Category Archives: Singularity

Flying cars are almost a byword for the misplaced optimism of technologists, but recent news suggests their future may be on slightly firmer footing. The industry has seen a major influx of capital and big automakers seem to be piling in.

What actually constitutes a flying car has changed many times over the decades since the cartoon, The Jetsons, introduced the idea to the popular imagination. Todays incarnation is known more formally as an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

As the name suggests, the vehicles run on battery power rather than aviation fuel, and theyre able to take off and land like a helicopter. Designs vary from what are essentially gigantic multi-rotor drones to small fixed-wing aircraft with rotors that can tilt up or down, allowing them to hover or fly horizontally (like an airplane).

Aerospace companies and startups have been working on the idea for a number of years, but recent news suggests it might be coming closer to fruition. Last Monday, major automakers Hyundai and GM said they are developing vehicles of their own and are bullish about the prospects of this new mode of transport.

And the week prior, British flying car maker Vertical Aerospace announced plans to go public in a deal that values the company at $2.2 billion. Vertical Aerospace also said it had received $4 billion worth of preorders, including from American Airlines and Virgin Atlantic.

The deal was the latest installment in a flood of capital into the sector, with competitors Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, and Lilium all recently announcing deals to go public too. Also joining them is Blade Urban Mobility, which currently operates heliports but plans to accommodate flying cars when they become available.

When exactly that will be is still uncertain, but there seems to be growing consensus that the second half of this decade might be a realistic prospect. Vertical is aiming to start deliveries by 2024. And the other startups, who already have impressive prototypes, are on a similar timeline.

Hyundais global chief operating officer, Jos Muoz, told attendees at Reuters Car of the Future conference that the company is targeting a 2025 rollout of an air taxi service, while GMs vice president of global innovation, Pamela Fletcher, went with a more cautious 2030 target. Theyre not the only automakers getting in on the act, with Toyota, Daimler, and Chinas Geely all developing vehicles alone or in partnership with startups.

Regulators also seem to be increasingly open to the idea.

In January, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it expects to certify the first eVTOLs later this year and have regulations around their operation in place by 2023. And last month the European Union Aviation Safety Agency said it expected air taxi services to be running by 2024 or 2025.

While it seems fairly settled that the earliest flying cars will be taxis rather than private vehicles, a major outstanding question is the extent to which they will be automated.

The majority of prototypes currently rely on a human to pilot them. But earlier this month Larry Pages air taxi startup Kitty Hawk announced it would buy drone maker 3D Robotics as it seeks to shift to a fully autonomous setup. The FAA recently created a new committee to draft a regulatory path for beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) autonomous drone flights. This would likely be a first step along the path to allowing unmanned passenger aircraft.

What seems more certain is that there will be winners and losers in the recent rush to corner the air mobility market. As Chris Bryant points out in Bloomberg, these companies still face a host of technological, regulatory, and social hurdles, and the huge amounts of money flooding into the sector may be hard to justify.

Regardless of which companies make it out the other side, its looking increasingly likely that air taxis will be a significant new player in urban transport by the end of the decade.

Image Credit: Joby Aviation

Originally posted here:

Why Flying Cars Could Be Here Within the Decade - Singularity Hub

CNME Editor Mark Forker spoke to Tamer Odeh, Regional Director at SentinelOne, Middle East, onsite at GISEC 2021, to find out how their patented AI technology is equipping businesses with the solutions required to deter, mitigate and stop ransomware attacks and why the end-point has become the first line ofdefencefor enterprises.

Over the last six months there has been a plethora of ransomware attacks from the high-profile SolarWinds hack to the vulnerability that was exposed in Microsoft Exchange and most recently the Colonial Pipeline attack in the United States.

Since conducting this interview with SentinelOne at GISEC, there has been another huge ransomware attack, this time on the worlds largest meat processing company JBS.

In a compelling interview, Odeh was candid about the severity of the ransomware problem on a global scale, but he highlighted how their Singularity XDR platform is helping enterprises to better prevent, detect and respond to ransomware attacks.

We have never seen so many ransomware attacks in such a short period of time that has impacted so many different industry verticals. There is nobody in the security ecosystem that can present a solution and say that this is the remedy to deter and prevent ransomware attacks. However, what distinguishes the XDR Singularity platform developed by SentinelOne, compared to other security vendors is our patented technology in leveraging AI. What that allows us to do is to stop ransomware attacks in their tracks. We can detect them at the very inception of the attack, and we can detect them in motion, and we have the capacity to stop it, mitigate it, and provide further analysis of the attack, said Odeh.

Odeh also added that their mission was to not only stop attacks from happening, but to educate their customers through the compilation of their intelligence reports to give them the knowledge to improve their security posture in the future.

SentinelOne has enjoyed strong growth over the last few quarters, and many IT analysts have credited their success as a direct result of the unique capabilities provided by its XDR Singularity platform which is empowering enterprises to bolster their security portfolio.

