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dmitrilyalikov · 6 years ago

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Why do America’s generations keep getting dumber?

America is the global symbol of individual liberty and opportunity. Defined by capitalism and democracy, the very concepts that have made the U.S. the hallmark in innovative thinking and societal development. With arguably the best ‘system’ in the world able to work at great scale, American renegades have been the frontrunners in many aspects of society many countries wish they could compete with. Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, all American icons for creative thinking and execution. Creative, intelligent men that any company would love to have on their team if they could convince them to come. They’ve accomplished things that some would believe to be impossible, and not only that, they all dropped out of college. The education system failed them.

The current American educational system was first introduced in the 1910′s during the industrial era to create a scaled up version of a youth knowledge assembly line. Children are crammed into large classrooms and are taught general knowledge to enter the next level of education. The strict regimen of be quiet, listen, and regurgitate what you have heard onto a standardized exam to get a letter grade has been used for over a century. This practice is nowhere near teaching a child to think and solve problems. Tests do not work. They do not represent any more than words on a paper. Example, the Chinese Box Experiment. In short, a Chinese professor inserts a test of different Mandarin characters that a robot on the other side of the door must answer. The robot identified every character correctly and returned the paper. The Professor says “Wow, this pupil understands Mandarin very well!”. She is unaware the answers came from a machine programmed by humans. The robot does not actually understand what is going on, it is simply responding with what it’s been told to do. Understanding is using memory to create predictions. However, this is exactly how school teaches children in America. They program children to respond to an input with a correct output, and those that compute such information correctly, are deemed the brightest. If we are programming children to act as robots, robots will win every time, bar none. The only way to fundamentally beat a robot is to be more human. Humans have creativity, emotional intelligence, morals, historical and societal awareness. Schools are essentially building kids like robots in an assembly line. They are writing code in our brains on how to think, act, and behave in many situations. The smartest natural child can be nurtured in such an environment to become average.

The most beautiful aspect of a child is its sense of curiosity and creativity. Left to its own, many will fantasize about spaceships and rockets and trains. They will dance on couches, spill their parent’s coffee on the rug, They ask naive questions about complex issues. I was lucky enough as a child as my father would make me understand how any toy or tool worked when I used it. I was made to inquire about the world around me. How does a car engine work? What could make it better? Why do planes not fall from the sky? I was then sent to day school and would be told to shut up and listen to the teacher, because he is smarter than you. What does it mean to be smart then? To know more information and algorithms downloaded into the hippocampus? Memory is not intelligence. Intelligence and consciousness are manifested in the neocortex. The part of the brain that operates high level thought. Children in American society are suppressed and told to remember things to graduate. After a certain point of indoctrinated thinking, children lose their sense of curiosity and are more focused on execution then the process of learning and solving the problem itself. The most commonly asked question in American schools is “Will this be on the test next week?”.

So how can we make this better? This epidemic starts on the very system of education itself. The end goal of school is to obtain a degree, a rough representation of what college taught you, or maybe you were just wily enough to cheat (which is highly incentivized in the ends justify the means environment.). School’s are not obligated to innovate. Colleges are businesses. They force 18 year old children to take on 200 thousand dollar debt decisions. They don't need all that money. The books that cost hundreds of dollars for students, cost 6$ to make. NO INDUSTRY IN THE WORLD HAS A MONOPOLY THAT BOASTS SUCH GREAT PROFIT MARGINS. Colleges have young generations on a string with the rhetoric that a degree is worth such money. Millions of kids cry joyfully over getting into a school, just to give them money that is taken from loans to enslave them once they get out with a degree. College is enslavement. It is a monopolistic business. It is a shame to see such an important factor to human development being exploited for profit. They pay zero taxes on the profits they make. They teach general knowledge in a lecture style. Is that worth it? Why do kids want this? Why do parents make them do this? Because they did it when they were kids? We are in a new age.

Fast forward over a century later, the digital age. Children have smartphones, smartphones with all the information they need. Why sit in a room listening to someone lecture when you can just look something up? Children are put in classrooms that are part of a school, that are part of a district, that is part of a school board. These scaled up versions of education pump out millions of children with a broad range of general knowledge, or at least that is the intent. Now most of these kids go to college, work a 9-5 job, and start a family and the cycle goes on with their children. That is not fulfillment, that is not happiness for most. The average school tuition has increased by more than 200% while the average salary of college graduates has plateaued since the start of mass schooling. We live in an era of economies of “unscale”. With artificial intelligence and cloud computing, vertically integrated corporations with huge factories and inventory cannot compete with lean, agile startups that rent cloud storage on Amazon Web Services, outsource manufacturing to Chinese factories, and utilize open source Machine Learning algorithms instead of spending great capital to build it all individually. This gives power to creative, niche startups that can effectively run a business from their basement. Think back to the 1990′s. The internet had just gone mainstream, thousands of employees quit their jobs to create internet companies during the Dot-Com Boom before it crashed. They would plan their IPO before even incorporating, this new technology was a home run in their eyes. How does this relate to education? The rapid evolution of technology can be attributed to new platforms. Telecommunications created a global platform for information to be spread from Boston to Australia in an instant, the internet has revolutionized virtually every industry. My generation is growing up in the advent of the AI and cloud computing platform. Essentially, the innovation of big tech platforms should equate to radically different education. However, because school systems have no incentive to change and make less profit, they are still preparing kids for an industrial era to be interchangeable pieces working for large corporations rather than agile startups and small to medium companies.

