Self-driving cars weren't even on the horizon a little more than a decade ago, but now it seems that every major automaker and the most prominent firms in Silicon Valley are hot on the trail of driverless cars.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent), is widely considered the front-runner in autonomous driving. Waymo has compiled more than 3.5 million miles driven on the highways and byways of the U.S. The company embarked on an early rider program in early 2017, shuttling consumers around the Phoenix metro area to gauge public reaction to the technology. The company recently removed the backup drivers from the vehicles, making them genuinely autonomous.

Now, Google has partnered with Rolls-Royce to use its pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) to bring self-piloting capability to ships at sea.

The initial work will be done by the deep-learning neural networks that Google currently uses for image recognition. Rolls-Royce will use Google's Cloud Machine Learning Engine, and the system will be fine-tuned "for detecting, identifying and tracking the objects a vessel can encounter at sea." This will help make current vessels more efficient and increase safety for the crews who operate them.

Ships currently use several traditional technologies like radar and automatic identification system (AIS) to detect other vessels in the water and for collision avoidance. AIS is a tracking system used to determine the identification and specific information for ships, by using radio frequencies and GPS transmitters linked to satellites. Smaller vessels won't necessarily have these sophisticated technologies, so crew members keep watch for these and other water-borne hazards.

By positioning cameras, sensors, and scanners around the vessel, it can be outfitted with 360-degree computer vision. This would enable an AI system to fuse the resulting data with information from a variety of other shipboard instrumentation including radar and AIS, potentially relieving the crew of this responsibility.

Since there is far less oceangoing traffic, fewer obstacles, and more straight line of travel, you might be tempted to assume that a self-piloting ship would be easier to engineer than an autonomous car. Karno Tenovuo, the senior vice president for ship intelligence for Rolls-Royce, explained that this isn't the case:
“A typical car AI aims to replace one human (the driver) whereas a typical cargo ship has over 20 crew members, and you need to cover all of the jobs they would do on a vessel. In a lot of ways, the complexity can be greater than what an automobile has to deal with.”

It would also be necessary for an autonomous ship to control cargo handling, security, and other shipboard systems.

Rolls-Royce heads the Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative (AAWA), a project that enlists the aid of leading universities, shipbuilders, equipment manufacturers, and classification societies to explore the many factors that would need to be addressed before self-piloting ships can take to the high seas.

The AAWA released a report that sets the stage for further research, by identifying three critical areas for development – sensor fusion, control algorithms, and communication and connectivity. This will be the starting point for its partnership with Google and the some of the goals for training its AI.

Rolls-Royce believes that the first of these ships with reduced crews and remote support will be in operation by 2020, and entirely unmanned oceangoing vessels could launch by 2035.
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The most significant benefits gained would be safety and efficiency. Human error, fatigue, in particular, is responsible for 75% to 96% of all marine accidents, according to a report published by insurance company Allianz. Rolls-Royce also estimates that autonomous shipping could reduce shipping costs by as much as 22%.

Wireless keyboards are the way to go but changing batteries or recharging your keyboard is a pain in the neck – even if you only have to do it once every month or two. What you might not know, however, is that there are wireless keyboards that never need to be recharged. Check out the Logitech K750 Wireless Solar Keyboard, which is available for both Windows PCs and for Mac computers. This awesome keyboard is recharged constantly by the light around you. It doesn’t even need sunlight – any light source will do.

Here are some highlights from the product page:

         •   Solar-powered keyboard: No battery hassles – any light source keeps your keyboard charged for at
              least three months in total darkness
         •   Only 1/3-inch thick: Ultra-thin design adds sleek style to your workspace
         •   Feel-good typing: Logitech-only concave key cap design for faster, quieter, more comfortable typing
        •   Powerful 2.4 GHz wireless: Enjoy a reliable connection using a tiny Logitech Unifying receiver that
​             stays in your computer

System Requirements-Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, OS X, or macOS. Light source from sunlight and/or indoor lighting.

The process of creating, tracking, verifying, and reporting on the cryptocurrency transactions using Bitcoin is called “mining.” The network of computers mining Bitcoins uses more electricity in a year than the whole of Ireland, according to statistics released as the price of a Bitcoin broke $17,400 for the first time last Monday.
According to Digiconomist the estimated power use of the bitcoin network, which is responsible for verifying transactions made with the cryptocurrency, is 30.14 Terawatt-hours (TWh) a year, which exceeds that of 19 European countries. At an ongoing power drain of 3.4GigaWatts, it means the network consumes five times more electricity than is produced by the largest wind farm in Europe, the London Array in the outer Thames Estuary, at 630MegaWatts.

