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The Original Pawleys Island Introduces the Comfort Collection Deep Seating Swing just in time for Mother’s Day – PRNewswire

April 22, 2020 | Author: admin

GREENVILLE, N.C., April 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Original Pawleys Island (http://pawleysislandhammocks.com) is excited to introduce their brand new Deep Seating DurawoodSwing for Mother's Day. Now mom can relax all year long in style and comfort. The soft, deep cushions on our swings are the perfect place to unwind and enjoy family time together. All her cares will melt away as she swings in a soft breeze with warm sunshine on her face. It's a wonderful backyard vacation getaway. So, give mom the gift of love this year with a brand new Deep Seating DurawoodSwing from The Original Pawleys Island.

CLICK HEREto see the incredible selection of swings.

Durawood Comfort Collection

Durawood is a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) product made from recycled plastic milk jugs. Heavier and more sturdy than natural wood, Durawoodwithstands the most extreme weather and can be conveniently left outdoors all year long. A non-absorbent synthetic lumber, Durawood makes the entire Original Pawleys Island Comfort Collection virtually maintenance-free and nearly indestructible. And each piece of Durawoodfurniture comes with a Lifetime Warrantee to never rot, split, crack or attract insects.

The Original Pawleys Island: State-of-the-Art Construction

In addition to cutting-edge materials like Durawood,advanced construction gives the furniture an unprecedented level of overall stability. With a series of ingenious patent-pending techniques like K-Joint connections, Dowel Joint precision, and Mortise and Tenon Joints, The Original Pawleys Island produces furniture that is rock-solid - made to last a lifetime and beyond. In addition, each piece of furniture utilizes the highest quality marine-grade 316 stainless steel hardware, guaranteeing resistance to rust, corrosion and staining.

About The Original Pawleys Island

The Original Pawleys Island Hammocks story goes back to Carolina Low Country more than 130 years ago. Joshua John Ward, a river boat captain, simply wanted a good night's sleep during sultry summers. He set out with some rope and wood, a little gumption and grit and soon fashioned what would become the basis for our company the rope hammocka hand woven bed, two wooden spreader bars, a clew knot with a ring for hanging the hammock. Pretty simple when you think about it.

Our collections, which have grown with simpler times in mind, now include a variety of fabric hammocks and decorative pillows. And because Carolina Low Country is about sitting-a-spell, dropping in on neighbors and sharing a meal with friends and family, we introduced HDPE better-than-wood furniture several years back.

Original Pawleys Island Furniture, steeped in Low Country tradition is generous in proportion, long on durability and rich in design. From casual seating that lends itself to hours of conversations to outdoor dining sets where the best of friendships are cemented with a meal and a toast, our craftsmen and designers keep these simple experiences in mind.

Contact: Paul Pearse Phone 252-599-2073 Email [emailprotected]

SOURCE The Original Pawleys Island

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The Original Pawleys Island Introduces the Comfort Collection Deep Seating Swing just in time for Mother's Day - PRNewswire

‘Take Deep Breaths, Make Your Bed’ Therapists Offer Tips for Maintaining Mental Health During the Coronavirus – Evanston RoundTable

April 22, 2020 | Author: admin

Dr. Adia Gooden, director of community programs and outcome measurement at The Family Institute at Northwestern University.

Dr. Christine Somervill, director of programs for NAMI Cook County North Suburban

Everyone who is feeling out-of-sorts, apprehensive, uncertain about the future because of the Coronavirus may be relieved to know that is not so unusual.

Its normal for mental health symptoms to be exacerbated by a time of stress and crisis. And I think its really important to acknowledge that, said Dr. Adia Gooden, director of community programs and outcome measurement at The Family Institute at Northwestern University.

Dr. Gooden joined Dr. Christine Somervill, director of programs for NAMI Cook County North Suburban, at a City of Evanston Facebook Live Q&A session on April 20 that focused on mental health.

Both serve on the Coronavirus Task Force which Evanston Mayor Stephen Hagerty established to bring together representatives from various sectors of the City to coordinate Evanstons response to the virus.Mayor Hagerty served as moderator of the April 20 Q&A session, noting the growing significance of mental health as the crisis goes on.

The mayor has raised concern about the Citys mental health needs during so-called normal times.

And here we are facing a crisis of global proportions, he said, leading off the session, and I know that anxiety is high, stress is high, he said.

One question that frequently comes up, he said, is how one takes care of ones self at a time when so many restrictions are in place on activities.

Self-care becomes an important issue during a time like this, and getting proper rest is part of the core of self-care, Dr. Gooden said.

For most adults, that means seven to eight hours of sleep, and kids and teenagers need even more than that, maybe nine to ten hours, she said. That [proper res] boosts our immune system, which we really need right now. It allows our system to sort of regulate and calm down and relax, so prioritizing getting enough sleep, is important. So is making sure you are eating regularly and eating foods that are nourishing to the body.

