings emphasize the urgent need to tackle our plastics problem. Finding more environmentally sustainable solutions to issues such as bottle production is one step in the right direction.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/this-biodegradable-water-bottle-breaks-down-when-it-s-empty?utm_content=bufferb4d90&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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<Questions>

Q1. Do you think what the most crucial pollution challenge is in your community? What would be the right solutions to tackle this trouble? 

Q2. According to an article, biodegradable water bottle breaks down when it’s empty. Would you buy those environmentally sound products with extra money?

Q3. Have you ever had an allergic problem without specific reason? How did you deal with it?