One of the key differentiators of the XDR Singularity platform against all the other market competition out there is that we utilise behavioural analytics through machine learning and AI to quickly detect an attack, or a malicious activity. Other market players have an element of the human factor, or a process in which the decision-making is delegated to an outside source, be it a cloud, or a managed detection and response service. However, what SentinelOne does is provide intelligence that is based at the agent level, so even if the end point, or the agent is in a remote location with no connectivity it can understand and analyse the attack and defend itself automatically, said Odeh.

The acceleration towards the cloud has undoubtedly been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but what has become evident is that many businesses are struggling to adapt to the demands of cloud transformation.

However, Odeh believes the pandemic has also resulted in a dramatic mindset shift from both CISOs and CIOs across the region, but said many businesses have overlooked their security strategy in order to facilitate their move to the cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic has applied a lot of pressure on CISOs and CIOs in relation to their cloud migration journeys towards digital transformation. The trend that we see in the Middle East is that we were very heavy on on-prem technology, and that was the most common architecture that we had. As a result, moving to the cloud was very steady, but also very slow, but the global health crisis and the need for digital transformation has accelerated that. There is a cost involved in this type of transformation, but unfortunately many businesses compensated their security offerings to raise the capital needed for migrating towards the cloud, said Odeh.

The regional director at SentinelOne also highlighted how their approach during the pandemic was very much customer-centric.

At SentinelOne, we said come and use our platform for FREE, and make sure that your environment is secure and dont worry about that, instead worry about the safety of your business. We approached certain industries, such as the healthcare and education sector and said to them let us help you build out your security roadmap and accelerate that through various means, whether it was through offering the solution at an affordable cost, or through our services, said Odeh.

In April 2020, Odeh had previously stressed the importance of CISOs reviewing and bolstering their end-point security policies, especially given the number of businesses that were adopting to remote working models. 12 months on he believes there is acceptance in the industry that now that the end-point is the first line of defense.

The dialogue around end-point protection has increased as has the consolidation of protection on the end-point. In the past significant investments were made into resources and technology being within the perimeter of the enterprise, but once we introduced working remotely the perimeter expanded and the vectors of attacks also expanded. Your average person now is working from home, and they are connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi connection. The perimeter has widened and the end-point has become your first line of defense towards your weakest link, which is us. We are the most vulnerable and susceptible to a phishing email and attackers are preying on this. However, the end-point is the one point that gives you visibility in terms of how the attacker is trying to penetrate and infiltrate than most of the other technologies that are around, said Odeh.

SentinelOne as aforementioned above have enjoyed strong growth, and Odeh declared that their mission was to continue that growth journey.

Our mission is to protect customers from breaches and the best way to do that is by getting closer to the customer. We have invested in channel programs to get closer to our customers across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. We also want to add to our team and increase the resources that we have both from a sales perspective and a support perspective. Its not just about breaching the technology, its also about the after-sales element, as we want to maintain a consistent experience to our customers. The region is witnessing an immense amount of growth, and we are very fortunate to be centralised in Dubai, and are very close to all our major markets, said Odeh.

Read more here:

SentinelOne driven to stop attacks in their tracks - Tahawul Tech

Embracing the full array of advanced digital technologies is crucial if offshore wind and other renewables are to cope in an ever more volatile and complex energy world, where forecasts are having to be repeatedly recalculated and mind boggling levels of growth are expected, experts told a Recharge event.

Tapping into the huge engineering and operational potential unlocked by advances in areas such as digital design, machine learning and artificial intelligence the tools of the fourth industrial revolution will act as a bridge for the clean-energy sectors as they make rapid adaptions to shifting market demands, the latest Recharge roundtable, on Digitalisation & the Future of Energy, heard.

When it comes to wind, we need to see how we can speed up innovation to keep track of the market changes we face, said Daniel Luecht, chief digital officer at turbine OEM giant Siemens Gamesa.

Luecht reflected on the early days of wind industry innovation which were geared around a market dominated by feed-in tariffs where the straightforward mission was to capture the maximum wind available at the site and push maximum annual production into the grid.

We didnt much care how much this matched demand, for example. Those days are over. All of a sudden spot market energy prices react on a 15-minute basis, meaning turbine-operators need to be equipped to closely configure their plants to the exact demands of the market and need sophisticated digital tools to help them, he said.

The need for wind to adopt a 21st century digital approach was stressed by Thomas Leurent, CEO of Akselos, an engineering pioneer that works with the likes of Shell on digital twinning of offshore wind assets.

Leurent said the offshore wind sector needs to mirror the approach of king solar, as PV has been dubbed, if it is to achieve the mind boggling goal set by the International Energy Agency (IEA) of installing 80GW annually by 2030, almost three times the global fleet in operation now.