Limiting the amount of caffeine and alcohol can make sense during this period, too, she said, because those things can sort of shift our moods in ways that can be unhelpful and exacerbate anxiety or depression.Taking time for oneself is another good practice, she said. So if you are in a house with your whole family, and its really hard to get space, maybe considertaking a walk by yourself, or if you have a car, sitting in the car.

Dr. Somervill said establishing a daily routine is important, too.

Just making your bed in the morning, putting on clothes that you would put on if you were going outside make yourself feel like youre living a normal life, she suggested.

If youre working from home, its important to create structure, she said. Dedicate some space in your home to do that. Make sure you schedule breaks so that you get up and move around and have lunch. Maybe connect with coworkers, via whatever tools you have.

"Also, you might consider not spending too much time talking about Covid-19 because, you know, I think were all consuming that information. And its important that were consuming reliable information and that we dont get overwhelmed.

Dr. Gooden spoke about people making use of their self-agency function, as they go about their day.In fact you should be doing them with purpose and intentionality I would say get up and lay out your day, she said. Know that youre going to have certain times when youre going to do certain things that will work for you.

Along with establishing a daily routine, she said, I think its can be helpful to sort of shrink the window when you start thinking about whats going to happen six months from now, or eight months from now. That [thinking of the far-off future] is when we start to get more overwhelmed, and can start to catastrophize, or think about the worst possible outcome. But if you sort of shrink it down and say, Okay, whats going to happen the next day or two, or maybe even the next month, but sort of shortening everything. The more anxious and overwhelmed and out-of-control you feel, the shorter your timeline should be.

If thoughts start rolling out worst-case scenarios, bringing it back and trying to let go of those thoughts and sort of check in with yourself: How do you feel now? Do you feel healthy in this moment, can you breathe in at this moment is one technique you might use.

People who start to feel anxious and overwhelmed, for example, at a grocery store, might do a grounding technique that we call noticing, she said, taking note of five things in your immediate environment to get your mind to settle into the present moment.

Connecting resources to people is harder now these times because were at home and cant go out and look for them, Dr. Somervill noted.

Earlier this month, Mayor Hagerty notes, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced a Call-4-Calm program a free emotional support text line where people can speak with a mental health professional. Any Illinois resident with a mobile phone can opt in by texting TALK to 552020 or texting HABLAR for service in Spanish to the same number.

Locally, more and more therapy practices are providing teletherapy options in response to the shelter-at-home directive, said Dr. Gooden. And so that may be a really helpful resource, to learn new coping strategies for depression. Depression can cause us to self-isolate, [which] can exacerbate depression, she said, and we have to sort of make more of an effort to reach out more than we might normally, because we dont have the normal ways of interacting that we usually have.

For that matter, said Dr. Somervill,during these difficult times, make sure you have the contact information, or the phone numbers and email addresses of people who are maybe in your close social circle , as well as people you dont talk to often, or havent seen for a while.

Reach out to them, she suggested, because one of the things thats really helpful to an individual who may be struggling is to do something that you know is helping another individual, so caring for other people, while you need it yourself, is a really good strategy.

And also ask for help when you need it, she said. I think part of the thing that people struggle with sometimes is they feel like theyre all alone ... and they should be able to handle things and dont ask for help when they need it.

Just share that feeling with people that you really trust, she urged. Take that chance, open up, be vulnerable and let the people who care for you help you in that way.

The Q&A in its entirety is available atcityofevanston.org/covid19.

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'Take Deep Breaths, Make Your Bed' Therapists Offer Tips for Maintaining Mental Health During the Coronavirus - Evanston RoundTable

Putting AI to work against COVID-19 – PHG Foundation

April 22, 2020 | Author: admin

Until the coronavirus pandemic took hold, it seemed that at least every other headline about healthcare innovations was related to machine learning or other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) - systems that can mimic human processes such as the capacity to learn and adapt on the basis of new information increasingly used in technology.

We have heard a great deal about how AI might improve healthcare, but what use is it in the face of the massively disruptive effects of a serious infectious disease outbreak?

In fact, AI is supporting a whole range of efforts to manage COVID-19. It has been reported that an AI-driven surveillance system identified the outbreak before even the World Health Organisation knew of it, based on data from a mass of sources including reports from health, public health and livestock bodies, and even allowed prediction of likely spread to other countries. AI continues to be used to track real-time spread around the world.

Certainly, the beauty of AI is the capacity to make sense of vast datasets that exceed human analytic ability; combining AI with genomic sequencing is, unsurprisingly, a powerful biomedical tool. One application is the analysis of viral genome sequences and combine these with computer modelling to predict potential responses of the virus to different drugs. AI is used to model the interaction of the virus particle with a potential drug in silico to identify candidates that may be effective at disabling the virus.

