Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

Crime causes significant damage to the society and property. Different kinds of physical or direct methods are devised by the law and order department to spot out the criminals involved in the crime. This techniques will explore the evidences at crime site. For instance if it finds a fingerprint then the system will capture and send it to forensic department for fingerprint matching, which can be later used for identifying the suspects or criminals by investigations etc. Yet, it is a huge challenge for them to find the criminal due to less or no evidence and incorrect information, which can change the direction of investigation to the end. This paper proposes a data analysis approach to help the police department by giving them first-hand information about the suspects. It automates the manual process for finding criminal and future crime spot by using various techniques such as pattern matching, biometric and crime analytics. Based on the availability of information, the system is able to produce the expected accuracy.

The U.N. human rights chief is calling for a moratorium on the use of artificial intelligence technology that poses a serious risk to human rights, including face-scanning systems that track people in public spaces.

Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also said Wednesday that countries should expressly ban AI applications which don’t comply with international human rights law.

Applications that should be prohibited include government “social scoring” systems that judge people based on their behavior and certain AI-based tools that categorize people into clusters such as by ethnicity or gender.

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work begins now!

Newsletter 17.09.2021 by Bernard Foing & Adriano V. Autino

During the last months we have seen the first civilian passengers fly to space, onboard Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic vehicles. September 15th, four civilian astronauts, onboard a Space X Dragon capsule, passed the 500 km orbit, more than 100 km higher than the ISS.In 2016 we started to publicly talk about and promote Civilian Space Development, while the whole space community kept on talking only about space exploration. Earlier, in 2,008 we founded the Space Renaissance movement, and a couple of years later the Space Renaissance International, as a philosophical association targeted to complete the Kopernican Revolution, supporting the Civilization expansion into space. Nowadays the concept of civilian space flight is everywhere on the media, and many people in the space community talk about a space renaissance. Of course the Coronavirus pandemics accelerated the awareness of the urgency to expand humanity into outer space. And space tourism — the first stage of civilian space settlement — is now a reality, in its first steps.

Of course nobody could be more happy than ourselves, for the above development, and of course**2 we want to congratulate with Elon, Richard and Jeff, for such a great achievement!

Continue reading “Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work starts now!” »

The UK government has approved Europe’s first field trials of Crispr-edited wheat. The experiments will be conducted in Hertfordshire by the agricultural science institute Rothamsted Research.

The Rothamsted project is aiming to produce wheat with lower levels of the amino acid asparagine. When bread is baked or toasted, asparagine is converted into acrylamide – a carcinogenic contaminant that requires close monitoring under EU law.

Laboratory and greenhouse studies have already shown Crispr can be used to create wheat plants that produce much lower levels of asparagine. Rothamsted Research says that the new five-year project will examine ‘how the plants fare in the field and whether asparagine concentrations continue to be low in grain produced under field conditions’.

TEPCO has been repeatedly criticized for coverups and delayed disclosures of problems at the plant. In February, it said two seismometers at one reactor had remained broken since last year and failed to collect data during a powerful earthquake.

TOKYO (AP) — Officials at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant have acknowledged they neglected to investigate the cause of faulty exhaust filters that are key to preventing radioactive pollution, after being forced to replace them twice.

Representatives of the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, made the revelation Monday during a regular review of the Fukushima Daiichi plant at a meeting with Japanese regulatory authorities. Three reactors at the plant melted following a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Continue reading “Fukushima plant failed to probe cause of faulty filters” »

El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, with Pres. Nayib Bukele saying it will save millions in commissions for remittances.

Good info.

Nobody is exempt from misunderstanding scientific concepts and/or applying them incorrectly. Statistics from the National Science Board show that Americans scored an average of 5.6 over 9 true-or-false and multiple-choice science-related questions in 2016. Because of the low number of questions, the study is better at differentiating low and medium levels of knowledge than those with higher levels of knowledge. However, the results weren’t much different in previous studies, suggesting that Americans generally have had the same basic levels of science literacy since the beginning of the century.

In this context, we’d like to clear up and emphasize the distinctions between scientific hypothesis, theory, and law, and why you shouldn’t use these terms interchangeably.

Continue reading “The Difference Between a Scientific Hypothesis, Theory, and Law” »

South Korea’s parliament has approved a bill that will make it the first country to impose curbs on Google and Apple’s payment policies that force developers to only use the tech giants’ proprietary billing systems.

The legislation will become law once signed by President Moon Jae-in, whose party has been a vocal supporter of the bill.

Apple and Google’s policies usually require developers to pay the tech giants a commission as high as 30% of every transaction.

“I think it’s changed everything, and I think it’s changed everything fundamentally,” James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, told Vox.

We’ll (probably) always have work, but could the job as the centerpiece of American life be on the way out?

To understand the question, you have to know how the country got to where it is today. The story starts, to some degree, with a failure. Much of American labor law — as well as the social safety net, such as it is — stems from union organizing and progressive action at the federal level in the 1930s, culminating in the New Deal. At that time, many unions were pushing for a national system of pensions not dependent on jobs, as well as national health care, Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. They did win Social Security, but with many people left out, such as agricultural and domestic workers, it wasn’t a full nationwide retirement system. And when it came to universal health care, they lost entirely.