Tag: computers

Neurotech could join our brains to personal computers. What could go improper, proper? : NPR

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We are approaching the courageous new earth of neurotech.

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We are approaching the brave new globe of neurotech.

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Connecting our brains to pcs could seem like one thing from a science fiction movie, but it turns out the long term is previously below. One particular specialist argues it can be a slippery slope.

Who is she? Nita Farahany is professor of legislation and philosophy at Duke Legislation Faculty. Her get the job done focuses on futurism and legal ethics, and her most current ebook, The Fight For Your Brain, explores the development of neurotech in our everyday lives.

  • Neurotechnology can offer insight into the operate of the human mind. It really is a expanding industry of investigate that could have all sorts of overall health programs, and goes further than wearable gadgets like smart watches that watch your heart amount of the sum of actions you acquire in a working day.
  • Farahany describes it to NPR like this: “Imagine a close to distant long term in which it is just not just your heart rate, or your oxygen stages, or the measures that you are getting that you are monitoring, but also your brain action, in which you might be donning wearable mind sensors that are built-in into your headphones, and your earbuds, and your watches, to track your mind exercise in the similar way that you observe all of the rest of your exercise. And that allows you to peer into your individual brain well being and wellness, and your attention and your target, and even possibly your cognitive decrease in excess of time.” 

Nita Farahany is a regulation and philosophy professor at Duke College.

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Merritt Chesson/Merritt Chesson

Nita Farahany is a legislation and philosophy professor at Duke University.

Merritt Chesson/Merritt Chesson

What’s the huge deal? You imply aside from the prospect of acquiring your brain tracked? Farahany concerns about prospective privacy concerns, and outlines various situations in which entry to this facts could be problematic, if the right protections are not set in place.

  • Regulation enforcement could request the details from neurotech organizations in purchase to support with legal investigations, she claims, citing Fitbit facts remaining introduced as evidence in court docket as a precedent.  
  • And she warns it could increase to the workplace, supplying employers the option to observe productivity, or no matter if workers’ minds are wandering when on the career.
  • Farahany argues that without the need of the right human rights protections in spot, the unfettered advancement of this tech could lead to a planet that violates our right to “cognitive liberty.” 

Want much more perception on the tech world? Pay attention to the Look at This episode about how Silicon Valley Lender failed, and what will come up coming.


What is she declaring?

Farahany on defining cognitive liberty:

The simplest definition I can give is the ideal to self-determination more than our

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You Lost Your Wi-Fi Password, but It’s OK. Your Computer’s Got Your Back

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You almost never think of your Wi-Fi password after setting up your devices. A friend comes over, asks you for the network password and you stumble to remember — what was it again? Is it this number on the back of my router?

Even if you don’t have the password saved anywhere and you haven’t memorized it, there’s a simple way to find all your Wi-Fi passwords at once — just check your computer.

Read more: Best Password Managers for 2022

As long as your Windows or Mac computer has connected to the network before, that Wi-Fi password is permanently stored in your settings. It may require a bit of digging on your part, but all of the passwords are there, saved, and ready to be shared with anyone who wants to connect to Wi-Fi.

Here’s how to find the passwords to all of the Wi-Fi networks you’ve ever connected to on MacOS and Windows. For more, discover 17 essential settings for customizing your MacBook or how to get the most out of Windows 11. 

How to find Wi-Fi passwords in MacOS

Every password you’ve entered and saved on a Mac is stored in Keychain Access, the password management system for MacOS. And that includes Wi-Fi network passwords. 

To start, use the search feature to open the Keychain Access app and do the following:

1. Click on System under System Keychains in the sidebar.

2. Next, click on Passwords at the top of the window.

3. Find the Wi-Fi network you want the password for and double-click on it.

4. Finally, check the box next to Show password and enter your password when prompted.

Keychain Access app pop-up on MacBook

Find all your stored Wi-Fi passwords in the Keychain Access app on MacOS.


Screenshot by Nelson Aguilar/CNET

The password field will then show the password you used to log in to that Wi-Fi network. You can double-click in the password field to select the password and copy it to your clipboard, if needed.

How to find Wi-Fi passwords on Windows

Finding the password to the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to is simple on Windows, but getting your hands on all stored Wi-Fi passwords takes a bit of work, so we’ll discuss both methods below.

To find the password to the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to on Windows:

1. Click the Start button and then go to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center (Windows 11) or Settings > Network & Internet > Status > Network and Sharing Center (Windows 10).