US researchers have used AI to identify a potential inhibitor of viral-induced lung disease, baricitinib, now in clinical trials. Many other companies and research organisations are using similar approaches to screen known drugs and other chemical compounds that could prove to be useful treatments, sometimes using AI to search the vast amounts of information available in the published scientific literature, as well as libraries of compounds.

Modelling can be used to predict the physical and biological changes that could arise from changes in the viral genome sequence increasing or decreasing the ability to infect humans, to cause disease, or to interact with potential treatments. This could provide early warnings of trouble, or suggest changes to any new treatment approaches that might be found. AI-driven modelling is also being used in the vital search for an effective vaccine; systems such as DeepMinds Alphafold are being used to model the precise physical structure of the virus, to help the design of vaccines that can perfectly mimic key parts and trigger protective immune responses.

AI can also be put to good use with many other forms of data. In the UK, researchers at the University of Cambridge are using machine learning to analyse COVID-19 patient information from Public Health England in order to predict the risk of patients developing more severe disease and needing specific resources such as intensive care beds and ventilators. The mathematicians are using information on patients being admitted to hospital, to intensive care units, needing respiratory support, and whether and how fast they recover, to develop predictive algorithms that could help hospitals plan ahead for likely resource demands.

It may even be that this sort of algorithm could be developed to aid clinical decision-making for COVID-19 patients for example, identifying patients at risk of rapid deterioration to receive extra monitoring or earlier respiratory support. Another personalised medicine benefit might lie in suggesting those patients for whom emerging treatments are likely to be more or less effective.

On the frontline of health services AI is helpingwith the delivery of healthcare, just as they are aiding other services. The sudden shift to remote digital health services for most patients, to reduce the risks of COVID-19 transmission, has seen AI-driven health apps gain further prominence. These may be directed to automating basic (but essential) processes such as taking patient information, or powering remote consultations and triage such as the Doctorlink symptom assessment platform now being used for NHS video consultations. The UK government has also launched a WhatsApp AI-powered conversational AI chatbot to provide coronavirus information to the public.

One important factor in managing the current outbreak is knowing who is actually infected. Current diagnostic tests use a technique called RT-PCR, but Chinese researchers have reported using AI to analyse CT chest scans in a bid to see whether or not COVID-19 lung disease could be distinguished from other, similar chest infections. Results appearpromising , though concerns have been raised about potential selection bias.

Success against COVID-19 from AI relies on two factors: the AI tools themselves (in terms of quality and performance), and crucially, the quantity and quality of the data used to develop and train those tools.

As Prof Ara Darzi, director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, at Imperial College, told the BBC: "AI remains one of our strongest paths to achieve a perceptible solution but there is a fundamental need for high quality, large and clean data sets or as the old adage goes, rubbish in, rubbish out; issues such as inadvertent bias introduced by the data used to train AI systems also require careful scrutiny. This is why regulating AI systems as medical devices is no simple matter.

There is little question that AI is supporting the fight against COVID-19 on many fronts; it may yet prove to have played a vital role in success, by aiding the identification of an effective new treatment or vaccine. However, AI is not the whole answer; the true benefits lie in combining AI tools with human insights and experience to deliver optimal public health and medical intelligence and interventions.

Look out for our new report on AI and genomics to be published next month

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Hotel resorts to crowd funding to stay afloat – Daily Business

April 21, 2020 | Author: admin

Dornoch: alternative money

A Highlands Hotel has resorted to raising cash through a crowdfunding campaign in order to stay in business.

Dornoch Castle Hotel, which has seen 70,000 in takings lost during the lockdown, said it expects to raise 40,000 from loyal customers and supporters to help pay its bills.

The immediate pressure of wages, dues etc can be covered to keep us in a holding pattern, and this will help us to be in a good position for the partial, then eventually full, trading, said managing director Colin Thompson, whose family has owned the hotel for 20 years.

He said he watched the crisis unfold with a certain uncomfortable feeling of impending doom after finding it difficult to secure help through the governments schemes.

The hotel has 22 employees on furlough but the hotels rates are the second highest in Dornoch, with a rateable value too high to qualify for the 25,000 grant that has been offered by the government.

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Hotel resorts to crowd funding to stay afloat - Daily Business

Google’s Head of Quantum Computing Hardware Resigns – WIRED

April 21, 2020 | Author: admin

In late October 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai likened the latest result from the companys quantum computing hardware lab in Santa Barbara, California, to the Wright brothers first flight.

One of the labs prototype processors had achieved quantum supremacyevocative jargon for the moment a conventional computer does something seemingly impossible by harnessing quantum mechanics. In a blog post, Pichai said the milestone affirmed his belief that quantum computers might one day tackle problems like climate change, and the CEO also name-checked John Martinis, who had established Googles quantum hardware group in 2014.

