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Is a
cashless society really on the cards? World’s
most advanced computer no smarter than a toddler Prof Yash
Pal This
Universe |
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Is a cashless society really on the cards? TECHNOLOGY becomes meaningful the moment we see it solve a real-life problem. Boarding a late-night bus in London, you find you have no change — and an empty Oyster card. What to do? Run through the rain in search of a newsagent to top up? Make pleading eyes and scrounge the fare? No, use your debit card instead. One touch on the reader and, hey presto — dignity preserved. New ways of paying for things without using cash are rapidly transforming our lives. Up to 10,000 Londoners a day have been swiping their plastic to pay £1.40 bus fares. This has emboldened Transport for London, which will roll out the idea to the Tube, Docklands Light Railway and the London Overground next year. You can already touch your card to instantly pay for a steak bake at Greggs, while Urban Outfitters is binning cash tills in the hope that you’ll be more keen to make an impulse purchase from an tablet-wielding hipstress lurking by the fitting room. For years, we’ve been hearing about the demise of cash and the rise of “cashless” payments. Is that actually happening? “Businesses have no choice but to offer an alternative method of payment,” warns Geraldine Wilson of Worldplay Zinc, a London-based firm offering pay-as-you-go payment machines. “If they don’t, consumers will go elsewhere.” Wilson’s company has just launched a £60 version of the card readers currently used in restaurants and bars. They are sold at John Lewis and could change the way we pay for things though traders have to pay 2.75 per cent of the transaction to Zinc. Plumbers may not be quite so keen to forgo “cash in hand”. It’s not just card readers that are attracting attention from small businessness and individuals; mobile phones are where the action is now. “Turning your phone into a wallet — that’s where it gets interesting,” says Tim Green, editor of mobilemoneyrevolution.co.uk. “The mobility of the smartphones and technology makes everything instant. Think about dynamic pricing — retailers could send you different offers at different prices depending on where you are.” In Dalston, in east London, Lothair Hamann, owner of the Bird Café, explains why he’s started using new software called Tab: “It’s a new start-up worth supporting and they target independent businesses — we feed back to them.” Tab grabs your mobile phone number and photo for ID and you top up credit online — with discounts as an incentive. Competitors to Tab include Droplet, Sage and Barclays’ Pingit. They were developed in Britain and turn your phone into a mobile wallet, making it easy to send payments — or buy stuff by quickly scanning a QR (Quick Response) code. Intriguingly, Pingit allows you to make instant payments to an esoteric quartet of countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. Why? “Kenya is an incredible example of this technology,” says Green. We Brits may want to save a few seconds in Starbucks, “but think of someone in Kenya queuing up all day to pay bills.” Mobiles transformed communication in Africa — and now the same basic handsets Africans use might do the same for payments. “Mobile payment really is a new form of currency,” adds Green. “You get money on your phone from an authorised vendor and then pay by SMS.” But how do you get all the rival mobile payment systems to understand each other? Zapp aims to become the standard in Britain. Its parent company Vocalink has form. It powers the BACS and direct debit systems that pay your wages and collect your gas bill, as well as running the Link network which binds together Britain’s cash machines. “We estimate mobile will account for over 20 per cent of all payments within the next 10 years,” says Zapp CEO Peter Keenan. Zapp wants to become the BACS and direct debit of mobile payment. Zapp will talk to your mobile banking app and all payments are instant. Is it safe though? Keenan insists: “Zapp is a much more inherently secure environment as no payment credentials are shared with the merchant.” There’s clearly money in money — whether the merchant pays 2.75 per cent to Zinc or we pay fees on things like changing foreign currency. But why should we let corporations and banks skim the cream? Radical advocates of the online-only currency Bitcoin are trying to do away with money, banks and centralised currency controls altogether — in favour of democratised strings of code that exist in cyberspace. Alas, with pound and dollar signs flashing in front of their eyes, businesses everywhere have been licking their lips and piling in to the mobile money market. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — the billionaire who wooed Barack Obama and makes no secret of his own political ambitions — jumped feet first into mobile payments when he launched Square in 2010. Now he’s challenging eBay and Etsy with a new online “marketplace”. Square’s Wallet app works by checking you into a restaurant. You say your name when you want to pay for your meal and the card you pre-loaded is charged. “Square Wallet makes every customer feel like a regular,” explains the company’s Katie Baynes. “Your name and photo appears on the seller’s register when you enter.” Square isn’t in Britain yet, but the US firm launched in Canada last year and Japan this year. So it might not be long before it arrives here with its eponymous Square card reader, literally a Duplo-sized white plastic block that plugs into a phone’s headphone jack and allows small traders, like market stallholders, to take instant card payments. Could we one day see buskers, beggars or chuggers brandishing Square readers and smartphones on street corners? “Cash has got a long life ahead of it,” cautions Green. “If you want to buy a present for your wife, you still don’t want a data trail.” — The Independent