2. Next to Connections, click your Wi-Fi network name highlighted in blue.

3. In the Wi-Fi Status page that opens, click Wireless Properties and then on the Security tab.

4. Finally, check the box next to Show characters to display your Wi-Fi network password above it.

Network sharing center on a Windows laptop

You can easily find the password for the Wi-Fi network you’re currently connected to on Windows.


Screenshot by Nelson Aguilar/CNET

However, this

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MIT Develops New Programming Language for High-Functionality Personal computers

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With a tensor language prototype, “speed and correctness do not have to contend … they can go alongside one another, hand-in-hand.”

High-functionality computing is required for an at any time-rising variety of duties — these kinds of as graphic processing or several deep studying purposes on neural nets — the place a person ought to plow by means of immense piles of info, and do so fairly quickly, or else it could just take absurd amounts of time. It is widely thought that, in carrying out operations of this sort, there are unavoidable trade-offs between velocity and reliability. If velocity is the top precedence, in accordance to this watch, then dependability will most likely suffer, and vice versa.

Nonetheless, a staff of researchers, based predominantly at A Tensor Language” (ATL), last month at the Principles of Programming Languages conference in Philadelphia.

“Everything in our language,” Liu says, “is aimed at producing either a single number or a tensor.” Tensors, in turn, are generalizations of vectors and matrices. Whereas vectors are one-dimensional objects (often represented by individual arrows) and matrices are familiar two-dimensional arrays of numbers, tensors are n-dimensional arrays, which could take the form of a 3x3x3 array, for instance, or something of even higher (or lower) dimensions.

The whole point of a computer algorithm or program is to initiate a particular computation. But there can be many different ways of writing that program — “a bewildering variety of different code realizations,” as Liu and her coauthors wrote in their soon-to-be published conference paper — some considerably speedier than others. The primary rationale behind ATL is this, she explains: “Given that high-performance computing is so resource-intensive, you want to be able to modify, or rewrite, programs into an optimal form in order to speed things up. One often starts with a program that is easiest to write, but that may not be the fastest way to run it, so that further adjustments are still needed.”

As an example, suppose an image is represented by a 100×100 array of numbers, each corresponding to a … Read More...

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The Computers Were Never the Problem With the BCS Era

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In 2014, ESPN aired one of the first commercials for the new College Football Playoff. In it, actors playing fans for dozens of teams across the country explain why the sport’s move from the BCS to a new championship system is such a welcome development. At one point, fans of schools such as Boise State, Hawai’i, and Utah—as well as DeSean Jackson, for some reason—proudly proclaim that there are “no more computers to keep us out!” You’ll notice that they are joined by fans of the Cincinnati Bearcats; if you follow college football, you already know why that’s funny.

Ah yes, The Computers. From 1998 to 2013, college football determined which teams would play for the national championship by using a formula created by the Bowl Championship Series. This formula included rankings produced by mathematicians. The most accurate way to describe these ranking systems would be to say they were algorithms or formulas, but during the 16 seasons that they were part of the championship selection process, they were always referred to as “the computers.” (Always. Always. Always.) It was as if desktops locked away in a lab somewhere were pumping out college football takes and were convinced your team was trash. I like to picture one of those cute little 2000s-era iMacs calling in to The Paul Finebaum Show.

People hated The Computers. “If we’ve got to let a computer tell us who is the best team, we’ve got a major issue,” then–Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher said in 2012. Former Oregon coach Chip Kelly once joked that the computers must be falling asleep before his Ducks kicked off in the Pacific time zone. In 2010, Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Dufresne asked, “Who died and made the computers king?” Even President Obama said he was “fed up with these computer rankings” and called for the sport to adopt a playoff.

But our hatred for The Computers was misguided. “The system, the BCS formula, was not necessarily the issue. It was the system it fed into,” says Asher Feldman, who runs BCS Know How, a Twitter account that attempts to reverse-engineer zombie BCS standings for present-day football seasons. “Choosing just two teams at the end of the season was the biggest fault of the system overall.”

Under the new College Football Playoff format, the number of teams involved in the championship picture has doubled, from two to four. That change has been great: Two of the seven champions in the playoff era have been teams seeded fourth, and would have been excluded from competing for a title under the old two-team format. But the method of selecting playoff teams—having a committee of 13 people decide who belongs in the field—is worse than the BCS in every other way. It is less transparent, more prone to biases and conflicts of interest, and more prone to be affected by one person’s bad opinions.

