Rolls-Royce charts course for autonomous shipping

The company has secured the grant from Tekes, the Finnish funding agency for innovation, which it plans to invest in an R&D centre in Turku, Finland.

Engineers at the site will carry out development projects focusing on land-based control centres and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in remote and autonomous shipping.

There is still very little AI or machine learning used in the maritime industry, according to Sauli Eloranta, head of innovation and technology at Rolls-Royce Marine.

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BARCLAYS: Amazon is probably going to be one of the first ‘trillion-dollar’ companies (AMZN)

Amazon’s stock price has been on a tear over the last year, gaining 46%.

A Barclays equity research team led by Ross Sandler thinks that the party may just be getting started, initiating coverage of the stock with $1120 price target, or 29% upside.

In a flurry of notes released from their Internet & Media desk on March 29, Barclays picked Amazon as one of their favorites in the sector and made the case for the stock’s market cap to reach one trillion dollars.

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The Blockchain Will Do to the Financial System What the Internet Did to Media

Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet, in the 1990s, the mainstream press scoffed when Nicholas Negroponte predicted that most of us would soon be reading our news online rather than from a newspaper.

Fast forward two decades: Will we soon be seeing a similar impact from cryptocurrencies and blockchains? There are certainly many parallels. Like the internet, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are driven by advances in core technologies along with a new, open architecture — the Bitcoin blockchain. Like the internet, this technology is designed to be decentralized, with “layers,” where each layer is defined by an interoperable open protocol on top of which companies, as well as individuals, can build products and services. Like the internet, in the early stages of development there are many competing technologies, so it’s important to specify which blockchain you’re talking about. And, like the internet, blockchain technology is strongest when everyone is using the same network, so in the future we might all be talking about “the” blockchain.

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Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even richer

Should robots pay taxes?

It may sound strange, but a number of prominent people have been asking this question lately. As fears about the impact of automation grow, calls for a “robot tax” are gaining momentum. Earlier this month, the European parliament considered one for the EU. Benoît Hamon, the French Socialist party presidential candidate who is often described as his country’s Bernie Sanders, has put a robot tax in his platform. Even Bill Gates recently endorsed the idea.

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Dash Passes Litecoin and Monero to Claim Number 4 Cryptocurrency Status

In a major price surge, Dash has nearly doubled market cap over the last month, overtaking Litecoin and Monero to become the fourth most valued cryptocurrency.

This week one year ago, Dash was the #7 ranked cryptocurrency with a market cap of about $23 mln. This number grew steadily over the course of the year, finishing out the year with a market cap of $69 mln and maintained #7 ranking. Over the course of 2017 so far, however, Dash’s growth has significantly picked up steam, exceeding $100 mln over January. This month Dash has risen to a nearly $200 mln market cap, currently with a value of over $27 and 0.23 Bitcoin at present time.

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What if the internet stopped working for a day?

Jeff Hancock likes to give his Stanford University students weekend assignments that let them experience concepts discussed in class for themselves. Before 2008, he would sometimes challenge his students to stay off the internet for 48 hours and then discuss how it affected them. But when Hancock returned to work in 2009, after a year-long sabbatical, things had changed.

“When I tried to introduce the task, there was a class revolt,” says Hancock, who studies the psychological and social processes involved in online communication. “The students emphatically said the assignment was impossible and unfair.”

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Sewbo is getting closer to disrupting the sweatshop

Jon Zornow, the founder of Sewbo, made waves in September after announcing that he had built the first robot to sew a t-shirt without human intervention. Using a robot arm and an automatic sewing machine, Zornow took some carefully prepared material and ran it through a pre-programmed series of moves.

It worked. Out popped a t-shirt.

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Robots will replace over 250,000 government jobs — and that’s just the beginning

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Automation could replace 250,000 jobs in government over the next 10 to 15 years — with potentially one million more under threat. The UK’s public sector workforce stood at around 5.3 million in the middle of last year, and has been falling since 2009, when it stood at 6.4 million. But that could be slashed significantly if the public sector adopts a policy of automating predictable jobs, according to a report from thinktank Reform.

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How Japan can solve its huge sex problem

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It’s the kind of stat you might casually tell a friend at a bar: For the last six years, Japan has sold more adult diapers than baby diapers. But Japan’s fertility problems are far more grave than toilet-related trivia. Over the last decade, Japan has seen its elderly population swell, new family-planning stall, and its economy shrink because of persistently low spending. Economists are now calling the situation a “demographic time bomb,” and some Japanese researchers have even created a doomsday clock that ticks off the seconds until Japan’s population extinction.

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The future of American jobs lies in the tech industry

Rows of office workers working on computers with data streaming

When Donald Trump won the election, many in Silicon Valley were flummoxed: “How could a bigoted billionaire with no government experience and a twitchy Twitter trigger finger win the U.S. presidential election?” they asked themselves.

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Plans unveiled for world’s first ‘floating city’ in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

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A company is planning to build the world’s first floating city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The government of French Polynesia has signed an agreement with a US firm and they hope construction work will begin in 2019. The Seasteading Institute has spent the past five years trying to work out how to build “permanent, innovative communities floating at sea”.

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The patent bubble is ready to pop

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I’m certainly not going to win any popularity contests for writing this article.  The last thing anybody wants to talk about after a presidential election is a patent bubble.  After all, most of us took a nice stock market beat down during the recent housing bubble and mortgage crisis.

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