Artificial Intelligence will radically change education. Harvard, Stanford, and a few other large brand schools have noticed this trend and created online courses already that use machine learning engines to tailor a course to a students understanding. AI can use big data to understand how a pupil learns, what he/she is struggling in, and create a report on their level of thought that is a perfect representation on what they can do, rather than a vague degree. Many companies such as Microsoft and Google are receptive to this and an increasing number of developers enter the software field with no degrees. Because there is no system that could exemplify a student’s intelligence in the past, an expensive degree was the next best thing and college became a booming business but quite an enslaving process for the children utilizing it. AI can guide a student while virtual classrooms and teachers can connect to children across the globe for real organic conversation. Now, the physical classroom is very important for social development and should still be used to an extent. Perhaps we Americans should look towards Finland, the country with the best ranked educational system in the world. Their primary and secondary schools are incredibly different. School days are 3 hours long, there is no homework, and there are no private schools. The philosophy is that kids should be emancipated from the institutions and be left to be kids and develop intuitiveness organically through real world social experiences. There are no private schools so that rich families send their kids to public schools and those parents make sure the school is up to par with what they can afford.This forces schools nationwide to keep a standard that is universal, much unlike the U.S. with many inner city public schools without internet while capitalistic private and public district schools spend money on football field renovations.

To create a more productive generation of students, we must “unscale” education, remove private schools, reduce length of school hours, ban or at least regulate student loan firms, set a price ceiling on all college tuitions and utilize the platform of Artificial Intelligence to create a market of one for all students starting from Kindergarten to beyond college. Hiring more teachers and building would effectively make the problem worse. Teachers can be the greatest minds on the planet, but under such a restrictive there is little hope to save a whole generation. Khan Academy has implemented an unscaled online system, leading the way for more personalized education programs. There is little chance this can happen unless this is derived from the Federal Government, which is famously bureaucratic and slow to act especially with education. Changes are needed. This will make children more excited to learn, ask questions and solve the great global issues that are long overdue to be solved. Kids will strengthen critical thinking skills and experience freedom of thought that will create a wave of further technological development and accelerate American education to new heights.

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weaselle · 6 years ago

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Scry Capers hashtag fictionblast

In the far future, more than half of humanity lives on the Moon. There are also a few populations on in-system space stations, the Mars Colony, and the Fleet Crews that live on the enormous ships that travel between them all. The last of the earthlings inhabit a dead and deadly Earth, ruined by humanity’s failure to properly steward our planet and ravaged by terrible wars. Vast abandoned mega-cities return to nature and yet become home to the unnatural: altered animals/people that are either cybernetically Upgraded or biologically Enhanced beings. Scavengers and Privateers make illegal loot runs to Dead Earth for anything of value to smuggle into space colony black markets. The situation for the few million people still living on Earth is growing worse and a final chance of rescue off-planet is taking place, a cooperative mission organized by the governments of the Moon, overseen by the newly formed and nefarious Planetary Evacuation and Transfer Agency, who takes violent measures to protect against “infiltration” of the Moon by any who are not “pure” humans. This is not a welcome policy for the various UpGraded and Enhanced people who have become a part of Dead Earth society - lifelong lovers, leaders, parents and friends in the communities left to fend for themselves for so many generations. Into this hotbed of unrest and wreckage sails the crew of one small smuggling ship. Come explore this future with them. Basically it’s about a space smuggling ship of rag-tag adventurers who raid the surface of Dead Earth and sell goods on the Lunar black market. They wind up chasing down a series of ancient sites that answer questions about the deep origins of humanity.