Were using digital, but old digital. We cant do this with 1970s technologies.

Were using digital, but old digital. We cant do this with 1970s technologies, which is what the industry is doing today with engineering design.

Instead, the offshore wind sector should tap the potential of digitalisation to underpin a Moores Law-style push for continual, exponential improvement, said Leurent.

The role of digital technologies in coping with the increasing volatility of markets was underlined by Mari Haapala, digital lead at industrial technology giant ABB Motion as illustrated by the impact of the pandemic.

I think everyone can say they had to throw all their forecasting in the trash bin on how the market would develop [because of] the Covid crisis, Haapala said.

As well as dealing with the unexpected, digital tools can also act as a vehicle to take energy services to the next level and raise the speed of innovation, she told the roundtable moderated by Recharge editor-in-chief Darius Snieckus.

Ian Dinwoodie, head of advanced performance engineering at consultancy and service provider Natural Power, agreed that digitalisation can help renewable energy provide the additional services that will be required of it in future and take advantage of opportunities in areas such as dynamic pricing.

[Energy] is going to get more complicated. They key is to be able to react to that, said Dinwoodie, adding that digitalisation can also empower smaller players to act effectively in a market that has moved on from the old-fashioned way of someone in a control room turning knobs and dials.

Energy is going to get more complicated. They key is to be able to react to that.

Ana Trbovich, co-founder and chief operating officer at Grid Singularity, which is building open source, customised energy exchanges, told the Recharge event that digitalisation is needed to shift approaches to energy management that havent caught up with the facts of life today.

Trbovich said in a world where markets should be local, and bottom-up rather than top-down innovators in digitalisation are adding choices and using more optimally the resources we have.

A full replay of the digital roundtable is available here.

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'1970s tech and forecasts in the bin': why renewables need digitalisation more than ever | Recharge - Recharge

With so many old and rum ideas, we might conclude that Son is besotted more by the wrapping paper than the gift.

Whilst these are touted as transformational companies, no problem is being solved, no neglected asset is being utilised, and in truth, theres almost no technology involved either. And what novelty exists does so in a form where the ideas are very easily copied.

Sons latest market mover Klarna uncannily follows this pattern. The Swedish company enables buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) transactions (at zero interest, so long as punters pay up in time), earning revenue from the retailer and from interest on late payers. Extraordinarily, the Vision Funds backing has resulted in a $46bn valuation for Klarna. But its a service offering that can be easily cloned, and dozens are doing just that, including ClearPay and PayPal. In addition, people hate low cost credit (for others, not themselves), so regulators loom.

Now its emerged that Credit Suisse, once one of SoftBanks biggest lenders, has stopped lending to Son and has reviewed its relationship with Softbank, after regretting its exposure to Greensill and Katerra.

So far Softbank has emerged largely unscathed - but trouble looms. Bipartisan support for antitrust regulation is united by the suspicion that windfall profits for one of Sons unicorns may mean extorting other businesses.

But the greatest fear of all for his disciples is inflation.

This is one of the greatest valuation bubbles ever, says fund manager Ralph Jainz. Bubble tech valuations are built on DCF (Discounted Cash Flow) models, and rising levels of inflation are poisonous for them. What this means is that the promised transformation becomes more distant reaching to infinity.

Its pure mathematics, Jainz explains. Rising interest rates reduce the long-term value of high-growth companies when youre projecting out twenty or thirty years. Two Nobel Laureates, Robert Schiller and James Tobin, each point out how the market is wildly inflated; Tobins Q Ratio, a measure of how overvalued shares are with a mean average of 1, is touching 3 for the first time. Schillers PE ratio, another yardstick of froth, is higher than it was on Black Tuesday in 1929.

You will not see who is wearing trunks until the tide goes out says Jainz. Mr Son remains unrepentant, but the choice may be out of his hands.Son faced a grilling from unimpressed Softbank shareholders on Wednesday, who have seen a 21pc fall in the share price since March. With rate rises on the horizon, the moment of reckoning for Mr Singularity beckons.

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Inflation will burst this tech bubble and good riddance to its New Age cranks - Telegraph.co.uk

by: Austria MasimJun 24, 2021

Poni is expanding the ranks of Sable Valleys roster with her igniting rework ofDeadcrows Fallout. The stimulating new remix comes after the labels Audius-hosted remix competition in late April,where RL Grime named Altare as the winner with a remix of REMNANT.exes track Singularity.

Ponis energetic, well-fueled rework of Fallout hauls in inspiration from multiple electronic sub-genres of as the Canadian producer combines house, trap, and mid-tempo stylings while maintaining the acidic rush of the original. Sable Valleys latest two offerings point toward a promising direction of the imprint, and while the label has yet to reveal the last winning revision ofDeadcrows THERA, in the meantime, fans can devour a tasty new remix from Poni below.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQG7r1EAMGa/

Featured image: Poni/Facebook

Tags: deadcrow, Fallout, poni, remix, Trap, wave

Categories: Music

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Poni is the latest to join Sable Valley's roster with engulfing remix of Deadcrow's 'Fallout' - Dancing Astronaut

Renowned digital anthropologist and futurist Brian Solis will participate in the next edition of the 21st Century Business Forum, presented by BizTimes Media. Click here to register.

