Superintelligence and Natural Resources: Morality and Technology in a Brave New World

A growing majority of artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and engineers believe human-level intelligence will be attained before the dawn of the 22nd century, while a large number believe this will happen much sooner. At this point, the elevation to “superintelligence,” or systems that have superhuman levels of general intelligence, would likely proceed very rapidly. With this in mind, this commentary has three goals: (1) to provide an overview of how a leading scholar, Nick Bostrom, conceives of superintelligence, with its potential and risks, (2) to bring attention to a burgeoning form of common pool resource extraction, space mining, that may benefit from superintelligence management, and (3) to suggest that environmental social scientists should play a key role in programming seed AI, infusing it not only with our existing collective knowledge, but also with just values.     

An intelligent and autonomous MEMS IMU/GPS integration scheme for low cost land navigation applications

An intelligent scheme to integrate inertial navigation system/global positioning system (GPS) is proposed using a constructive neural network (CNN) to overcome the limitations of current schemes, namely Kalman filtering (KF). The proposed CNN technique does not require prior knowledge or empirical trials to implement the proposed architecture since it is able to construct its architecture “on the fly,” based on the complexity of the vehicle dynamic variations. The proposed scheme is implemented and tested using Micro-electro-mechanical systems inertial measurement unit data collected in a land-vehicle environment. The performance of the proposed scheme is then compared with the multi-layer feed-forward neural networks (MFNN) and KF- based schemes in terms of positioning accuracy during GPS signal outages. The results are then analyzed and discussed in terms of positioning accuracy and learning time. The preliminary results presented in this article indicate that the positioning accuracy were improved by more than 55% when the MFNN and CNN-based schemes were implemented. In addition, the proposed CNN was able to construct the topology by itself autonomously on the fly and achieve similar prediction performance with less hidden neurons compared to MFNN-based schemes.     

An averaging method to study the motion of lunar artificial satellites II: Averaging and Applications

On this, the second part of a two part study (Steichen, 1998) we further develop a semi-analytical theory for a lunar artificial satellite. This theory is obtained by averaging analytically the Hamiltonian function over period up to a month. The averaged equations are then numerically integrated. The solution is free from singularities at e = 0 and I = 0 and is not expanded in powers of these variables. In the last section, the analytic work is applied to characteristic examples to validate the method used. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

城市旅游开发规划进展评述

在总结国内旅游开发规划工作经验的基础上,从理论和实践两方面探讨了综合与整体规划,配套建设,滚动开发的操作模式以及当前旅游开发重点等,强调要突出旅游文化背景和旅游形象策划,并归纳了旅游开发规划需要研究的一系列问题。     

Simulation of Wave Forces on A Semi-Circular Breakwater Using Multilayer Feed Forward Network

1 .IntroductionTheartificialneuralnetwork(ANN)hasbeenwidelyusedinmanyscientificfieldsinrecentyears .Itisakindofinformationmanagementsystemthatresemblesthehumanbraininworkpattern .Comparedwiththetraditionalmethodsofnumericalsimulation ,ANNhastheadvantagesofrelativein dependenceofphysicalmodel,uniformandsimplewayofrealization ,quicknessofcomputing ,andsoon .Sincethemodelofartificialneuronswasfirstlyintroducedin 1 943,ithasbeendevelopedthroughseveralstages.TheapplicationofANNhadnotbeenpopular…     

Natural organics as fluorescent tracers of river-sea mixing

The use of dissolved organic matter fluorescence as a tracer of river-sea mixing was examined in two South Carolina estuaries. Fluorescence declined linearly with seawater dilution in laboratory mixing studies, and also behaved conservatively in an estuary where a single river emptied into a bay. Fluorescence-salinity relationships were also studied in another estuary where a piedmont river (high suspended sediment, low fluorescence) and a coastal plains river (low sediment, high fluorescence) mixed with ocean water. The factor of 2 or greater difference in fluorescence between the two rivers allowed their relative contribution to the estuarine water mass to be distinguished. Petroleum hydrocarbons, measured in estuarine water at 0·7-1·8 μg l⁻¹ concentrations, contributed negligibly to water fluorescence.     

CHIMEHERB人工皮治疗烧伤临床总结

用青岛海洋大学生物材料研究所研制、海威生物材料有限公司生产的CHIMEHERB人工皮治疗烧伤50例.其中用于切、削痂创面10例,Ⅲ°创面20例,肉芽创面12例,供皮区创面3例.削痂创面一次覆盖面积最大23％,切痂创面13％.人工皮下可移植点状小皮片,亦可移植微粒皮,是一种较好的覆盖创面的生物材料.治疗浅Ⅱ°烧伤可使创面愈合时间提前2～4d(天);用于深Ⅱ°创面愈合时间为19～21d.人工皮治疗Ⅱ°创面,最大贴敷面积为60％.它对烧伤肉芽创面有促进周围上皮生长加速创面愈合的作用.     

The past, present and future of the East/Japan sea in change: a simple moving-boundary box model approach

The East/Japan Sea is a mid-latitude marginal sea that has undergone dramatic changes during the last 50–60 years. One of the most prominent characteristics of these changes is a rapid decrease in the amount of dissolved oxygen in deep waters. As a consequence of these changes, some investigators have even argued that the East/Japan Sea might become an anoxic sea in the next 200 years. While the causes of these changes are still under investigation, it has been shown that they are mainly due to modifications in the mode of the deep water ventilation system in the East/Japan Sea: a slowdown and complete cessation of bottom water formation accompanied by an enhancement of upper water formation instead. A simple moving-boundary box model (MBBM) was developed in order to analyze and quantify the processes involved in such changes over the last 50–60 years. Using a MBBM, we estimated the levels of several conservative chemical tracers (CFCs, Tritium, SF₆, ¹³⁷Cs) and bioactive tracers (oxygen and phosphate) in the deep water masses of the East/Japan Sea, comparing these with the historical data available, and making predictions for the near future. The model predicts that the East/Japan Sea should remain well-oxygenated, despite recent rapid oxygen decreases in its deep waters, accompanied by such structural changes as a shrinking of its oxygen-depleted deeper waters and an expansion of its oxygen-rich upper waters over the next few decades.     

The stability and reproducibility of Tris buffers in synthetic seawater

The equimolal Tris buffer (0.04 mol/kg-H₂O Tris + 0.04 mol/kg-H₂O Tris-HCl) prepared in synthetic seawater of salinity 35 has been shown to be stable when sealed in a borosilicate glass bottle with a greased ground-glass stopper (drift rate ≤ 0.0005 in pH per year). The error in pH of such buffers resulting from uncertainties in the preparation of such buffers is typically less than 0.002 in pH (relative to the results of DelValls and Dickson, 1998 [DelValls, T.A., Dickson, A.G., 1998. The pH of buffers based on 2-amino-2-hydroxymethyl-1,3-propanediol (‘tris’) in synthetic sea water. Deep-Sea Research I, 45, 1541–1554]).