Heres what Pichai didnt mention: Soon after the team had first got its quantum supremacy experiment working a few months earlier, Martinis says, he had been reassigned from a leadership position to an advisory one. Martinis tells WIRED that the change led to disagreements with Hartmut Neven, the longtime leader of Googles quantum project.

Martinis resigned from Google early this month. Since my professional goal is for someone to build a quantum computer, I think my resignation is the best course of action for everyone, he adds.

A Google spokesman did not dispute this account, and says that the company is grateful for Martinis contributions and that Neven continues to head the companys quantum project. Parent company Alphabet has a second, smaller, quantum computing group at its X Labs research unit. Martinis retains his position as a professor at the UC Santa Barbara, which he held throughout his tenure at Google, and says he will continue to work on quantum computing.

Googles quantum computing project was founded by Neven, who pioneered Googles image search technology, in 2006, and initially focused on software. To start, the small group accessed quantum hardware from Canadian startup D-Wave Systems, including in collaboration with NASA.

Everything you ever wanted to know about qubits, superpositioning, and spooky action at a distance.

The project took on greater scale and ambition when Martinis joined in 2014 to establish Googles quantum hardware lab in Santa Barbara, bringing along several members of his university research group. His nearby lab at UC Santa Barbara had produced some of the most prominent work in the field over the past 20 years, helping to demonstrate the potential of using superconducting circuits to build qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers.

Qubits are analogous to the bits of a conventional computer, but in addition to representing 1s and 0s, they can use quantum mechanical effects to attain a third state, dubbed a superposition, something like a combination of both. Qubits in superposition can work through some very complex problems, such as modeling the interactions of atoms and molecules, much more efficiently than conventional computer hardware.

How useful that is depends on the number and reliability of qubits in your quantum computing processor. So far the best demonstrations have used only tens of qubits, a far cry from the hundreds or thousands of high quality qubits experts believe will be needed to do useful work in chemistry or other fields. Googles supremacy experiment used 53 qubits working together. They took minutes to crunch through a carefully chosen math problem the company calculated would take a supercomputer on the order of 10,000 years, but does not have a practical application.

Martinis leaves Google as the company and rivals that are working on quantum computing face crucial questions about the technologys path. Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as Google offer their prototype technology to companies such as Daimler and JP Morgan so they can run experiments. But those processors are not large enough to work on practical problems, and it is not clear how quickly they can be scaled up.

When WIRED visited Googles quantum hardware lab in Santa Barbara last fall, Martinis responded optimistically when asked if his hardware team could see a path to making the technology practical. I feel we know how to scale up to hundreds and maybe thousands of qubits, he said at the time. Google will now have to do it without him.

COVID-19: Quantum computing could someday find cures for coronaviruses and other diseases – TechRepublic

April 21, 2020 | Author: admin

While supercomputers are critical to researchers today, even they can't provide the massive computing power needed to map out the molecular structures of viruses to find cures.

When it comes to finding a vaccine that can halt and eradicate the deadly COVID-19 virus, today's supercomputers can only do so much. While supercomputers can do amazing things, they are not complex enough to find answers to nature's deepest and most complicated secrets, such as quickly and carefully mapping out the molecular structures of viruses so they can be defeated with modern medicines and treatments.

But an answer awaits perhaps five to 10 years away in the form of quantum computers, which are exponentially more powerful than traditional classic computers, according to computer scientists and other researchers.

SEE:Coronavirus: Critical IT policies and tools every business needs(TechRepublic Premium)

Recently a public-private partnership was formed to create a COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is working to harness the power of high-performance computing resources to massively increase the speed and capacity of coronavirus research. And though that work is today welcome in the fight against COVID-19, it won't unlock all the incredibly difficult secrets that are held closely by such viruses.

For most pharmaceutical companies, supercomputers are used regularly to help research, find, and identify new drug treatments, including the identification of virus structures so cures can be found.

Yet supercomputers used today in virus and other pharmaceutical research are still based on classical computing architectures that view all data as a series of binary bits with a value of zero or one. Those machines face the limitations of modern bit-based computer architectures and power that is available today but can't theoretically or physically handle all the tremendously detailed research that is still needed.

That's where the future promise of quantum computing is expected to one day provide the vast computational power that could allow researchers to truly map out molecular structures in real time to solve medical mysteries and help quickly identify new drugs and treatments, said Chirag Dekate, a supercomputing and high-performance computing analyst with Gartner.

"If you're trying to do a quantum realistic simulation of the molecules and interactions of a virus, that is where classical computing starts falling short," Dekate said. "In classical computing, what you are able to simulate is only a fraction of what you can do with quantum computing."

The problem, though, is that true quantum computing capabilities are probably at least five to 10 years away from actual use, Dekate said.

