Category Archives: Transhuman News

Jenna Sutela - #39;New Degrees of Freedom #39;
I live on earth at present and I don #39;t know what I am#seapunk #slimepunk #icepunk This video is part of Act 3 of Jenna Sutela #39;s ongoing project #39;New Degrees of Freedom. #39; ...

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Jenna Sutela - 'New Degrees of Freedom' - Video

Two families and a bicyclist meet with combustible results in Human Capital, a sharp, ambitiously staged drama about life in modern, post-Berlusconi Italy. Everything is collapsing, says one character after financial forecasts prove disastrously incorrect. That collapse, director Paolo Virzi demonstrates, is not just monetary, but personal, emotional and even physical.

Like recent Italian cinema successes The Great Beauty and Reality, Virzis film is focused on the severe clash between the haves, the have-nots, and those stuck in the middle, aching to get ahead.

Dino Ossola is in the latter category, a likable if slightly buffoonish sort whose daughter Serena is dating the son of a wealthy hedge fund kingpin. Dino (played by Fabrizio Bentivoglio who looks like a cross between Eric Roberts and Bob Seger) sees an opportunity to get in with Giovanni Bernaschi (Fabrizio Gifuni). Giovanni can tell: You want to buy into our fund, he says with the air of a man who is used to such requests.

It is quickly clear that Dino is in over his head, but bigger problems develop. When a waiter on his bicycle is struck by a passing SUV on the night before Christmas Eve, Dinos daughter and Giovannis son are suspects.

This news arrives at a particularly bad time for Carla Bernaschi (the wondrous, wounded Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a seemingly bored wife and mother attempting to save a small theater until her husband announces that he must sell it.

Human Capital buzzes along nicely for the first hour, but makes a crucial error in turning its focus to Serena. It is not the fault of actress Matilde Gioli that Serena is so dull we can blame director and co-writer Virzi but no matter who is responsible, the Serena section causes the film to screech to a halt.

Placement also is an issue. The stories of Dino and Carla are so involving that perhaps whoever followed would seem rote by comparison. But Serenas tale, and the love story at its center, seems particularly weak. Also rather pedestrian is the final explanation of who is responsible for causing the accident.

Yet for the most part, Human Capital is compelling cinema. And while Italys submission to the Academy Awards failed to secure a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, it is a smarter, more ambitious production than most adult fare being burped out in Hollywood.

Virzi is known for his Italian comedies, but Human Capital is a dark, somber piece. Except for a few issues (sorry, Serena), he has created a unique, timely drama. And 50 Shades of Grey devotees should note that Virzi also stages one of the more erotic love scenes in recent memory.

The cast is uniformly strong, but it is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi who truly impresses. Her Carla is a vulnerable woman stuck in a powerless position, and every moment she is on screen is riveting.

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Human Capital lacks the character focus to take it from good to great

Editors note: Bo Lu is the founder of FutureAdvisor.

Shane Leonard recently wrote a doomsday post on this site about robo advisors, whose rapid growth has made the behemoths of finance take notice.

Now that robo advisorshave shown theres a market for low-cost, online investment management, Leonard predicts that the industrys incumbents will copy robos technology and offer similar services at little to no cost, essentially wiping out their nascent rivals.

While that has happened in sectors like online banking, a close look at wealth management shows Leonard is wrong for three reasons: incumbents are slow to start because digital financial advice cannibalizes their existing businesses; they face deep conflicts of interest as advisors; and not enough human experts exist for them to serve middle-class families, where robos dominate.

Leonard cites two examples: One is Charles Schwab, the discount broker and asset custodian, which said last July that it would offer online investment management for free sometime this year. Another example is Vanguard, which came out with its Personal Advisor Service last year, and plans to make human financial advisors available for inexpensive webcam consultations.

Schwab and Vanguard are both great companies, but several structural issues prevent them from competing effectively.

Lets take Schwab: It mooted its free robo-advisory service in July. Three months later, it formally announced the same service. Seven months later, no service.

Every day that Schwab doesnt launch demonstrates the disadvantage large companies have competing against startups in the short-term. Its not the product or engineering ability that slows them down, but the dissonance within an organization acting against its own interests.

Creating a great robo-advisory service undercuts human advisors. That puts incumbents like Schwab at odds with the human advisors who custody assets with them (if those advisors leave, Schwab loses money). So incumbents must manage an internal conflict, and Schwabs strategy will need all the careful attention of their very smart CEO, Walt Bettinger. Theyre walking a very fine line.

In the short run, Schwab is trying to sidestep the conflict by announcing direct-to-consumer robo advice and a re-brandable version for human advisors. That could work. Early disruptive products are always worse than the incumbents by some measures. But as the disruptive product improves and closes the gap between low-priced robo advice and human solutions, a company providing both will be more and more at odds with itself.

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Rumors Of Robo Advisors Deaths Are Greatly Exaggerated

Photo: Sam Gustin/WIRED

Companies are using IBM Watson to grow and transform their businesses in huge ways that are making a lot of professionals nervous. Instead of writing it off as another new supercomputer, lets take a look at what actually makes Watson unique. Watson is a cognitive technology that processes information much more like a smart human than a smart computer. Rather than thinking humans will be replaced by a computer, you should realize that this is, in fact, a huge opportunity.

In 2011, you may recall, Watson summarily bested its human competitors onJeopardy.It was able to accomplish that because it doesnt just use conventional computing; it also combines three additional capabilities: natural language processing, hypothesis generation and evaluation, and dynamic learning. No other technology on the market today possesses these combined capabilities. Its this synergy that has the potential to make Watson your businesss new best friend.