This webcast, hosted by best-selling author Jon Gordon, will broadcast from 11 a.m. to 11:40 a.m. on Wednesday, July14. Registration is free.

Brian is the global innovation evangelist at Salesforce and an eight-time bestselling author and international keynote speaker. Forbes has called him one of the more creative and brilliant business minds of our time, ZDNet characterized him as one of the 21st century business worlds leading thinkers and Read/Write just named him a Top Futurist Speaker.

Over the past 20 years, Stolis has dedicated his work to understanding the impact of Digital Darwinism on businesses, markets and society. His research explores innovation, digital transformation, experience design, the cognitive enterprise, and technologys effects on human behavior. He has a unique gift of humanizing these trends to make change and innovation purposeful and inspiring to help leaders reimagine the future.

His insights on the state and future of digital trends have made him a go-to resource among media and market experts. He has published over 60 research papers and also actively shares his work in industry-leading publications including Forbes, ZDNet, CIO, eWeek, Fast Company, Adweek and Singularity University.

The 21st Century Business Forum debuted in 2021, featuring a lineup of successful top executives, experts and global thought leaders to share ideas and insights as business executives, entrepreneurs, owners and managers navigate the new year ahead. It airs on the second Wednesday of each month, with Gordon interviewing guests in a Q&A format.

The 21st Century Business Forum is presented by BizTimes Media and is sponsored by Johnson Financial Group. Registration is free. Click here to register.

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Digital anthropologist and futurist will share how your company can thrive in a digital economy, on next episode of 21st Century Business Forum -...

As inconceivable as it still sounds, the wheels have been set in motion for humans to one day reach and colonize Mars. Theres already a detailed design for the first Martian city, SpaceX is building its first offshore spaceport to one day launch Starships to Mars (among other missions), and NASA recently flew a helicopter on Mars. But there are a few big pieces of the puzzle still missing, including the answer to one crucial question: after we get humans to Mars, how will we ensure that our species is able to continue there? In other words, we dont yet know whether humans can reproduce in space.

A study by Japanese researchers just brought us a small step closer to answering some of these questions. The scientists sent freeze-dried mouse sperm to the International Space Station (ISS), where it stayed for varying lengths of timefrom nine months up to five years and ten monthsbefore being brought back to Earth and used to impregnate female mice. The team published their results last week in the journal Science Advances.

Sending sperm to the ISS seems like a bizarre idea. What could this tell us about humans potential to reproduce in space, especially since the sperm essentially took an extended field trip then came back, rather than being turned into babies off-Earth?

The team mainly wanted to study the impact of space radiation on DNA and fertility. Radiation can cause damage to somatic cells as well as germline cells, and in space theres more potential for harm from solar particle events, where the sun sends out high-charge, high-energy particles. These are called HZE particles, and theyre potent enough to break the interwoven strands of DNAs double helix. Galactic cosmic rays coming from outside the solar system can cause harm, too.

A species can certainly survive with some genetic mutations, but as more of them accumulate and are passed on to new generations, and the DNA of those generations undergoes additional mutations, its not long before youre dealing with an intractable set of problemsor, as the team put it in their paper, If radiation were continuously irradiated into the body of a species and several mutations accumulated in germ cells over a long period of time, then the species would become a different species.

By storing the sperm on the ISS, then, the team was able to observe its behavior and its resilience to space radiation, namely whether its DNA was damaged.

Out of 66 male mice, the scientists took sperm samples from the 12 that were healthiest and had the most genetic diversity. They divided the sperm into six different boxes, sending three to space and keeping three on Earth as a control group. The boxes sent to space were brought back nine months later, two years and nine months later, and five years and ten months later, respectively (this final timespan, by the way, is the longest that samples have ever been held on the ISS for biological research).

The team tested the repatriated sperm and the embryos created with them for things like abnormal chromosome segregation, cytoplasmic damage, cell number of blastocysts, and apoptosis rate. They found that the time the sperm spent in space didnt cause damage to their DNA.

The space sperm and the control group sperm were both used to impregnate female mice via IVF, and all the mouse pups were born healthy, with no significant differences between them. Not only that, the team bred an additional generation to check the health of those pups, too, and found no abnormalities. The space radiation did not affect sperm DNA or fertility after preservation on ISS, and many genetically normal offspring were obtained without reducing the success rate compared to the ground-preserved control, they wrote.

While these results are promising, theyre really just the beginning of our research on reproducing in space, and there are a few important caveats.