In addition to the Martian and Lunar Colonies, there are the Space Stations, and The Fleet. Originally, the Fleet was the Station Supply Fleet, created to service the seven space stations humans had built. Life on these stations was secretive, and their smaller populations tended toward high I.Q.s in the top of their various fields of study, who then raised several generations of children who were certainly very, very smart, even if thus far unproven to be genetically enhanced to be extra intelligent, as several stations were rumored to do. Stations were little worlds unto themselves, and along with developing various needed commodities in their areas of specialty (such as nano-tech, medical research, the production and improvement of various foods and technologies) they also developed their own ways of life. Likewise, the Service Fleet, many ships crewed by up to two hundred men and women on between-station journeys that could take three years or more, acquired their own culture. The stations began to have differing opinions about what the law should be on-station.Those opinions disagreed with the opinions of Earth and the Lunar colonies, and when one of those disagreements came to a head on Station Delta, Space Command found out very quickly that one of the things all the stations had in common was an opinion that attempts at military boarding and take-over of a station would not be tolerated. Initial reports by surviving members of the Lunar Military incursion team were to the effect that yes, the extremely intelligent people of Station Delta had, in fact, thought to engineer quite efficiently against armed intrusion. Planetary authorities were further caught with their pants down when the seven stations of Sol System immediately unionized, announcing themselves an alliance of self-governing bodies. The Sol Union then gave the fleet that serviced them (and relied largely on the stations for refuel and supply) an offer: “join us.” On each ship of the Fleet, decisions were made. On some ships, there were votes. On other ships arguments were more pointed. Explosive, even. Two ships were lost entirely. In the end, the Council of Captains was formed (some of whom were very new to their captaincy indeed) who defined each ship as an autonomous entity within the Captain’s Council, and unanimously offered an alliance with the Sol System Union, simultaneously offering Earth and the Lunar Colonies a peace-treaty with trade agreements. Once the Sol Union signed allegiance with the Council of Captains, there wasn't really any choice for Terran government; the station labs produced a lot of the best goods and technology: medical equipment and vaccines, personal electronics, as well as widely enjoyed arts and entertainment- that last bit was particularly tricky for Space Command to get around. It was extremely difficult to garner the support of the citizenry when the 'enemy' was so damned popular. And the ships of the Fleet were almost all of the serious space-craft humanity had made; there was no space navy, or any kind of second fleet to provide shipping. In effect, the rebel space stations, while refusing to trade any of those things with Earth or the Moon, had agreed to sell to the Fleet. And the Fleet was offering to sell those things to the Earth and Moon. And buy goods from them to sell to Sol Union, of course. Terra couldn't afford to refuse, and indeed, the Delta Solar Treaty worked well for all concerned. ______________________________________________________________________ The ship is a Sprite Class escort ship repurposed for surface raids and smuggling. The crew is 12 strong 1 AL Short. Buff. Mechanic. Loves vehicles. Missing two fingers. Weapons of choice: sawed off shotgun, hammer, and explosives. Seems fierce but is a big softie. Loves sandwiches and beer. Very seriously insists that he is not of the magic race of dwarves. Always winks afterward. Pet/companion: robot badger. 2 PAIGE Navigation officer. Bookkeeper. Researcher. Woman of Persian heritage. Smart, plays chess, loves books. Grew up half her time on a Space Fleet ship half at a space station. Excellent cook. Weapons of choice: tranq gun full of customized doses and a poisoned dagger. Pet/companion: cat. 3 FEY the captain’s left hand. Loyal to a fault. Black-haired lady of Irish decent. Deadly with several weapons, as well as hand to hand, for some reason, likes the compound bow. Pet/companion: a raven. 4 Q (sometimes Quade or Quin) Tech savant. Computer engineer, code monkey, inventor, robotics tech. Ship pilot. Genius. Always listening to weird music. Androgynous ace black person. Pet/companion: probably-sapient robot built by Q. Resembles a spider the size of a chihuahua 5 DOGWOOD (or maybe Jinx) Being of mystery. So many tattoos. Unrecognizable ethnicity. Witch, probably. Constantly picking pockets and pulling little cons. Tarot cards for poker, winners hands come true. Weapons of choice: hands, random items, the surrounding environment, and pure luck. Flirts with 100% of everyone. Pet/companion something that is probably a coyote but might be a fox? some kind of jackal? Smarter than it should be. 6 . SIX Six is trouble. Don’t bother Six. Six is emotionally fragile and also might rend you limb from limb. Let’s just, let’s just leave Six alone. Pet/companion: the beast within 7 LIEUTENANT WOLFE (usually just called Lieutenant) the captain’s right hand. Weapons of choice, rifle, axe. Russian and Scandinavian ancestry. Companion/pet, clearly, a grey wolf, grey, named Shadow (follows him everywhere.) 8 EIGHT-BALL. Rogue. Gambler. Half-Japanese black trans woman. Loves pool and casinos. Loves cash, jewels, and reeeeaaalllyyyy expensive whiskey. Quickdraw artist with a pistol. Personal pool cue houses a sword cane blade. Laughs easy, holds grudges. Pet/companion: raccoon. 9 THE CAPTAIN. Also referred to as Boss. Trying to navigate the group to success. Slow to give up personal information. The crew are all family the captain would die for. Non binary person with ancestry in mongolia as well as various east asian populations. Pet/companion: Siberian Husky. 10. DOC. Not actually a doctor, more like a paramedic, field surgeon. Sort of a vet for humans. A mostly Tibetan person. Might be 40 years old, might be 90 years old. Pet/companion: saker falcon. 11. SU. Sometimes Suke. Assassin. Bodyguard. Not a talker. Japanese. Highly specialized weapons. Pet/companion: venomous cyborg snake. 12. The Client / possible new adoptee, a well-off lad from the lunar colonies, disowned for his stance against the political status quo, with powerful political enemies. He has hired the crew to help uncover proof of a big secret he is trying to bring to light, and he has his own secret from the crew. Meanwhile, he does his best to unlearn some of his lunar colony privilege and preconceptions, out where population gene pools aren’t screened for designer mutations and cybernetic upgrades don’t define you as less than human. Companion/pet: cyber-ferret. _____________________________________________________________________ Here is some background and world building, and please, I know it says prologue, but it’s really just, like, rough world building notes

