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Author: avi maxwel

New aviation icing detection system developed in Alberta

New aviation icing detection system developed in Alberta

Work being done by Alberta company Pegasus, based in Sturgeon County, has gotten the attention of Boeing.

“Boeing is always looking for companies that show great innovation, great technology development,” said Charles ‘Duff’ Sullivan, president of Boeing Canada.

“We’re extremely honoured that they’re able to actually share this publicly, the work we’ve been able to do with them,” added the founder & CEO of Pegasus, Cole Rosentreter.

Pegasus has developed a “game changing” new technology for the aviation industry called Motion Icing Detection Alert System (MIDAS).

“We developed this technology that allows us to actually detect icing buildup in real-time,” Rosentreter said.

“This allows us to basically peel and patch onto any surface on an aircraft … to give you real time alerts and life-saving warnings at the very early onset of icing conditions,” Rosentreter said.

He said icing is one of the biggest hazards and costs for the aviation

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The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages

The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages

Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”

This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.

The rise of the internet, alongside decades of American hegemony, made English into a common tongue for business, politics, science, and entertainment. More than half of all websites are in English, yet more than

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China’s striking advances in green technology

China’s striking advances in green technology

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China’s BYD overtaking Tesla as the world’s best-selling brand of electric vehicles is one of the most eye-catching headlines of the first week of 2024. But it is just one of the green milestones that China has recently achieved. More important for the world’s environment was the news late last month that China’s share of renewable energy capacity — mostly solar, wind and hydro — reached about 50 per cent of its total generation capacity in 2023. Renewables’ installed capacity surpassed that of coal power for the first time, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

China’s advances in deploying clean tech should be applauded, even if it is continuing to expand its use of fossil fuels such as coal. The country remains the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide,

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‘For people in Bengaluru, technology begins and ends with a smartphone app’ | Technology News

‘For people in Bengaluru, technology begins and ends with a smartphone app’ | Technology News

Nagaraja Prakasam is a bearded man with a book in his hand. He wears a colourful handloom shirt and an overcoat with his name embossed on it — Naga. It is a walking advertisement for one of the social enterprises he has invested in, GoCoop — a marketplace for handlooms and crafts from India. A serial entrepreneur, he calls himself Naga the Farmer.

Nagaraja is a hands-on investor, identifying startups which others ignore or which seem to be a long bet. For example, Uniphore, which later became a unicorn, was rejected by quite a few investors before Nagaraja picked it up. Today, it is one of the largest global AI-native companies.

Nagaraja is now an author as his book Back to Bharat: In Search of a Sustainable Future has hit the shelves. He speaks to indianexpress.com about his debut book, his journey, and his goal of empowering social enterprises.

Venkatesh

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Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

One won­ders whether this would have sur­prised Aldous Hux­ley. He under­stood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC inter­view above, that “if you plant the seed of applied sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy, it pro­ceeds to grow, and it grows accord­ing to the laws of

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