For starters, the International Space Station is only about 250 miles from Earth, and its partially shielded from space radiation by Earths magnetic field. There are a lot more harmful particles flying around as you get farther away, and radiation on Mars is a major concern for human health in general, before even considering its impact on reproduction.

In addition, while five years and ten months is a long time in terms of biological research done in space, its not long relative to an average human lifespan; whos to say what will happen to germline cells inside human bodies when theyre in space for 10 or 20 years, or when theyre born in space? And radiation isnt the only wild card up theretheres also microgravity (as if being pregnant and giving birth with gravitys help wasnt already hard enough).

One piece of good news? The study found that freeze-drying sperm actually gives the sperms nucleus a higher tolerance for radiation as compared to fresh sperm. This could be relevant for sending samples of germline cells to space and preserving or utilizing them there, perhaps to ensure high genetic diversity for future colonies. A project called the Lunar Ark aims to store DNA on the moon as a modern global insurance policy.

Since were still decades away from human reproduction actually happening off Earth, whats next in terms of relevant research? The team notes that NASA is planning to launch a multi-purpose outpost to orbit the moon as part of its Artemis program, and theyre hoping to perform similar research with freeze-dried sperm there to study the effects of radiation deeper in space. These discoveries are essential and important for mankind to progress into the space age, they wrote.

Image Credit: Teruhiko Wakayama/University of Yamanashi

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These Mice Were Born From Sperm That Spent Almost 6 Years in Space - Singularity Hub

When it comes to science fiction, I have two favorite genres: Time Travel and Artificial Intelligence. Oddly, I actually missed this show when looking over what to watch for the spring anime season. Either I accidentally glossed over it or it was added to the lineup after I had made my choices on what to watch. Had I spied it, I would have watched it from week one; however, I ended up having to marathon the first ten episodes because thats how deep into the show it had gotten before I realized it was a thing.

Am I glad that I took the time to get caught up and finish this series?

Lets go!

A.I.s have gone insane and are in the process of destroying mankind. An unknown scientist sends a program 100 years into the past to convince one of the worlds first A.I.s, Diva, to take part in what is called the Singularity Project a plan to rewrite history over the course of the next hundred years and to prevent judgment day.

This program takes the form of an A.I. that calls itself Matsumoto. It is a very fast-talking and snarky program but it eventually gets through to Diva and convinces her that she should embark on this journey to rewrite the future. From here, Diva (also known as Vivy due to a nickname a young girl named Momoka gave her) moves from point to point in time, only waking up when she is needed. Matsumoto has already bookmarked every major event for the next 100 years that led to the A.I.s going insane.

One by one, Matsumoto and Vivy tackle these events; however, the results never seem to matter. They begin to wonder if the future can be changed; however, after enough events transpire, the results of the Singularity Project are revealed.

One of the major hooks of this story is the fact that Diva/Vivys main mission as an A.I. is to sing for humans. She is programmed to entertain all humans through song which makes her question why she was chosen for this project and why The Archive, a huge tower in the middle of the city that links all A.I.s to its database, hasnt done anything to thwart her attempts at rewriting history even though The Archive is behind it all. (I dont consider that a spoiler as its pretty obvious from the start like painfully obvious.)

The whole music thing was something I didnt really expect but aside from the occasional reference to it, the show mainly focuses on stopping a bleak and dismal future all while questioning whether or not humans and A.I.s can co-exist. This is done through a rogue faction named Toak that believes all A.I.s should be eradicated. Over the years and through leadership changes, their mission changes as well. What once was a group that wanted to hunt down and destroy A.I.s now wants to see them co-exist.

Its things like these that show that no matter how much The Archive tries to prevent it, the future can and has changed. All of this makes for a compelling story that sci-fi fans are sure to love!

The thing about Vivy Flourite Eyes Song is that there are a lot of characters but there isnt a lot of them at the same time. The show heavily focuses on Vivy and Matsumoto. In the later episodes we get some characters like Osamu and Elizabeth which play some vital roles, and then we end up with small characters like Momoka and Ophelia which dont stick around long but they do play their parts. For the sake of focusing on the main story and not really spoiling the sub-stories told, I will just focus on the major characters.

Vivy/Diva

As mentioned in the story section, she is an A.I. that is programmed to sing and entertain humans through her music. She was chosen by an unknown scientist (later revealed in the back half of the series) to take part in the Singularity Project and rewrite history.

For an A.I., Vivy is very self-aware and seems to be able to make her own decisions. Despite being chosen for this project, she doesnt know how to fight that is until Matsumoto gives her a combat program Matrix-style. Suddenly, just like Neo, she knows Kung-Fu! When shes not rewriting history, she is carrying out her main mission of providing entertainment. Her personality seems very righteous towards the end but, in the beginning, she was very skeptical, thinking that she shouldnt deviate from her mission.