#fictionblast #scry capers #writing #fiction

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escalonservices · 4 years ago

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If you’ve been using the same accounting processes for over a decade, chances are that it might be time to evolve. The accounting industry has become exponentially more high-tech over the past few years, with new advancements emerging every day. To get a feel for the trends that is likely to be most relevant to your small business in 2020 (and beyond), check out these five areas of importance.

1. Cloud-Based Solutions

Maintaining your accounting data on just one person’s office PC is not going to work for the vast majority of today’s businesses. Accounting information must be accessible to multiple stakeholders, and the best way to do that is to keep the data in the cloud. The importance of this was emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic when companies were completely shut out of their offices but still needed to access important accounting information.

Cloud-based software providers have made these solutions inexpensive, easy to use, and customizable so every business has a way to use them in the most efficient way possible. Also, companies have implemented safeguards to ensure that cloud-based data is accessible to all who need it but impossible to access for those who don’t. Cybersecurity measures ensure that cloud-based data is private, secure, and well protected.

2. Artificial Intelligence and RPA

The use of AI in the accounting world goes far beyond the ability to offer chat bots on your customer service and home pages. AI is used in concert with tools like block chain and big data to ensure safe, fast, and transparent transactions that are secure and well protected. Also, AI can be used to notify you if bills are overdue, payments are late or the numbers aren’t reconciling.

You can also use robot process automation (RPA) to handle simple tasks like automatically generating month-end accounting reports and producing compliance documents regularly. This cuts the need for human involvement in your accounting process, freeing up your financial professionals to do more thought-intensive work.

3. Blockchain

You’ve likely heard the term “blockchain,” but you may not be familiar with its utility in the accounting sector. Its uses in the accounting realm are widespread, but one way you can use it is in maintaining a digital ledger that records all of your accounting transactions and traces them from conception through the final step of the payment process.

The block chain process ensures that every step is time stamped and that entries cannot be deleted or changed, allowing for complete transparency in the entire accounting life cycle. Any auditor (internal or external) can then trust the data within the block chain system since it’s completely digital and transparent.

4. Outsourcing

With all of the technology being employed across the accounting sector, it can be challenging for a small business to keep up with it. Investing in high-tech solutions (and hiring staff to manage them) is time-consuming and costly for any business to undertake, let alone a small or new firm. That’s why many business owners are turning to outsourcing as the solution to maintain optimal financial processes without breaking the bank.

By using an outsourced firm, a business can be sure that its financial processes are being handled professionally and accurately. They can avoid investing in the office space, employees, and technology necessary for maintaining a strong accounting process because the outsourced firm handles that for them. This allows the business to only pay for the specific accounting services it needs rather than pouring money into the entire process. Ultimately, outsourcing is less expensive and more efficient for the business versus handling the accounting operation internally.

5. Use of Big Data

Finance professionals are increasingly using big data as an integral part of the accounting process. This information can be translated into a multitude of formats to allow businesses to better make predictions for the future, benchmark against goals, and flag areas of opportunity.

Here’s how it works: The accounting and IT teams will work together to extract key insights from data sets. The analyses that result will allow you to plan better and ensure that your accounting department is operating proactively rather than on a reactive basis. This saves time for everyone involved in the process and also gives you the peace of mind that you’re making data-backed decisions rather than using subjective drivers to create your accounting strategy.

Reference Link @ https://www.businessmagazine.org/5-small-business-accounting-trends-to-follow-in-2020-5161/

#accounting services #small business accounting services #outsourced accounting #outsource accounting #Accounting outsourcing #Business Accounting Trends #Accounting Trends #Accounting Trends 2020

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vsplusonline · 5 years ago

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Backed by SoftBank, Herman Narula’s Improbable is struggling to revolutionize gaming industry

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/backed-by-softbank-herman-narulas-improbable-is-struggling-to-revolutionize-gaming-industry/

Backed by SoftBank, Herman Narula’s Improbable is struggling to revolutionize gaming industry

By Amy Thomson

Worlds Adrift was supposed to be a multiplayer game like no other: think Minecraft meets Second Life. Released to some users in 2018, the virtual world promised to take immersive gaming to another level by using a new technology from SoftBank-backed wunderkind, Improbable Worlds Ltd. Players would build ships to explore a universe of floating islands created by other participants. Then last May its creator, Bossa Studios, said it was pulling the plug.