"When two molecules or compounds interact, in order to do a quantum computing simulation, you have to be able to simulate the electrostatic forces of the interaction at the atomic level between those things," Dekate said. "This is where the computational complexity increases exponentially," requiring the power of quantum computing over traditional classical computing architecture.

SEE:Coronavirus: What business pros need to know(TechRepublic)

Quantum computers are based on qubits rather than bits, which are far more complex and allow information to be stored in new ways, giving them added dimensions of computing power. But that intense power requires many more technical requirements to make it possible, and much work is still to be done to enable the technology.

Dr. Itamar Sivan, a physicist and the founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, a quantum computing technology company, said the promise of quantum computing will someday help during times of crisis, such as today's coronavirus pandemic. Such machines are expected to be able to solve incredibly complex scientific problems in minutes in the future, compared with many years by even the most powerful supercomputers of 2020.

"Quantum computing is not a new field--it is already decades old," Sivan said. "In academia it is being investigated, and in the last five years in industry as well. The interest in quantum computing stems from a promise of immense computational power that we will never be able to achieve with classical computation."

SEE:Quantum computing: When to expect the next major leap(TechRepublic)

For researchers, quantum machines will provide power that will transform medical research and a wide range of other fields, he said. "If you would want to have an exact simulation of a molecule such as penicillin, you would never be able to do it with any classical computer because it is too complex. But quantum computers with hundreds of logical qubits will be able to do this task."

Just how much more powerful is a quantum computer compared with a classical computer?

"In order to explain the information in a quantum computer with 300 qubits you would need a classical processor which is built from more bits than there are atoms are in the universe," Sivan said. "It's one of the toughest moonshots that we face as a society, but if we can do it it's going to change the whole world."

Sivan agreed that such machines are easily a decade away before they would be able to perform the quantum simulations that are needed for virus research breakthroughs.

SEE:Quantum computing: Myths v. Realities(TechRepublic)

"For some problems, it's not about just running an algorithm faster, it's about making the impossible possible," he said. "This is why in drug discovery today, the majority of the process is done with the molecules themselves in test tubes and culture dishes, because you can't simulate them and look at their reactions and behavior using classic computers."

The challenges of achieving usable quantum computing are huge, including the extremely delicate state of quantum data when it is used. In operation, quantum data is rapidly lost in experiments being done over the last few years, preventing stable use of the machines.

"There are immense challenges all over the stack to get to the Holy Grail of quantum computing," Sivan said. "Once we solve the problem of loss of information, we will be fine."

The coronavirus has infected almost 2 million people and killed 121,000 around the world so far. While many patients with COVID-19 have mild symptoms and don't require hospitalization, with the incredibly wide scale of the pandemic, even at a 5% hospitalization rate large numbers of patients have been requiring emergency care in hospitals and other medical facilities that are struggling to keep up.

Be in the know about smart cities, AI, Internet of Things, VR, AR, robotics, drones, autonomous driving, and more of the coolest tech innovations. Delivered Wednesdays and Fridays

Image: PhonlamaiPhoto, Getty Images/iStockphoto

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The future of quantum computing in the cloud – TechTarget

April 21, 2020 | Author: admin

AWS, Microsoft and other IaaS providers have jumped on the quantum computing bandwagon as they try to get ahead of the curve on this emerging technology.

Developers use quantum computing to encode problems as qubits, which compute multiple combinations of variables at once rather than exploring each possibility discretely. In theory, this could allow researchers to quickly solve problems involving different combinations of variables, such as breaking encryption keys, testing the properties of different chemical compounds or simulating different business models. Researchers have begun to demonstrate real-world examples of how these early quantum computers could be put to use.

However, this technology is still being developed, so experts caution that it could take more than a decade for quantum computing to deliver practical value. In the meantime, there are a few cloud services, such as Amazon Bracket and Microsoft Quantum, that aim to get developers up to speed on writing quantum applications.

Quantum computing in the cloud has the potential to disrupt industries in a similar way as other emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning. But quantum computing is still being established in university classrooms and career paths, said Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development. Similarly, major cloud providers are focusing primarily on education at this early stage.

"The cloud services today are aimed at preparing the industry for the soon-to-arrive day when quantum computers will begin being useful," said Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, an orchestration platform for quantum computing.

There's still much to iron out regarding quantum computing and the cloud, but the two technologies appear to be a logical fit, for now.

Cloud-based quantum computing is more difficult to pull off than AI, so the ramp up will be slower and the learning curve steeper, said Martin Reynolds, distinguished vice president of research at Gartner. For starters, quantum computers require highly specialized room conditions that are dramatically different from how cloud providers build and operate their existing data centers.