The fact that she decides to deviate of her own free will shows just how special of an A.I. she truly is and its pretty clear as to why this unknown scientist chose her for the job. As a main character, she excels in almost every fact. She makes you feel a connection to her, her doubts are very justified, and her actions are heroic. In the final episode, you even get to experience the same pain she does which completes that connection to the character. I believe she is very well-balanced one of the better main characters Ive seen in a while. There are so many sides to her that she feels anything but one-dimensional which is something good main characters need.

Matsumoto

Oh boy, where do I begin with this little spitfire? Matsumoto is an acquired taste and while he does mellow out towards the end of the show, he can be a bit annoying and unbearable in the beginning. Youd think that if you were an A.I. that was created to be sent back in time to help prevent the destruction of the human race, you wouldnt be some snarky, fast-talking, pile of code that berates your every action questions your every judgment, and goes out of its way to play the bad cop role. Its not exactly the best way to convince someone to save the world but, somehow, his persistence paid off and he got Vivy to come around.

The more the two of them work together, you can tell that Matsumoto is developing a certain level of respect for her. Because of the data he has, everything he does, as annoying as it is, is calculated and for a reason. There are times where you might even question his true motives but the thing is, his true motives are very black and white: save the planet. There is no mystery to Matsumoto but the way he acts and behaves, it constantly makes you question whether or not there is something more than meets the eye with him.

By the end of the show, hes still a bit snarky but youve gotten used to him. Youve even come to understand and appreciate him. Heck, you might even be thankful that he came along for the ride. As a secondary main character, Matsumoto was interesting to say the least but I will say that if you plan on watching this show tough it out with him. He will make you want to punch your monitor for the first few episodes but after a while, youll be wondering where you can buy your very own Matsumoto cube (or stuffed bear)!

WIT Studio handled the art and animation this time and all I have to say is THANK GOD THIS DOESNT LOOK LIKE ATTACK ON TITAN! I swear, between Attack on Titan, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, and Vinland Saga, I was starting to think WIT Studio had devolved into a single, solitary art style.

Vivy Flourite Eyes Song proves that they can do something different and still have it look good. The backgrounds that paint the picture of a futuristic setting are very well-done, the designs are really creative, and even the CG seems to all fit into place.

I loved the character designs for the androids and the symbols on their necks going from white to blue to red in times of stress reminded me a lot of the game Detroit: Become Human. Makes me wonder if thats where they drew some inspiration from? Either way, there were a ton of hits here on the art side and only a couple of misses. One of which was that really awkward run animation they gave Vivy when she was jumping off the rooftop at the beginning of the series. The fact that they replayed that a few times throughout the show made me cringe.

As far as sound goes, I cant really say that the OST was impressive. Nothing really stuck out. A lot of it was really just background noise and pretty forgettable. The insert song in the final episode was pretty good and the show did cycle through a few openings until (if I recall) episode three where they stuck with one for the remainder of the series.

The opening, Sing My Pleasure falls into the same problems a lot of Japanese anime opens experience. They hook you with a good opening riff, the first verse sounds cool and engaging, and then the chorus hits and it devolves into generic J-pop rock. I absolutely hate that. You get this nice serious feel with the verse and it just jumps into a more happy and upbeat chorus that just ruins the experience. Some people may like the song but I didnt care for it because of that.

I wouldnt go and say Vivy Flourite Eyes Song is as good as Steins;Gate but I will say that for a show that mixes artificial intelligence and time travel, it did a pretty banger job. The two main characters hold your attention and the plethora of side characters that Vivy meets on her 100-year journey to save the world all impact the story and Vivy in one form or another.

One of the things that the show does that might be a little offputting (at least in the beginning) is that it uses a lot of jump cuts that take you to a completely different scenario, leaving you to question just what the hell happened.

For example, Vivy and Matsumoto are having a conversation. The very next second, Matsumoto is in a giant piece of construction equipment where he bitch-slaps Vivy into a wall and then a plane in the sky explodes. Very, very random; however, if you stick with it, the show will explain just what in the name of Gods green Earth is going on. Still, those jump cuts can be a bit jarring and Im quite happy that they cut that stuff out in the back half of the show.

With interesting and relatable characters, great art and animation, and a thrilling story, Vivy Flourite Eyes Song should be on your To Watch list. Even if you just want a good sci-fi show to indulge in, I dont believe you will find a bad choice here.

If you enjoyed this review, consider following me on Twitter @JJPiedraOELN

Until next time,

Ja ne!

Vivy - Flourite Eye's Song

Summary

Vivy Flourite Eyes Song tells an interesting and engaging tale of humans trying to co-exist with artificial intelligence only to see their world go up in smoke. While already a sci-fi show, it goes deeper by delving into time travel that takes our well-developed and interesting main characters on a journey to prevent an apocalyptic future.