“We fell way short of what the game’s original vision was,” Bossa co-founder Henrique Olifiers explained in a YouTube video. “What we have live today is probably perhaps 20% of the game that we wanted to launch, and it shows.”

Worlds Adrift is one of at least three games using Improbable technology that were pulled last year—a setback for Improbable, which promised to revolutionize gaming by helping developers create complex worlds that rival the real one. There are many reasons games can fail, but two people familiar with the situation say Improbable is struggling in part because it surprised developers with frequent updates that forced game studios to spend more time fixing code than perfecting their products.

Founded about seven years ago by Cambridge University students, Improbable is unprofitable and has only one game running on its platform. Since 2018, the company has lost its chief financial officer, chief legal officer, vice president of people operations and chief creative officer, according to their LinkedIn profiles. One high-level person who left said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Herman Narula didn’t give executives autonomy to make their own decisions, from hiring to choosing which projects to pursue. Several people who worked with Improbable and requested anonymity to avoid hurting their careers in the insular gaming industry, also said Narula alienated game developers with his temper—shouting orders and complaints on the phone and in meetings.

Improbable has since lured a former Disney executive to become the new CFO, is working with several other studios and is starting to develop its own games. Company spokesman Daniel Griffiths said that it’s not unusual for game developers to decide against a commercial launch after a trial period. Additionally, he said, studios could decide when to implement updates and were allowed to use an older version of the platform for a period of time. The company offered assistance and kept developers updated of changes in its forums and through emails, Griffiths said. He called accusations of shouting and micromanaging “hearsay” and pointed to Narula’s approval rating on the Glassdoor job review site, which was at about 83% when this article was published, and said most reviewers on the site would recommend working at Improbable to a friend.

As for employee attrition, Griffiths said that the company’s voluntary turnover rate is in line with the tech industry, which is high. A report from LinkedIn put employee churn for tech at 13.2%, the highest of all the industries it surveyed. Improbable has an internal tool that lets employees offer anonymous feedback as part of efforts to manage its culture, he said.

The London-based startup’s travails are just the latest setback for SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, which in 2017 led an investing group that plowed $502 million into Improbable. Along with Narula, SoftBank is one of two Improbable shareholders that have significant control, with a stake of 25% to 50%, according to Companies House, the U.K. registrar of companies. While some of SoftBank’s bets have paid off, such as its 2018 sale of a majority stake in Flipkart Online Services Pvt Ltd. to Walmart Inc. for $16 billion, several of the Japanese investor’s companies have run into difficulties recently. WeWork pulled its initial public offering, robot pizza maker Zume Pizza Inc. announced it was cutting hundreds of jobs in January, and Indian lodging startup Oyo Hotels is eliminating thousands of employees and losing money after an aggressive expansion. SoftBank didn’t provide a comment.

Pic: Improbable

Narula, the son of Indian construction magnate Harpinder Singh Narula, founded Improbable in 2012 with Rob Whitehead, a fellow graduate student at Cambridge who’s now chief product officer. The men originally worked out of a barn next to Hyver Hall, the Narula family’s mansion, before moving to an office in central London two years later. They’d met in the university’s computer science department where they bonded over a shared passion for games, dreaming of creating huge, detailed virtual worlds where lots of people could play together.

SpatialOS was going to be the tool that made those dreams a reality. It helps developers create complex, simulated environments. Plants and animals continue to grow and reproduce even when nobody’s playing; it can enable programs that mimic how electrical grids, transportation networks and traffic work together. It promised to create elaborate, persistent worlds unlike anything that had been built before.

“We’re in a place today where it is actually possible to create artificial realities,” Narula said in a 2017 interview with Wired. “Basically, we want to build the Matrix,” he joked. SoftBank’s investment that year was one of the biggest in a U.K. startup, on par with Google’s 400 million pound ($511 million) acquisition of artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. Before that, Improbable got early funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which put in about $20 million in 2015, as well as billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures and Singapore’s state investor Temasek Holdings Pte, which were part of a group that invested $30 million later that year. All told, the company’s attracted more than $600 million in investment.

Even after SoftBank’s investment, Narula retained control of his company, keeping 75% of the voting rights, according to regulatory filings.

People who know Narula describe the 31-year-old executive as unusually charismatic and persuasive, drawing people into his “reality distortion field,” a characteristic famously attributed to Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs. During a Ted talk last year, Narula said the types of games his creation enables will reshape human relationships and identity as people spend more time together in huge, collaborative worlds.

