Lifeboat Foundation

The headquarters building for toy company Lego, which was designed by Danish architecture firm CF Møller Architects, has officially opened in Billund, Denmark.

Built near the company’s BIG-designed Lego House visitor centre, the 54,000-square-metre office block contains workspaces for 2,000 employees.

CF Møller Architects designed the headquarters to incorporate Lego’s core values of “imagination, fun, creativity, caring, learning, and quality”.

Large-scale language-based foundation models such as BERT, GPT-3 and CLIP have exhibited impressive capabilities ranging from zero-shot image classification to high-level planning. In most cases, these large language models, visual-language models and audio-language models remain domain-specific and rely highly on the distribution of their training data. The models thus obtain different although complementary common-sense knowledge within specific domains. But what if such models could effectively communicate with one another?

In the new paper Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language, Google researchers argue that the diversity of different foundation models is symbiotic and that it is possible to build a framework that uses structured Socratic dialogue between pre-existing foundation models to formulate new multimodal tasks as a guided exchange between the models without additional finetuning.

This work aims at building general language-based foundation models that embrace the diversity of pre-existing language-based foundation models by levering structured Socratic dialogue, and offers insights into the applicability of the proposed Socratic Models on challenging perceptual tasks.

(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Wing is set to begin the largest drone-delivery test program so far in the U.S., starting Thursday in the Dallas suburbs. Most Read from BloombergU.S. Drones for Ukraine Will Include Latest Tank KillersRussia Skirts Nearer Default After Dollar Payment BlockedCanada to Ban Foreigners From Buying Homes as Prices SoarEx-Oligarch Says Putin Sees War With the West Already UnderwayIf Stocks Don’t Fall, the Fed Needs to Force ThemWing LLC, which had announced its intention to begin the Texas deliveries last October, has obtained permission for the program from the Federal Aviation Administration, the company said in a statement Monday.

It is well established that quantum error correction can improve the performance of quantum sensors. But new theory work cautions that unexpectedly, the approach can also give rise to inaccurate and misleading results—and shows how to rectify these shortcomings.

Quantum systems can interact with one another and with their surroundings in ways that are fundamentally different from those of their classical counterparts. In a quantum sensor, the particularities of these interactions are exploited to obtain characteristic information about the environment of the quantum system—for instance, the strength of a magnetic and electric field in which it is immersed. Crucially, when such a device suitably harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics, then its sensitivity can surpass what is possible, even in principle, with conventional, classical technologies.

Unfortunately, quantum sensors are exquisitely sensitive not only to the physical quantities of interest, but also to noise. One way to suppress these unwanted contributions is to apply schemes collectively known as quantum error correction (QEC). This approach is attracting considerable and increasing attention, as it might enable practical high-precision quantum sensors in a wider range of applications than is possible today. But the benefits of error-corrected quantum sensing come with major potential side effects, as a team led by Florentin Reiter, an Ambizione fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation working in the group of Jonathan Home at the Institute for Quantum Electronics, has now found. Writing in Physical Review Letters, they report theoretical work in which they show that in realistic settings QEC can distort the output of quantum sensors and might even lead to unphysical results.

►Is faster-than-light (FTL) travel possible? In most discussions of this, we get hung up on the physics of particular ideas, such as wormholes or warp drives. But today, we take a more zoomed out approach that addresses all FTL propulsion — as well as FTL messaging. Because it turns out that they all allow for time travel. Join us today as we explore why this is so and the profound consequences that ensue. Special thanks to Prof Matt.

Written & presented by Prof David Kipping. Special thanks to Prof Matt Buckley for fact checking and his great blog article that inspired this video (http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel)

Continue reading “Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes” »

Another apple of the eye in the face of Dubai.

Dubai’s penchant for housing some of the world’s most magnificent creations is no secret. Beautiful buildings and jaw-dropping structures with breath-taking designs have helped the UAE capital build a solid foundation for its identity as one of the top tourist destinations throughout the globe. On the palindrome date of 22nd February 2022, Dubai added yet another feather in the cap to its stunning collection of architectural marvels as it unveiled the Museum of The Future — a standing tribute to science and technology that will allow the visitors an immersive experience of living the future. It will house some of the world’s most futuristic technologies, ideas, and innovative products.

The spectacular structure of the Museum of The Future is perhaps one of the most complex and complicated designs ever created and willed into solid reality in the history of architecture. So much so that His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, has already touted it as ‘the most beautiful building in the world’ to give a tribute to its marvelous design. Talking more about the structure, the museum has an elliptical shape that has invited different symbolic interpretations. Some say the elliptical shape represents humanity and the void represents the unknown future. On the flip side, some have compared the structure to that of the human eye that is looking at the future.

Project Harbour Club, by Levs Architecten, is an interesting new development in Amsterdam that involved renovating and extending a shipping terminal originally constructed in 1901. Most notably, the project transformed former industrial wine silos that were located on the site into unique rooftop homes.

Project Harbour Club is located in Amsterdam’s Cruquiuseiland, in the city’s eastern docklands. It’s made up of the original dock terminal building, a new entrance, a six-story L-shaped residential building that slots neatly into the site, and the three silo homes.

The silos were originally used to store bulk wine for the Dutch market. To make them safe for people to live in, they were first carefully cleared of any traces of harmful residues, had insulation fitted, generous glazing cut into place, and a comfortable and light-filled interior installed. This is spread over three floors and contains a dining area, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom.

US home prices have soared to new heights and they keep on climbing, and some researchers and economists say they have seen signs of a housing bubble brewing.

Home prices are rising faster than market forces would indicate they should and are becoming “unhinged from fundamentals,” according to a new blog post written by researchers and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Until recently, the possibility of a bubble wasn’t widely supported. But after looking at housing markets across the US, the Fed researchers said new evidence is emerging.

By Vanesa Castán Broto, University of Sheffield; Emmanuel Osuteye, UCL, and Linda Westman, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Flooding is common in informal settlements in Bwaise, a neighbourhood in the Ugandan capital Kampala. Bwaise’s residents are largely excluded from planning and local decision-making processes, and have poor housing and limited access to sanitation and other essential services.