Pros

Cons

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Anime Review: Vivy Flourite Eyes Song - The Outerhaven

In the world of physics, a singularity is a concept that shifts the laws of physics as we know them. The theories on singularity came about when people first discovered black holes. The unusual nature of black holes has made scientists ask the question - what lies beyond?

Singularity, in this context, serves as a theoretical framework to explain the Big Bang, and gravity becomes the focus of the exploration.

Physicists have proposed the idea of the so-called gravitational singularity. From this type of standpoint, a gravitational singularity is an occurrence or an object where common laws of physics do not work. This type of singularity is a specific point in space-time, a construct that views the notions of time and space like they are almost glued together.

This gravitational singularity is a hard one to measure, at least in a traditional sense of the word. In fact, a space-time singularity becomes virtually independent of the coordinate system, or space, where it is observed. The data that is measured becomes, in a way, infinite. Because of this, a singularity creates a system where time and space no longer affect each other and practically become one thing. That is why the phrase space-time is so essential because the two entities stop having self-governing properties.

It does not come as a shock, how Albert Einstein, arguably one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, is the person responsible for this hard-grasping concept. After Einstein came out with his Theory of General Relativity, it was possible to discuss singularities. It could be said that the black holes themselves were, in a way, predicted by Einstein and that he created a theoretical frame from where scientists could start to unveil the mysteries that lie beyond the event horizon.

The theory of how black holes, and therefore singularities, are possible, is not that hard to conceptualize. When a particular star becomes to approach a certain point of its mass, it creates a force of gravity that is so strong that the star collapses into itself. This breaking point is called the Chandrasekhar limit. This limit is exactly 1,39 solar masses, which means mass that is 1,39 times bigger than the mass of our own Sun. When a star collapses, nothing, not even light, can escape it. When that happens, we are talking about something called the event horizon.

There are two distinct types of singularities that exist if the event horizon covers them. The first one is known as Curvature singularity. It got its name because of what happens inside the black hole. At the very center, a black hole holds up enormous amounts of mass. Because of this, gravity becomes infinite, which leads to the, also infinite, curving of space-time.

The other type that goes by Conical singularity happens when the singularity reaches a point where all the variables are finite. In this scenario, the space-time is not infinite, but it looks more like a cone, with the Conical singularity at its very top.

Another type of singularity is the one that does not depend on it being covered up by the event horizon. In this case, we are talking about Naked singularity. The Naked singularity does not stay hidden behind the event horizon. In theory, this type of singularity existed before the Big Bang.

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What Is A Singularity? - WorldAtlas

Singularity

Extreme Mobility of Compute

Singularity containers let users run applications in a Linux environment of their choosing.

Possible uses for Singularity on Biowulf:

Web sites

Additional Learning Resources

Example definition files written by the NIH HPC staff

These definition files can all be found on GitHub, and the containers built from them are hosted on Singularity hub.

Additionally, a large number of staff maintained definition files and associated helper scripts can be found at this GitHub repo. These are files that staff members use to install containerized apps on the NIH HPC systems.

Please Note: Singularity gives you the ability to install and run applications in your own Linux environment with your own customized software stack. With this ability comes the added responsibility of managing your own Linux environment. While the NIH HPC staff can provide guidance on how to create and use singularity containers, we do not have the resources to manage containers for individual users. If you decide to use Singularity, it is your responsibility to build and manage your own containers.

Creating Singularity containers

To use Singularity on Biowulf, you either need to create your own Singularity container, or use one created by someone else. You have several options to build Singularity containers:

You can find information about installing Singularity on your Linux build system here for 2.x and here for the current 3.x series.

In addition to your own Linux environment, you will also need a definition file to build a Singularity container from scratch. You can find some simple definition files for a variety of Linux distributions in the /example directory of the source code. You can also find a small list of definition files containing popular applications at the top of this page.Detailed documentation about building Singularity container images is available at the Singularity website.

Troubleshooting containers that hang when they run out of memory

A few containers have caused issues on Biowulf by triggering a kernel level bug described in detail here and here. These include fmriprep and nanodisco. The problems follow a predictable pattern:

Binding external directories

Binding a directory to your Singularity container allows you to access files in a host system directory from within your container. By default, Singularity will bind your $HOME directory (along with a few other directories such as /tmp and /dev). You can also bind other directories into your Singularity container yourself.The process is described in detail in the Singularity documentation.

While $HOME is bound to the container by default, there are several filesystems on the NIH HPC systems that you may also want to include.Furthermore, if you are running a job and have allocated local scratch space, you might like to bind mount your lscratch directory to /tmp in the container.

The following command opens a shell in a container while bind-mounting your data directory, /fdb, /scratch, and /lscratch into the same path inside the containerIf you have access to shared data directories, you'll want to add them to the list as well (for example, /data/$USER,/data/mygroup1,/data/mygroup2,/fdb,...).