“If we could co-inhabit, co-experience things together, undiminished by physical frailty or by lack of context, create opportunities together—that changes things,” Narula said in the talk. “That bonds people.”

Bossa Studios was Improbable’s first big gaming customer to use its technology platform. The two companies began discussions about what they could build together in 2014, giving some users early access to Worlds Adrift in 2018. It was a major departure for a gamemaker that previously specialized in simpler, social titles, such as I Am Bread, “a beautiful story of one slice of bread’s epic and emotional journey as it embarks upon a quest to become toasted.”

Following Bossa’s vote of confidence, Spilt Milk Studios decided to give Improbable a try with a game called Lazarus. Described as a sci-fi twist on Groundhog Day, the game let thousands of players fight over technology and territories in a world that reset weekly. After about three years letting players test the game, Spilt Milk shut it down in September, saying the game was too expensive to continue and cited the costs of maintaining, running and updating the game as it became more feature-packed.

On its website, Improbable says it costs “slightly more” to use SpatialOS than traditional cloud-hosted, dedicated game servers. Improbable estimates that for the smallest “templates,” hosted in the U.S., developers are paying 8% to 35% more per hour.

Bossa declined to comment and Spilt Milk didn’t reply to requests for comment. Both are focusing on other games.

The biggest failure so far has been Automaton, a SpatialOS game developer which last year went into administration, the British version of bankruptcy. Its Mavericks: Proving Grounds game was going to be a 1,000-player “battle royale” shooter with users ducking in and out of abandoned buildings and running across landscapes to be the last one standing. The game had weather systems, and players left footprints and shell casings behind that let others track them. Mavericks was going to be vastly bigger than similar games, like Fortnite, which typically host a maximum of 100 people at once.

Big, complicated games like Mavericks are expensive to develop, and Improbable offered studios financing ranging from thousands to millions of pounds, the people said. Studios in return agreed to give Narula control over aspects of their business including communications and financials, depending on the deal, people familiar with the arrangements said. Game makers also agreed not to make disparaging comments about Improbable, they said.

Last year, Improbable provided Automaton a credit line of about 5 million pounds that could be converted into equity, according to the administrators’ report. The deal gave Improbable some control over Automaton’s finances. But Improbable became so involved in the game’s development that Automaton felt more like a subsidiary than an independent studio, and employees complained that they didn’t know who was making decisions, people familiar with the episode said.

Then last summer, Improbable told Automaton, which had drawn down less than a third of its credit line, that it would be withdrawing further funding, according to the administrators’ report. No other benefactors materialized, and the firm, which had been profitable through the fiscal year ending in May 2018, entered administration with just 30% of Mavericks development completed. As part of discussions about the company’s insolvency, Improbable said it would be willing to take on about 20 staff who’d been working on the project. The company had 40 employees at the time. Automaton’s founder, James Thompson, now works at Improbable as head of product research. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Improbable loan was meant to be a bridge while Automaton looked for other investors, Griffiths said. The loan was to be used specifically for Mavericks, and did give Improbable some oversight over how the money was spent, but was never meant to fund the game’s entire development, he said. Improbable decided not to extend the loan further after Automaton notified them that it hadn’t secured any additional money, though the company did contribute to a fund for Automaton’s employees who were affected by the administration, he said.

Improbable, which is private, reported that sales rose to 1.22 million pounds for the year ended in May 2019, double the revenue from a year earlier, but less than the 7.8 million pounds in fiscal 2017. Its net loss narrowed to 39.2 million pounds from a 50.4 million loss in 2018 as the company invested in its technology and expanded, adding employees.

In the absence of significant game traffic on its platform, Improbable has said its main revenue source has come from defense industry projects.

The company’s next move is to develop its own games. Improbable has set up studios and bought Midwinter Entertainment, a Washington state-based SpatialOS developer, in September. No games are ready for commercial release, though Midwinter has been play-testing one title, called Scavengers, where opposing players must decide whether to join forces to defeat monsters and survive in the wilderness. The company also acquired game development consultancy the Multiplayer Guys in September and hosting firm Zeuz in February.

There are also a number of other SpatialOS games in development including Seed, a multiplayer game by Klang, and Wizard’s Wrath, a fantasy first-person-shooter from DragonfiAR.

Improbable has also recently attracted a new CFO, Dan Odell, who spent 15 years at Walt Disney Co. where he was finance chief of Maker Studios and Disney Mobile and Social Games, the company said.

But so far, the only game for sale is from NetEase Inc., a Chinese gamemaker that invested more than $50 million in Improbable in 2018. Called Nostos, the multiplayer survival title launched as an early release in December.

“It’s a great team with solid technology, and Herman Narula is a visionary CEO,” NetEase said in an emailed statement. “We chose to work with Improbable for their advanced technical capability and the increasing usability of their technology further confirmed our choice.”