Reynolds believes practical quantum computers are at least a decade away. The biggest drawback lies in aligning the quantum state of qubits in the computer with a given problem, especially since quantumcomputersstill haven't been proven to solve problems better than traditional computers.

Coders also must learn new math and logic skills to utilize quantum computing. This makes it hard for them since they can't apply traditional digital programming techniques. IT teams need to develop specialized skills to understand how to apply quantum computing in the cloud so they can fine tune the algorithms, as well as the hardware, to make this technology work.

Current limitations aside, the cloud is an ideal way to consume quantum computing, because quantum computing has low I/O but deep computation, Reynolds said. Because cloud vendors have the technological resources and a large pool of users, they will inevitably be some of the first quantum-as-a-service providers and will look for ways to provide the best software development and deployment stacks.

Quantum computing could even supplement general compute and AI services cloud providers currently offer, said Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.In that scenario, the cloud would integrate with classical computing cloud resources in a co-processing environment.

The cloud plays two key roles in quantum computing today, according to Hyoun Park, CEO and principal analyst at Amalgam Insights. The first is to provide an application development and test environment for developers to simulate the use of quantum computers through standard computing resources.

The second is to offer access to the few quantum computers that are currently available, in the way mainframe leasing was common a generation ago. This improves the financial viability of quantum computing, since multiple users can increase machine utilization.

It takes significant computing power to simulate quantum algorithm behavior from a development and testing perspective. For the most part, cloud vendors want to provide an environment to develop quantum algorithms before loading these quantum applications onto dedicated hardware from other providers, which can be quite expensive.

However, classical simulations of quantum algorithms that use large numbers of qubits are not practical. "The issue is that the size of the classical computer needed will grow exponentially with the number of qubits in the machine," said Doug Finke, publisher of the Quantum Computing Report.So, a classical simulation of a 50-qubit quantum computer would require a classical computer with roughly 1 petabyte of memory. This requirement will double with every additional qubit.

Nobody knows which approach is best, or which materials are best. We're at the Edison light bulb filament stage. Martin ReynoldsDistinguished vice president of research at Gartner

But classical simulations for problems using a smaller number of qubits are useful both as a tool to teach quantum algorithms to students and also for quantum software engineers to test and debug algorithms with "toy models" for their problem, Finke said.Once they debug their software, they should be able to scale it up to solve larger problems on a real quantum computer.

In terms of putting quantum computing to use, organizations can currently use it to support last-mile optimization, encryption and other computationally challenging issues, Park said. This technology could also aid teams across logistics, cybersecurity, predictive equipment maintenance, weather predictions and more. Researchers can explore multiple combinations of variables in these kinds of problems simultaneously, whereas a traditional computer needs to compute each combination separately.

However, there are some drawbacks to quantum computing in the cloud. Developers should proceed cautiously when experimenting with applications that involve sensitive data, said Finke. To address this, many organizations prefer to install quantum hardware in their own facilities despite the operational hassles, Finke said.

Also, a machine may not be immediately available when a quantum developer wants to submit a job through quantum services on the public cloud. "The machines will have job queues and sometimes there may be several jobs ahead of you when you want to run your own job," Finke said. Some of the vendors have implemented a reservation capability so a user can book a quantum computer for a set time period to eliminate this problem.

IBM was first to market with its Quantum Experience offering, which launched in 2016 and now has over 15 quantum computers connected to the cloud. Over 210,000 registered users have executed more than 70 billion circuits through the IBM Cloud and published over 200 papers based on the system, according to IBM.

IBM also started the Qiskit open source quantum software development platform and has been building an open community around it. According to GitHub statistics, it is currently the leading quantum development environment.

In late 2019, AWS and Microsoft introduced quantum cloud services offered through partners.

Microsoft Quantum provides a quantum algorithm development environment, and from there users can transfer quantum algorithms to Honeywell, IonQ or Quantum Circuits Inc. hardware. Microsoft's Q# scripting offers a familiar Visual Studio experience for quantum problems, said Michael Morris, CEO of Topcoder, an on-demand digital talent platform.

Currently, this transfer involves the cloud providers installing a high-speed communication link from their data center to the quantum computer facilities, Finke said. This approach has many advantages from a logistics standpoint, because it makes things like maintenance, spare parts, calibration and physical infrastructure a lot easier.

Amazon Braket similarly provides a quantum development environment and, when generally available, will provide time-based pricing to access D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti hardware. Amazon says it will add more hardware partners as well. Braket offers a variety of different hardware architecture options through a common high-level programming interface, so users can test out the machines from the various partners and determine which one would work best with their application, Finke said.

Google has done considerable core research on quantum computing in the cloud and is expected to launch a cloud computing service later this year. Google has been more focused on developing its in-house quantum computing capabilities and hardware rather than providing access to these tools to its cloud users, Park said. In the meantime, developers can test out quantum algorithms locally using Google's Circ programming environment for writing apps in Python.