At those levels of electricity consumption, each bitcoin transaction uses almost 300KWh of electricity – enough to boil around 36,000 kettles full of water. Although power consumption of other payment networks is harder to isolate, one of Visa’s two US data centers reportedly runs on about 2% of the power required by the Bitcoin network. Between them, those two data centers conduct around 200 million transactions a day; the bitcoin network handles fewer than 350,000.

The astronomical power draw is a facet of how the bitcoin network protects itself against fraud. With no centralized authority confirming transactions, Bitcoin is instead backed by “miners,” who put specialized computers to work churning through extremely power-intensive computing problems. Solving those issues both rewards the miner, handing them almost a quarter of a million dollars in Bitcoin, and verifies all transactions made in the last 10 minutes.

As the price of Bitcoin goes up, so does the value of the reward, meaning that more miners put more computers to the task of running the network. But since the price of bitcoin doesn’t necessarily rise in step with the number of transactions, that disconnect can mean the currency uses a significant amount of power per transaction in periods of high prices.
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In the last three months, the cryptocurrency continued to grow in its third significant boom in its history. Previous periods of sustained growth, in 2013 and 2014, each ended with substantial busts, leading commentators to label them, in hindsight, as speculative bubbles.

Do you use a laptop or tablet to take notes during school lectures or meetings? If so, you might want to reconsider pen and paper; there’s increasing evidence that using laptops during academic presentations decreases learning, which can result in lower grades, reports The New York Times.

To study this, researchers at Princeton University and the University of California asked a group of students to take notes at a lecture using pen and paper while another group used laptops. The experiment found that the students who used a computer did not understand the lecture as well as those who wrote their notes out by hand. The researchers hypothesized that this was because students who wrote notes by hand had to process what the lecturer was saying and, in effect, summarize what was being said to keep up with the lecture. Additionally, they found that laptop note takers had a “tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim,” which meant they were less likely to process information into their own words, thus preventing them from truly understanding what was being taught.

Another study by researchers at York University and McMaster University tested students by asking them to look up things on their laptop that were unrelated to their lecture, like cinema session times. Unsurprisingly, the distraction caused them to remember less of the lecture, and those sitting near them were adversely affected too.

Lastly, a study from the United States Military Academy tested students’ achievements in an economics class by comparing student performance based on whether laptops or tablets were restricted, unrestricted, or not permitted at all. The study found that the students who did not have access to a device performed significantly better than those who did. 
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Writing things by hand is becoming less common as gadgets and speech recognition software continue to replace pen and paper, but it’s long proven that handwriting improves motor skills, memory, and creativity. So even though note taking with a laptop might be faster, you might want to think about how much of any presentation you’re retaining.

The case that could transform privacy law in the digital era began with the armed robbery of a Radio Shack store in Detroit, a couple of weeks before Christmas in 2010. In the next three months, eight more stores in Michigan and Ohio were robbed at gunpoint.

The robbers took bags filled with smartphones. Their phones would help send them to prison.
This past week, the Supreme Court considered whether prosecutors violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches, by collecting vast amounts of data from cellphone companies showing the movements of the man they say organized most of the robberies.

Experts in privacy law state the case, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402, is a potential blockbuster.

The court’s decision, expected by June, will apply the Fourth Amendment, drafted in the 18th century, to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets, and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems. The court’s reasoning may also apply to email and text messages, internet searches, and bank and credit card records.

The case concerns Timothy Ivory Carpenter, who witnesses said had planned the robberies, supplied guns and served as a lookout, typically waiting in a stolen car across the street. “At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers and employees to the back, and ordered the employees to fill the robbers’ bags with new smartphones,” a court decision said, summarizing the evidence against him.

In addition to presenting testimony, prosecutors relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to prove their case. The documents showed that Mr. Carpenter’s phone had been nearby when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison.
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“If the court squarely recognizes what it’s been suggesting in recent cases, namely that we do have an expectation of privacy in our digital data and public movements and that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from tracking us door to door for weeks in public, that would be an occasion for dancing in the streets,” he said. “If the court holds that we don’t have an expectation of privacy in public except when there is some sort of physical trespass involved, that could be a huge setback for privacy.”