David Brin's AI talk at IBM (November 2016)

https://youtu.be/BlwsJpwg3e0

Still very interesting.

Human Brain genes in monkeys

Chinese scientists are putting human brain genes into monkeys and they the monkeys are smarter. Ethics? TiC (This is China!)

Empire of Bones by Terry Mixon

The writing and editing is not as strong as I prefer but the space opera themes are ok.  I plan to read a few more in the series, hoping the treacle tropes, style, and tone don't drown out the tech and story line.  3/5 stars.

Accelerated Mobile Pages and other predatory behaviors by the evil search giant (ESG)

There are a few, suppressed but strident rumblings by low-tech media companies trying to resist Google's new accelerated mobile pages (AMP) technology.  We, the end-users reading the AMP media pages, experience faster page load times.  However there may be some nefarious funny business enabling these experiences:

https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047

AMP aggressively pre-fetches everything you might possibly click on, burning the data in your data plan.

And Google is applying enormous, predatory pressures on media web sites to embrace their technology:

https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/

This latest phenomenon adds to the growing list of repressive, monopolistic practices the evil search giant (ESG) inflicts upon the web ecosystem:

http://listverse.com/2017/09/24/top-10-ways-google-does-evil/

I do not fault many of Google's efforts to move technology forward (e.g. Google's work on security, containerization, and services mesh).  In these cases, Google is applying dozens of great developers to pushing interoperable standards forward with a little less heavy-handed policy choice.

However, I do find Google's behaviors in the "Open Markets" story to be unethical.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/30/new-america-foundation-google-funding-firings

Shame on you, Google.  Please exercise some ethics and stop being so evil.

Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The opening scene and beginning were a little weak and I got worried the story and science would be bad but it got better and better, building to a very strong ending.  I really like the writing and shall explore more books by this author.  Very good, 4/5 stars.

Constitution by Nick Webb

Interesting story with too many contrivances, cardboard characters, silly melodrama, quite entertaining, not the best space opera around, 3/5 stars.

Delta-V by Daniel Suarez

Great adventure story with thrilling plot twists, interesting story line, fun characters, good celestial mechanics and science, a few too many contrived emergencies, bad treatment of AI system failures.  Engrossing, fun. 4/5 stars.

The Colonel by Peter Watts

I flew through this one in the flight from Seattle to San Jose. I wish the author would write more stories or books in this universe instead of his others. 4/5 stars.

Washington State takes top honors at the 2019 US News Ranking

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings

"Washington is a key exporter for the U.S., particularly for transportation equipment. Additionally, Washington is crucial to the nation's food and agriculture industry, generating 70 percent of the country's apples, and also leading in milk, potato and cattle production."

Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks, Nordstroms, sure.  Cattle?  Who knew?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) learns Origami

Those silly Harvard and Berkeley AI people have stumbled upon a cool method in AI. Augmenting extremely limited data sets with inexhaustible generated data from simple rules enables much better prediction.  This technique is broadly applicable to many areas of machine learning (ML) where we have insufficient labels.  Variations of this concept are applied in computer vision and robotics.  It's not clear if they will work with human behavior data but I shall endeavor to find out in my "day job."