In addition to the larger offerings from the major cloud providers, there are several alternative approaches to implementing quantum computers that are being provided through the cloud.

D-Wave is the furthest along, with a quantum annealer well-suited for many optimization problems. Other alternatives include QuTech, which is working on a cloud offering of its small quantum machine utilizing its spin qubits technology. Xanadu is another and is developing a quantum machine based on a photonic technology.

Researchers are pursuing a variety of approaches to quantum computing -- using electrons, ions or photons -- and it's not yet clear which approaches will pan out for practical applications first.

"Nobody knows which approach is best, or which materials are best. We're at the Edison light bulb filament stage, where Edison reportedly tested thousands of ways to make a carbon filament until he got to one that lasted 1,500 hours," Reynolds said. In the meantime, recent cloud offerings promise to enable developers to start experimenting with these different approaches to get a taste of what's to come.

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The future of quantum computing in the cloud - TechTarget

How ‘Sultan’ of Indian chess won over Brits, beat Capablanca – Times of India

April 21, 2020 | Author: admin

CHENNAI: Decades before five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand powered the country's chess story, it was Mir Sultan Khan who gave India its first hero in the sport.

While Anand's feats on the chess board have been widely chronicled, very little is known about Sultan's glorious chapters. Grandmaster Daniel King, through his biography on Sultan released earlier this month, has revisited the life of a player who ruled the chess world much before any Indian did. Titled 'Sultan Khan - The Indian Servant Who Became Chess Champion Of The British Empire' - the book's foreword has been written by Anand.

In 1928, Khan organized the all-India championships which Sultan won. A well-known British loyalist, Khan went to London on a political mission in 1929 with Sultan accompanying him. While Khan was fiercely loyal to the erstwhile rulers of India, Sultan remained apolitical and concentrated on what he knew best - chess. Sultan showcased his chess prowess as he pocketed the British championships in 1929, 1932 and 1933.

Despite those wins, King revealed how Sultan was liked by the British thanks to his endearing nature. "Sultan learned an Indian form of chess before switching to the western style and still managed to achieve so much - that to me is the heart of the story. As I researched more on him, I found Sultan to be a generous individual who would often praise his opponents," Daniel told TOI.

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How 'Sultan' of Indian chess won over Brits, beat Capablanca - Times of India

Chris Burtenshaw, Strata Security: On cloud and IT complexity – and keeping off the front page – Cloud Tech

April 20, 2020 | Author: admin

Times may change, but standards must remain. Or, rather, technologies may change but user behaviour remains. Shadow IT has been in place at many organisations long before the launch of the smartphone, and attempts to take control of it, from the clunkily-named bring your own PC (BYO PC), to the more streamlined BYOD, have been just as common.

Now, instead of just shadow IT, we have shadow cloud, as well as what Zscaler recently described as shadow IoT. Its all about complexity, and for security managers, keeping an ever-increasing circle of sharks at bay.

Chris Burtenshaw (left) is founder of Strata Security, a company which aims to provide joined up cybersecurity, removing the silos and giving easy-to-digest insight across an entire estate. With the better part of two decades experience as a cybersecurity consultant, Burtenshaw kept seeing the same requests from his clients. His response was to build out a scalable solution and thus Strata was born.

What typically would happen is, towards the end of an implementation for a very expensive monitoring tool maybe it was a multi-million pound project somebody would pop up and say how do we show this is delivering value? Burtenshaw tells CloudTech. The tools themselves arent necessarily the best place to show the context of the tool.

So what I ended up doing was building one-off snapshots, usually in Excel, that allowed them to see what their tools were doing, how those tools were performing, and how they worked with a real customer cybersecurity strategy.

It is safe to say the companys main product, Strata Insight, is a little more sophisticated than an Excel sheet. As the company puts it, Strata creates metrics that correlate to security control frameworks granting a new level of mastery over such controls. In this way, [it] helps reveal hidden risks, gaps and imbalances. To give a basic example, imagine you have one or more anti-malware tools, and want to know if they are up-to-date across all your systems. Strata brings that coverage data together, enabling you to quickly spot gaps plus track performance against controls.

The question of why such a solution is needed raises itself. Complexity is one thing, but should the security vendors themselves have a bigger part to play? What generally happens is there is a disjoint which comes in during the sales to implementation to delivery process, explains Burtenshaw. A product is typically bought to solve a specific, identified need, and often that can be a technology-driven process thats led to the selection of that particular product.

As the project continues, the focus then switches to business, he adds. Great, weve got this new, lovely, shiny thing, but how is it delivering all of our strategy?'