Unlike typical computers, Watson can unlock the vast world of unstructured data that makes up as much as 80 percent of existing information today. Watson knows that all data is not created equal. Its able to distinguish between different kinds of information. It culls relevant data from disparate sources, and it creates hypotheses and continually tests them in order to narrow in on the most reliable and accurate results. Because Watson can read, analyze, and learn from natural language, just as humans can, it can make the sorts of informed, context-specific decisions we would expect from a person, as opposed to a search engine.

Such as what to cook for dinner? Yes, in fact, when Bon Apptit invited Watson to plumb the magazines database of some 9000 recipes, Watson effectively taught itself how to cook. Once it understood the principles of taste and cuisine style, as well as the intricate mechanics of flavor combinations it was able to generate new, creative dishes. And since Watson is capable of dynamic learning, it literally gets smarter by tracking feedback from its users and learning from both failures and successes.

IBM is betting big on Watsons ability to transform the world of business. It recently opened a $1 billion dollar Watson Headquarters in New York to provide support for entrepreneurs and developers interested in the technology. Were beginning to see the tech applied to the fields of education, retail, and medicine. If the success of this rollout indicates anything, its that Watson is going to be here for a very long time, and if you think your field is somehow immune to disruption from Watson, its time to wake up.

Imagine if your employees and customers had the ability to receive help from the most knowledgeable expert in your field at a moments notice. You may begin to understand the implications of Watson as a potent disruptive technology and why its currently poised to revolutionize a huge array of industries.

A majority of online shoppers dont end up buying because, without a great sales associate, they lack confidence in their selection. To solve this problem, retail clothing and supply company, The North Face, is now using an app developed by Fluid Inc., which draws on Watson technology to provide customers with an infinitely patient and expert personal salesperson who can intuitively and conversationally answer questions like What do I need for a two-week hiking trip in the mountains?

This retail expertise extends into the realms of travel, banking, real estate, and finance. Watson-based technologies are able to replace many of the current services of human travel agents, bank officers, real estate agents, and financial advisors by drawing upon comprehensive knowledge of existing information to provide detailed answers to questions traditionally posed only to fellow humans, such as: Given our interests, whats a low-key and romantic beach I could travel to with my wife this summer? Given my age and goals, how should I diversify my retirement portfolio? and Given our family dynamics and income, which neighborhood in my city offers both great schools and affordable homes?

Even more disruptive is the way Watson is already altering the medical industry. Imagine your ideal human doctor: you know, the one with the top-notch education and impeccable track record who makes it his mission to keep up with the very latest research. As Watson takes over the role of an expert diagnosing diseases and prescribing the most cost effective treatment, the human doctors role will change to focus on what humans do best.

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What Can Watson Do for Your Company?

John Green takes issue with a photographic record of colonialism and imperialism

Human Rights, Human Wrongs at The Photographers Gallery, London W1

3/5

Human Rights, Human Wrongs, with more than 200 press prints drawn from the prestigious Black Star collection of 20th-century photo-reportage, is a whirlwind tour through the post-war history of colonialism and imperialism.

According to its curator Mark Sealy, its guiding principle is Article Six of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in mounting this exhibition, he seeks to question what the human right to recognition actually means and to make audiences consider how the recognition of such rights is generated and controlled, particularly in terms of image production and circulation.

The images on display are culled from news reportage snapshots taken for the specific purpose of documenting events for the print media and they are not, in the first instance, aesthetic or artistic statements.

The early post-war colonial struggles in north Africa under French rule, Kenya under the British and the wars in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, along with the freedom struggles in Mozambique and Nicaragua, are only a few of the events and places depicted.

Sealys intentions are laudable but whats on display hardly serves to enlighten. There are too many photographs in relatively small formats arranged in tight rows on each wall with tiny captions, often only a few feet from the ground.

While most convey the brutality and violence of imperialist oppression, they lose impact through their sheer overabundance. Others of political personalities, out of their historical context, appear to have little justification for being on display.

What might work better in a book, where particular images can be lingered over and returned to, comes across here as simply a huge collage.

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Morning Star :: Verging on the voyeuristic

Searchers walk back to the command post at Gray Branch FWB Church as numerous law enforcement agencies searched the area Wednesday morning. Suspected human remains turned out to be a bear foot.

DEEP RUN | Where the rest of the bear lies is up for debate, but a dog picked up the remains of its foot and set off a large-scale search Wednesday morning.

Initial examinations of the foot led to debate that it could have come from a person, so investigators and dogs combed woods and creeks in and around Gray Branch under cold overcast skies that fit with the name.

We had a dog that found a foot, and originally the doctor could not determine if it was human, or if it was an animal, Lenoir County Sheriff Ronnie Ingram said. First of all, there was very little meat on it, so really, you couldnt tell. And the next one goes, I think its a human. But, nobody would commit 100 percent.

The State Medical Examiners Office in Greenville took possession of the remains and after a thorough examination, concluded the foot came from the rear left leg of a bear.

But before that determination, law enforcement and search and rescue crews filled the parking lot at Gray Branch FWB Church.

All we knew is the dog brought it up we did not know where it got it from, Ingram said. So, we were having to do a grid search to try to see if we could find anything else.

Among the agencies responding to the scene were the Lenoir County Sheriffs Office, the Johnston County Sheriffs Office, the Wayne County Sheriffs Office, the Arr-Mac Search and Rescue Team from Wayne County, the Coastal Carolina Search Team from Greenville, Greenville Fire and Rescue, Gates County Emergency Services and N.C. Emergency Management. Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 and Wes.Wolfe@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.

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Authorities: Remains found near Deep Run not human