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Data Doctors: Are extended warranties on computers worth it?

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Practically anyone selling you a computer will likely try to get you to pay a little extra for a “protection plan” that goes above and beyond the standard factory warranty. Should you go for it?

Q: Are computer extended warranties worth buying?

A: No matter what tech device you buy, practically any retailer will likely try to get you to pay a little extra for a “protection plan” that goes above and beyond the standard factory warranty.

In some cases, it seems like such a small amount of money that you may think, “Why not get the extra coverage?”

But the credit card you made the purchase with may already provide basic protection.

Many of the electronic devices you’ll buy today don’t have the moving parts that would commonly wear out in the past, making the “protection” even less likely to pay off.

In the vast majority of cases, you’re simply improving the profitability of the sale for the retailer — which is why you’re seeing it virtually everywhere.

It’s not covered

When it comes to computers, there are a variety of reasons that buying “extra protection” up front can be a waste of money.

First and foremost, these protection plans generally only cover hardware components, which is rarely what causes aggravating computer problems.

In our 30-plus years of servicing computers, the vast majority of issues that we see are software- or operating system-based, which isn’t covered by most extended warranties or protection plans.

Retailers know most consumers don’t realize this, and won’t take the time to read the fine print. Even when some form of coverage includes the operating system, it means they will return the computer to the factory settings.

That means the stuff you really care about — your programs, data files, browser settings, printer drivers and desktop icons — are all going to be wiped out.

When you get your computer back from this type of “warranty” service, the burden of reloading your programs, restoring your data files (hopefully you had them backed up), reinstalling printer drivers and getting the computer to work the way it used to, is all on you.

Warranty service can also take a lot longer depending upon your device as large retailers may require the device to be shipped to a central repair facility in another state.

Maintenance plans

If you’re going to pay for extra coverage on a computer, it’s best to get a plan that covers software-based issues and includes data backup and restoration. Another thing it should address is the one that very few computer owners ever think about: maintenance.

The reason so many computer problems become complicated, time-consuming and expensive to fix is because most users tend to ignore the signs of a problem when they first appear.

They don’t reach out for help until the computer becomes unbearable to use, which means it’s likely loaded with problems by then. Imagine how expensive car repair would become if you never maintained your vehicle and waited until it

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Two Chinese teams claim to have reached primacy with quantum computers

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The Pan team’s optical quantum computer uses a 144-mode interferometer to solve a Gaussian boson sampling problem with a factor-of-1024 speedup in computational time relative to a classical computer. Credit: Chao-Yang Lu/University of Science and Technology of China, via Physics

Two teams in China are claiming that they have reached primacy with their individual quantum computers. Both have published the details of their work in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In the computer world, quantum primacy is the performance of calculations that are not feasible on conventional computers—others use the term “quantum advantage.”

Over the past several years, several working with quantum computers have claimed to have reached primacy, but thus far have been met with skepticism due to questions about whether the algorithm used was the best choice possible, including the one used by Google. In this new effort, both teams are claiming that their computers leave no room for doubt.

Both of the teams in these new efforts were working at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China, and both were led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan, who has become well known for his work with quantum entanglement.

In both efforts, the goal was to build a quantum computer capable of calculating the output probabilities of quantum circuits—a task that is relatively simple for a conventional computer to perform when there are just a few inputs and outputs. It grows increasingly difficult as the numbers rise until it becomes unfeasible.

In the first effort, the researchers used a photonic approach in building their computer. To tackle the problem of estimating output probabilities, the team used Gaussian boson sampling as a way to analyze the output. In this case, output from a 144-mode interferometer. Under this scenario, there could be 1043 possible outcomes. The researchers claim their machine was capable of sampling the output 1023 times as fast as a supercomputer, which, they further claim, shows quantum primacy.

The second effort involved creating a superconductor-based that was capable of calculating using 66 qubits—only 56 of them were used, however. Still, the researchers found the machine capable of estimating sample calculations up to 1000 times as fast as the best supercomputers, which, they claim, shows that they achieved primacy.

Chinese photonic quantum computer demonstrates quantum supremacy

More information:
Han-Sen Zhong et al, Phase-Programmable Gaussian Boson Sampling Using Stimulated Squeezed Light, Physical Review Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.180502

Yulin Wu et al, Strong Quantum Computational Advantage Using a Superconducting Quantum Processor, Physical Review Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.180501

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Two Chinese teams claim to have reached primacy with quantum computers (2021, October 27)
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