NIH HPC Staff recommendations for bind mounts on Biowulf

When building containers for use on Biowulf, there are two steps you should take to ensure that users of the container can read and write data to all normal directories. These are the same steps that NIH HPC staff take when containerizing applications for general use.

Step 1. Add directories and symlinks at build time

Data directories hosted on the GPFS file system rely on a series of symbolic links. Singularity can't follow these symlinks if they don't exist within the container, so you need to create them at build time. Other data directories can be automatically created within the container by recent versions of Singularity, but it's still a good idea to create them.

Include the following lines in the %post section of your definition file.

Step 2. Set the --bind option or the SINGULARITY_BIND variable appropriately at run time

Use the following option/argument pair when you run your container.

Singularity as an Installation Medium: faking a native installation

One use case of Singularity is to transparently use software in a container as through it were directly installed on the host system.To accomplish this on our systems, you need to be aware of the shared filesystem locations and bind mount the corresponding directories inside the container, which is more complicated than it seems because we use symbolic links to refer to some of our network storage systems.As a result, you will need to specify some directories in addition to the ones you use directly to ensure that the symbolic link destinations are also bound into the container.

If you wanted to take advantage of a Debian package this way and use it to install software into your home directory, for example samtools and bcftools, you would use a definition file, Singularity, with these contents:

After finalizing the definition file, you can proceed to build the container (of course, on a system where you have sudo or root access):

You can then set up your installation prefix (here, it's $HOME/opt/hts) as follows, making use of symbolic links and a wrapper script:

So if you have added the installation prefix $HOME/opt/hts/bin to your PATH, then calling samtools or bcftools will run those programs from within your container.And because we have arranged to bind mount all the necessary filesystems into the container, the path names you provide for input and output into the programs will be available to the container in the same way.

Interactive Singularity containers

Singularity cannot be run on the Biowulf login node.

To run a Singularity container image on Biowulf interactively, you need to allocate an interactive session, and load the Singularity module. In this sample session (user input in bold), an Ubuntu 16.04 Singularity container is downloaded and run from Docker Hub. If you want to run a local Singularity container instead of downloading one, just replace the DockerHub URL with the path to your container image file.

Expand the tab below to view a demo of interactive Singularity usage.

Singularity interactive container demo

Singularity containers in batch

In this example, singularity will be used to run a TensorFlow example in an Ubuntu 16.04 container. (User input in bold).

First, create a container image on a machine where you have root privileges. These commands were run on a Google Cloud VM instance running an Ubuntu 16.04 image, and the Singularity container was created using this definition file that includes a TensorFlow installation.

Next, copy the TensorFlow script that you want to run into your home directory, or another directory that will be visible from within the container at runtime. (See 'binding external directories' above). In this case, this example script from the TensorFlow website was copied to /home/$USER, and the container was moved to the user's data directory

Then ssh to Biowulf and write a batch script to run the singularity command similar to this:

Submit the job like so:

After the job finishes executing you should see the following output in the slurm*.out file.

Expand the tab below to watch a quick demo of Singularity in batch mode.

Singularity containers in batch demo

Singularity containers on GPU nodes

With the release of Singularity v2.3 it is no longer necessary to install NVIDIA drivers into your Singularity container to access the GPU on a host node. If you still want the deprecated gpu4singularity script that was used to install NVIDIA drivers within containers for use on our GPU nodes you can find it on GitHub.

Now, you can simply use the --nv option to grant your containers GPU support at runtime. Consider the following example in which we will download some TensorFlow models to the user's home directory and then run the latest TensorFlow container from DockerHub to train a model on the MNIST handwritten digit data set using a GPU node.

Expand the tab below to see a demo of installing and using GPU support in a Singularity container.

Using the GPU demo

Using Docker containers with Singularity

Singularity can import, bootstrap, and even run Docker images directly from Docker Hub. For instance, the following commands will start an Ubuntu container running on a compute node with no need for a definition file or container image!And, of course, we remember to set SINGULARITY_BINDPATH appropriately to be able to access all our files.

In this example, we will create a Singularity container image starting from the official continuumio miniconda container on Docker Hub. Then we'll install a number of RNASeq tools. This would allow us to write a pipelinewith, for example, Snakemake and distribute it along with theimage to create an easily shared, reproducible workflow. This definition file also installs a runscript enabling us to treat our container like an executable.

Assuming this file is called rnaseq.def, we can create a Singularity container called rnaseq on our build system with the following commands:

This image contains miniconda and our rnaseq tools and can be called directly as an executable like so:

After copying the image to the NIH HPC systems, allocate an sinteractivesession and test it there

This could be used with a Snakemake file like this

Expand the tab below to see an example of creating a Singularity container to be used as an executable from a Docker image on DockerHub.

Singularity with Docker demo

Follow this link:

Singularity - NIH HPC Systems