Nostos got three out of five stars on game-distribution platform Steam, with reviewers hailing its promise and beautiful graphics, but complaining that the game is unpolished and buggy. NetEase developers posted in January that they realized there were some problems and had been working on improving performance issues.

“I really want to like the game, I really do but there isn’t much game here,” the top reviewer, the self-styled Trashgoblin, wrote in December.

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artificialintelligencebits · 5 years ago

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Autonomous delivery van drives at Goodwood Festival of Speed

On the opening day of the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a new company called Kar-go gave the first public demonstration of what is believed to be Europe’s first roadworthy autonomous delivery vehicle . Unveiled at the Future Lab exhibition at Goodwood, Kar-go aims to provide a solution for retailers that need to compete with Amazon’s free deliveries. According to the company’s founder, William Sachiti, the most expensive part of delivering items to people’s homes is the so-called last mile – the final part of their journey to the customer. The Kar-go autonomous vehicle uses an Nvidia Drive PX graphics processing unit (GPU) system to run real-time image detection for autonomous driving. It also includes a robot picker, which is used at the delivery destination to grab the package ready for the customer. Kar-go uses a combination of continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM), which Sachiti said creates a highly evolved top-level controller system that can “learn” from the past, “perceive” its environment and make any necessary corrections. Unlike autonomous cars, which are being designed to drive on any road, Kar-go will have defined local driving routes, which Sachiti said means it can learn normal activities and objects that appear on its driving routes. As is the case with military drone pilots, when being driven in the real world, Kar-go will also have a remote human operator on hand to step in if there are unforeseen events. However, in the event of any emergencies, he said Kar-go would slow down and stop automatically. Cliff Saran/Computer Weekly Kar-go autonomous delivery vehicle Sachiti expects to have one Kar-go vehicle piloting autonomous deliveries within three months and anticipates that autonomous deliveries via Kar-go will roll out in 2020. The company has raised over £300,000 through Crowdcube and has hired a team of artificial intelligence (AI) experts, as well as a chief designer from the McLaren Racing team, to develop software and hardware. Kar-go has launched the next funding round to scale-up production and testing. When asked about potential competition such as Amazon’s drone deliveries, Sachiti said he was confident that local authorities and the public would not tolerate the level of noise that drones generate. And while other autonomous delivery robots do exist, he said these have largely been restricted to use on the pavement, rather than on the road. Read more about autonomous vehicles Autonomous vehicle data from AI, car cognition, smart mobility and V2X can lead to new business models that can manage digital disruption on industries. Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles are a decade away. By then, the tech will be so expensive that it will only be available on high-end vehicles. Source: www.computerweekly.com Read the full article

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party-hard-or-die · 6 years ago

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A Tech Guru Captivated Canada. Then He Fled to China.

VANCOUVER — Sun Yian was living the Canadian dream.

The Chinese immigrant found fortune harnessing Canadian talent to develop cutting-edge technology, everything from semiconductors to facial recognition, to take back to China. His company grew to more than 1,500 employees across China and North America, and was lauded by Canadian officials as a model for unlocking the Chinese market to create homegrown prosperity.

Then Mr. Sun stopped paying his Canadian workers and fled to China. Left behind are lawsuits from angry investors and Canadian employees who are wondering whether their work could be used to help China’s growing domestic surveillance state.

Canada has long benefited from close business ties to China, and lawmakers have courted the country as a new market for Canadian companies as well as a source of investment. Now, Mr. Sun’s story is fueling calls for heightened skepticism of Chinese money.

“Canadian officials have to some degree been blinded by China’s incredible economic growth and waves of capital spreading worldwide,” said Michael Byers, a professor of global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “They’re certainly naïve to China’s approach to acquiring high tech from other countries, and they haven’t pushed hard on getting answers before allowing deals to go through.”

In March 2017, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved the sale of a Montreal laser company to a firm partly owned by the Chinese government, despite objections from security officials in the previous Canadian government. In June 2017, Canada waived a security review for a Chinese takeover of Norsat International, a Vancouver high-tech company that provided satellite technology to the United States military.

Mr. Sun’s company, Istuary Innovation Group, initially appeared to represent the positives of Chinese investment. His company brought jobs and high-tech business to Vancouver. But a review of the company’s finances and interviews with former employees reveal a murky web of financial and previously undisclosed ties to the Chinese government.

Mr. Sun, 45, who goes by the name Ethan, founded Istuary in 2013 in a Vancouver Starbucks, just as the Canadian government was welcoming greater Chinese investment. At its peak, the technology incubator and venture fund occupied two floors of a downtown Vancouver office building, where engineers toiled on semiconductors, robotics, big data analytics and facial recognition. By 2017, Istuary had 24 offices around the world, including in Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Toronto.

