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Category: business – Page 111

One multi-task performing robot can create an enormous difference in the cores of a business operation and its workflow. Over the past few years, robotics technology has risen and is still moving up the ladder, proving its worth by providing huge successes to businesses with increased productivity and customer retention rates.

These brave new robots are becoming a part of other technological changes and are moving towards enabling unprecedented opportunities for industries around the globe.

Every robot is an integration of sleek electronics and versatile software. Robots have to connect to real-life circumstances and perform based on predictive analytics about the situations that might occur in the future.

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The notion of self-driving vehicles is currently met with equal parts wonder and alarm. But a new study reveals how the pros may outweigh the cons as a business strategy.

An article titled “Impact of Autonomous Vehicle Assisted Last-Mile Delivery in Urban to Rural Settings” determines that this technology reduces the completion time of delivery tours and provides the most cost-effective business model. It appears in Transportation Science.

“The starting point of this paper involved the United States Postal Service announcing its idea to start using autonomous vehicles in rural routes,” said Sara Reed, assistant professor of business analytics at the University of Kansas.

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… along with new, unfamiliar — and often poorly understood — risks.

Technology and business risks morph with changes in technology and how it is delivered. While cloud services are often considered more dependable, businesses face new risks with SaaS and public cloud — risks that are unfamiliar or not completely understood. People’s eyes pop open and ears perk up when they witness prolonged outage events such as the current issue with Atlassian. Suddenly, SaaS dependencies and resilience issues become relevant, as a business can’t access its favorite SaaS tool. The unique risk of using SaaS is that you don’t have control over the application or the tool and cannot reimplement yourself. It is also important to understand the cascading risks, as some of the well-known SaaS services are hosted on a leading hyperscaler’s infrastructure. You need to analyze the business impact of SaaS and cloud services outages just like for any other technology in your portfolio.

Trust but verify vendor claims about service-level agreements supporting operations and resilience plans. To ensure that your SaaS providers deliver on their own promises:

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Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

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CSIS will host a public event on responsible AI in a global context, featuring a moderated discussion with Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, and Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair of the Microsoft Corporation, on the business perspective, followed by a conversation among a panel of experts on the best way forward for AI regulation. Dr. John J. Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, will provide welcoming remarks.

Keynote Speakers:
Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft Corporation.
Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.

Featured Speakers:
Gregory C. Allen, Director, Project on AI Governance and Senior Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, CSIS
Mignon Clyburn, Former Commissioner, U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Karine Perset, Head of AI Unit and OECD.AI, Digital Economy Policy Division, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)
Helen Toner, Director of Strategy, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University.

This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.

Continue reading “Responsible AI in a Global Context” | >

Elon Musk tweeted Tesla may get into the lithium mining and refining business directly and at scale because the cost of the metal, a key component in manufacturing batteries, has gotten so high.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels,” Musk tweeted. “There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.”

The Tesla and SpaceX tech boss was responding to a tweet showing the average price of lithium per tonne in the last two decades, which showed a massive increase in prices since 2021. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the cost of the metal has gone up more than 480% in the last year.

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COLORADO SPRINGS — A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues.

Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site.

But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort.

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It’s a reference to the evil form in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Lord of the Rings” books and movies, the Eye of Sauron is the chief antagonist in the series, exemplified as a flaming eye and that is a metaphor for pure evil. It’s not something anyone would want to be compared to unless, of course, you are Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy, Business and Parenting Principles, Personal Energy Management, Building the Metaverse, Seeking Awe, the Role of Religion, Solving Deep Technical Challenges (e.g., AR), and More | Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating (http://eightsleep.com/Tim), Magic Spoon delicious low-carb cereal (http://magicspoon.com/tim), and Helium 10 all-in-one software suite to sell on Amazon (https://helium10.com/tim).

Mark Zuckerberg (FB/IG) is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse—moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg — Founder and CEO of Meta | The Tim Ferriss Show” | >

With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.

The video details the shortwave radiotelephone system that linked New York and London in the 1930s. It starts with a brief but thorough explanation of ionospheric refraction, and how that atmospheric phenomenon makes it possible to communicate over vast distances. It also offers a great explanation on the problems inherent with radio connections, like multipath interference and the dependency on the solar cycle for usable skip. To overcome these issues, the Cooling Radio Station was built, and its construction is the main thrust of the video.

Built on Cooling Marshes along the Thames well outside of London, the receive-only radio station was a gigantic undertaking. It consisted of a two-mile-long rhombic array antenna, pointed directly at the transmitting site in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The pool-table-flat marshland made for a perfect place for the array; the fact that the ground was saturated with brackish tidal water had the added benefit of excellent electrical conduction, too. The amount of work it took to raise the antenna masts and booms is impressive — very little power equipment was used. And we loved the details about the hardline coaxial used to stitch the antennas together — it was made on-site from copper tube and insulating spacers.

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