It’s just the latest in the bitter feud between Google and Amazon over the future of the smart home.
Source: CNET
The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice.
The tech, created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora, anonymously stored votes in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results.
“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. “This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”
“Sierra Leone wishes to create an environment of trust with the voters in a contentious election, especially looking at how the election will be publicly viewed post-election. By using blockchain as a means to immutably record ballots and results, the country hopes to create legitimacy around the election and reduce fall-out from opposition parties,” he said.
Why is this interesting? While this is little more than a proof of concept – it is not a complete voting record but instead captured a seemingly acceptable plurality of votes – it’s fascinating to see the technology be implemented in Sierra Leone, a country of about 7.4 million people. The goal ultimately is to reduce voting costs by cutting out paper ballots as well as reducing corruption in the voting process.
Gammar, for his part, sees the value of a decentralizes system.
“We’re the only company in the world that has built a fully-functional blockchain voting platform. Other electronic voting machines are ‘block boxes’ that have been increasingly shown to be vulnerable to security attacks. For that reason, many US states and foreign nations have been moving back to paper,” he said. “If you believe that most countries will use some form of digital voting 50 years from now, then blockchain is the only technology that has been created which can provide an end-to-end verifiable and fully-transparent voting solution for this future.”
One election in one country isn’t a movement – yet. However, Gammar and his team plan on expanding their product to other African countries and, eventually, to the rest of the world.
As for the election it is still unclear who won and there will be a run-off election on March 27. The winner will succeed President Ernest Bai Koroma who has run the country for a full decade.
Source: TechCrunch
A notch housing the camera and other sensors has become the rage among Android makers, but you may not have to live with it, TechRadar reports.
Source: CNET
The ride-hailing company announces a collaboration with North America’s largest auto parts supplier to develop and manufacture self-driving cars.
Source: CNET
After the death — no, let’s not mince words — murder of Google Reader, I tried out a dozen or so other RSS readers to see if I could get a similar experience. Of all the ones I tested, I was very surprised to find that Digg Reader was the best of them all, for my purposes anyway.
It was simple, clean, compact, kept up to date, had no weird fluff, no “recommendations” or “trending articles” unless you accidentally visited Digg itself by accident, and since I started using it it has never had any downtime that I’ve noticed.
I’ve come to rely on it as much as I did Google Reader in the past few years, so I am sad to see that the service is shutting down in two weeks. You’ll still be able to export your feeds for a while afterwards, though.
Digg itself will live on, but the Reader portion is being retired. I understand why — RSS readers aren’t exactly glitzy or profitable, they’re more a public service than anything. At some point a company has to reckon with that and decide whether they want to continue subsidizing a tool used by relics like me instead of whatever most people use, probably Twitter or something.
Well, Digg Reader, you were a great tool and I’m sad to leave you. Guess it’s time for me to test out another dozen RSS readers, or maybe bite the bullet and host my own.
Source: TechCrunch
If you want to see how a proposed drug affects human physiology, your options are limited — and usually you end up using mice, which are in many ways poor analogues. What’s a pharmacologist to do? MIT researchers have a solution: a “body on a chip” that simulates up to 10 interconnected human organs at once using millions of living cells.
Anyone can understand the problem, which is simply that mice aren’t humans, and tests on them are necessarily limited. There exist quite a few “organ on a chip” platforms (more properly “microphysiological systems”), and while they’re useful, organs don’t exist in isolation — they’re part of complex systems that vary from person to person.
What if you only tested a drug on a bunch of liver cells, but failed to account for the effect of certain byproducts produced by the kidneys? Or what if a byproduct of the drug interferes with some critical process two organs down the line? In case you can’t tell, I am not a medical doctor, but the idea is there: without accounting for these complexities, the testing is incomplete. Say what you will about mice — at least they’re complete organisms.
To better simulate the body, MIT researchers created a much more complex platform where researchers can put up to 10 organ tissues in separate compartments, regulating the flow of substances and medications between them in real time.
MIT’s news release calls this a “body on a chip,” but in the paper, published today in Science Advances, the researchers demur — they prefer the term microphysiological system, “to avoid the implication that an entire organ system is recapitulated in vitro.” You can call it whatever you want, guys. It’s your thing. (“Physiome on a chip” is another popular option.)
It’s nothing new to do this with a handful of tissues, but to have 10 tissues stable for weeks, as the researchers’ paper demonstrates, is unprecedented and represents a huge jump in the capabilities of this kind of system. Not only that, but previous microphysiological systems were difficult to access mid-experiment in case you wanted to sample a tissue or otherwise manipulate it.
In the paper, the researchers tested examples from many of the most commonly tested organs: liver, lung, gut, endometrium, brain, heart, pancreas, kidney, skin and skeletal muscle. So you could introduce your drug to the gut, and let it be processed normally before being passed to the other organs, which may then perform their own processes and pass the substance on again.
Something that might have taken multiple experiments and systems can be done more quickly and with a method closer to how it actually works in the body — no rodents required.
“An advantage of our platform is that we can scale it up or down and accommodate a lot of different configurations,” explained senior author of the paper Linda Griffith. “I think the field is going to go through a transition where we start to get more information out of a three-organ or four-organ system, and it will start to become cost-competitive because the information you’re getting is so much more valuable.”
That’s good, because ultimately it’s cost that drives everything — if this works well but costs as much as 20 simpler experiments done by a bunch of interns, big pharma will probably go for the interns.
Source: TechCrunch
Commentary: If you’re a “lifelong” iPhone user you might be tempted to skip the iPhone X and get a Pixel 2. And that’s OK.
Source: CNET
It’s looking pretty grim for Geoffrey the Giraffe.
Source: CNET
La empresa lleva tiempo afirmando que está a punto de lograr este hito. Pero algunos expertos opinan que lo realmente importante no es la cantidad de cúbits sino las cosas que se pueden hacer con ellos y proponen alternativas al término como ‘inimitabilidad cuántica’
Source: MIT
Los expertos en derecho intentan decidir qué leyes deberían aplicarse a los crímenes perpetrados por sistemas inteligentes. A nivel penal se plantean tres escenarios, y uno de ellos responsabiliza directamente a las máquinas
Source: MIT