The company’s growth helped give Mr. Sun access to Canada’s political elite, relationships that were nurtured through political donations and corporate sponsorships. Photos he posted online show him smiling with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a trade mission in China. Government officials in British Columbia praised Mr. Sun for creating Canadian jobs.

A Vancouver government agency signed a contract with Chinese industrial parks to expand Istuary’s operations. Istuary joined publicly funded Canadian organizations to do research. Canada’s immigration ministry approved the company for a federal startup visa program that lets foreign entrepreneurs obtain permanent residency.

“The government gave us really good support,” Mr. Sun told a Canadian business summit in 2015, according to a video of his speech posted online.

Yet some of Istuary’s work provoked concern among employees.

Eric Hsu, 39, an American data scientist hired by Istuary’s Vancouver office in 2016, said he worked on artificial intelligence capable of recognizing a person’s face across multiple surveillance feeds or detecting specific human behavior, like fighting. “A lot of these security applications were both humanitarian and ethically troubling,” he said in an interview. “Chinese clients had lots of ideas for ways they would use our applications. Some of those raised red flags.”

An Istuary customer presentation reviewed by The New York Times highlighted the services its technology could offer in Chinese cities. They included the ability to recognize faces through security cameras and run them through databases, as well as track people’s personal relationships. It also highlighted other services, like tracking crowds and land records.

Mr. Hsu said he attended trade shows in China where Mr. Sun pitched Istuary’s artificial intelligence technology to potential customers interested in products designed to prevent prisoner suicides or for detecting criminal activity.

Human rights groups say Chinese authorities have been zealously using big data collection, A.I. and facial-recognition technology to upgrade Beijing’s mass surveillance efforts.

Mr. Sun enjoyed ties to the Chinese government that his Canadian workers and investors say he did not disclose.

Kuang’en Network Technologies, a cybersecurity company he founded in Beijing in 2014, specialized in industrial control systems for some of China’s biggest state-owned enterprises.

State Grid, China’s national power distributor, said it banned Kuang’en, among other companies, in 2016 from bidding on public contracts because of collusion, without offering details. But that year, Kuang’en formed a joint venture with another cybersecurity firm, BeijingVRV, whose powerful Chinese government clients include the National People’s Congress, the finance and foreign ministries, military contractors and public security agencies.

According to corporate documents and Mr. Sun’s employees in China, Istuary and Kuang’en shared funding, workers, technology, office space and shareholders, including Mr. Sun’s wife, Hu Yulan.

Former Istuary employees in Vancouver said the company’s collapse began last spring with a series of missed payrolls and final paychecks in May 2017. Many stayed at their jobs anyway.

“Sun kept giving us false hopes,” said Manivannan Gajendran, who led an Istuary quality testing team in Vancouver. He said he took out a $15,000 line of credit to cover his daily expenses while he waited for money that never came.

By then, Mr. Sun had gone back to China. In August, Istuary investors in British Columbia sued Mr. Sun and his wife, accusing the couple of illegally using funds to purchase two multimillion-dollar homes in Vancouver.

Canada’s immigration ministry suspended Istuary from the startup visa program after learning of the allegations. In an email, a ministry spokeswoman said it had gathered information on Istuary after the company was recommended by an industry association, and “found no reason to reject the designation recommendation at that time.”

Mr. Sun did not respond to interview requests made through his Vancouver lawyer. But he denied the allegations in a letter posted on Istuary’s now-defunct website in October. “We are NOT a Ponzi scheme,” he wrote.

A British Columbia provincial employment department has since ordered Istuary to pay around $2.2 million in unpaid wages to more than 150 employees and has begun collection proceedings in order to seize Mr. Sun’s residential properties, a spokeswoman from the province’s labor ministry said in an email.

The fallout, and Mr. Sun’s broken promises, soon reached the company’s operations in China. According to Laura Fan, an Istuary employee in Guangdong Province, Mr. Sun claimed the company’s cash crunch was because of poor management and Chinese regulatory changes. He also blamed Chinese investors and their “political mission” for pressuring him into striking deals with American chip companies, she said.

In December, Istuary and Kuang’en’s offices began closing across China, without employees being paid for months of work. “These people never got any of their salaries,” Ms. Fan said.

Just before Christmas, former employees said, two people from a Chinese technology firm that had invested in Kuang’en camped out in the Beijing office, hoping to catch Mr. Sun. A few weeks later, debt collectors locked the doors with a heavy chain. On a recent visit to the shuttered office, trash covered a rickety cot and chairs visible in the entryway.

Someone had scrawled a large handwritten message across the glass doors: “The fraudster network fakes bankruptcy, maliciously owes salaries and cons its employees.”

Underneath was an ultimatum: “Pay us the money and we’ll unlock the place.”

Dan Levin reported from Vancouver. Juecheng Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Cao Li contributed research from Hong Kong.

The post A Tech Guru Captivated Canada. Then He Fled to China. appeared first on World The News.

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newestbalance · 6 years ago