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World’s most advanced computer no smarter than a toddler ONE of the world’s best artificial intelligence computers is only as smart as a four-year-old child, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago IQ-tested one of the best available artificial intelligence systems to see how intelligent it really is. It turned out that the computer is about as smart as the average four-year-old, researchers said. The UIC team put ConceptNet 4, an artificial intelligence system developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), through the verbal portions of the Weschsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence Test, a standard IQ assessment for young children. They found ConceptNet 4 has the average IQ of a young child. But unlike most children, the machine’s scores were very uneven across different portions of the test. “If a child had scores that varied this much, it might be a symptom that something was wrong,” said Robert Sloan, professor and head of computer science at UIC, and lead author of the study. Sloan said ConceptNet 4 did very well on a test of vocabulary and on a test of its ability to recognise similarities. “But ConceptNet 4 did dramatically worse than average on comprehension — the ‘why’ questions,” he said. One of the hardest problems in building an artificial intelligence, Sloan said, is devising a computer program that can make sound and prudent judgement based on a simple perception of the situation or facts — the dictionary definition of commonsense. Commonsense has eluded artificial intelligence engineers because it requires both a very large collection of facts and what Sloan calls implicit facts — things so obvious that we don’t know we know them. A computer may know the temperature at which water freezes, but we know that ice is cold. “All of us know a huge number of things. As babies, we crawled around and yanked on things and learned that things fall. We yanked on other things and learned that dogs and cats don’t appreciate having their tails pulled,” said Sloan. “We are still very far from programs with commonsense — artificial intelligence that can answer comprehension questions with the skill of a child of eight,” said Sloan. — PTI
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This Universe In catalytic converters used in cars, the hot exhaust gases would pass with great velocity through the exhaust unit due to high temperature and pressure. How is the exhaust gas converted into the safer CO2, NO2 and SO2? Are the reactions phenomenally so quick? You have asked me about the construction and working of catalytic converters used in modern cars to cut out some of the pollutants in the exhausts of their engines. I have had to consult some writings over the internet. As I expected, I found the names of some special catalysts such as platimun, rhodium and even gold being used in the high temperature environment of the engine eshausts. These metals are used around cages of ceramics and other such material, making sure that the exit gases pass over large areas of the catalysing metal and ceramic cages. The catalysts help to convert oxides of nitrogen and sulphur into harmless gases. Some clever designs for the cages are required. As we know both the Earth and Sun are spherical in shape, then why is Earth's orbit elliptical? The Earth and the Sun revolve around their common centre of mass, which probably lies within the solar surface because the Sun is so much bigger. The shape of the orbit is elliptical. The shapes and the sizes of the Sun and Earth orbits are not independently defined. Readers can e-mail questions to Prof Yash Pal at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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‘Intelligent’ surgical knife can sniff out cancer tissue LONDON: Scientists have created an "intelligent" surgical knife that can detect in seconds whether tissue being cut is cancerous, promising more effective and accurate surgery in future. The device, built by researchers at London's Imperial College, could allow doctors to cut back on additional operations to remove further pieces of cancerous tumours. The technology, effectively merging an electrosurgical knife that cuts through tissue using heat with a mass spectrometer for chemical analysis, has also been shown to be able to distinguish beef from horsemeat. Study raises new concern about earthquakes NEW YORK: Powerful earthquakes thousands of miles away can trigger swarms of minor quakes near wastewater-injection wells like those used in oil and gas recovery, scientists reported, sometimes followed months later by quakes big enough to destroy buildings. The discovery, published in the journal Science by one of the world’s leading seismology labs, threatens to make hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, which involves injecting fluid deep underground, even more controversial. Astronomer finds new moon orbiting Neptune CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said. Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune. Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon. — Reuters |
The next
wave of cash-free technology will see you paying for your plumber with a
smartphone