The exponential rise in cloud services usage be it companies dipping their toes into the water to others actively exploring multiple clouds for different workloads has been noted, even since the beginning of 2018, when Strata was founded. Most people now are very much taking something like a cloud-first approach as far as possible, says Burtenshaw. That combination of a smorgasbord of public and private cloud services, plus the traditional on-prem environment for large organisations, that isnt going anywhere.

From a security teams perspective, obviously youve got to identify what those clouds are, and make sure theyre secure, because as we all know it just takes one unpatched server somewhere in an uncontrolled environment and youre all over the front page.

This is a marked change from even five years ago. As Burtenshaw notes, the pre-cloud world was still complex, but in a different way. One of the biggest challenges for larger companies was mergers and acquisitions, he explains.

Then there would be different tools for different parts of each individual organisations environments or networks. You needed that sort of holistic view to look at for example the monitoring system used by company A, company B, company C, to get the big picture.

As things have evolved, youve still got that level of complexity plus the clouds that these organisations use.

While cloud is irrefutably here to stay, so for the time being at least is Covid-19. The pandemic has seen working practices change radically, which means even more headaches for security teams. Burtenshaw notes that the first thing to do is the boring stuff how is the company doing remote access and antivirus? How are we maintaining control of our workforce? but it is essential. Many security managers and officers that we work with are spending most of their time over the last few weeks approving quite difficult security control changes to enable that transition to happen, he says.

Speaking to Jeremy Snyder of DivvyCloud last week, he argued that, with the need for employees to do as much work as they can remotely, companies are good at making things happen but less good at cleaning up after themselves. Burtenshaw again cites complexity, but adds that there should be positives from this not least changing peoples attitudes to remote working long-term.

The good thing is were in a much stronger place than we would have been five years ago, he says. From a security perspective, there is a lot more data available that we can use to understand our security risks and threats in that changing model, and to understand where we need to remediate. For example, theres a lot more data about the security status of endpoints available through cloud services than there was five years ago.

Even if you do suddenly have 5000 people working remotely, you can find out how secure those devices are when theyre using them to work remotely, Burtenshaw adds. You do have a lot more information available about things that are outside of your traditional corporate network that you would have been concerned about five years ago.

Photo byElijah ODonnellonUnsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders like Strata Security discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend theCyber Security & Cloud Expo World Serieswith upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Continued here:
Chris Burtenshaw, Strata Security: On cloud and IT complexity - and keeping off the front page - Cloud Tech

Our future is in the cloud and this AWS Cloud Bootcamp can get you ready for it. – The Next Web

April 20, 2020 | Author: admin

TLDR: From first-timers to experienced users, The All-Level AWS Cloud Professional Bootcamp explains everything anybody needs to be a true AWS cloud expert.

Sometimes, it really does pay to be first. Back in 2006, Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos ventured into cloud computing with the foundation of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was a solid 7 years before most of Amazons main competitors started up their own cloud services arms, but by then, AWS already had a commanding foothold in the exploding market.

Now, AWS is the unquestioned industry leader, holding a dominant third of the entire cloud market, which is set to exceed $330 billion this year.

The opportunities are there for those looking to make a name for themself and start a career as a proven AWS expert with the training in The All-Level AWS Cloud Professional Bootcamp. Right now, its available for only $34.99, an over 90 percent savings from TNW Deals.

This complete look at the AWS environment includes six courses and more than 30 hours of training that will not only help new users understand the AWS platform, but know enough to build, migrate, secure, administer and grow any companys entire digital system with AWS well-stocked toolbox.

All the ground level training starts with AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Guide for Beginners, as first time users start getting familiar with AWS and all the services they offer.

Of course, even a detailed introduction is just the beginning, so courses like AWS Master Class: Databases in the Cloud with AWS RDS, focus on how to create and maintain your own cloud databases; while AWS MasterClass: Networking & Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), as students go deeper on specific steps for building, configuring and managing your our own Virtual Private Cloud. Meanwhile, AWS Deployment for Node.js Applications explains how AWS-served apps interact with online data stockpiles

Flush with all that new knowledge, users can also take the all-important AWS Cloud Essentials and AWS Solutions Architect Associate courses, which get students ready for both the entry-level Essentials and more advanced Architect certification exams.

Each course in this bundle is a $200 value, but with this collection, the entire package is on sale for just $34.99, less than $6 per course.

Prices are subject to change.

Read next: Here's why your dreams are more vivid lately

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Putting AI to work against COVID-19 – PHG Foundation

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Google’s Head of Quantum Computing Hardware Resigns – WIRED

COVID-19: Quantum computing could someday find cures for coronaviruses and other diseases – TechRepublic

The future of quantum computing in the cloud – TechTarget

How ‘Sultan’ of Indian chess won over Brits, beat Capablanca – Times of India

Chris Burtenshaw, Strata Security: On cloud and IT complexity – and keeping off the front page – Cloud Tech

Our future is in the cloud and this AWS Cloud Bootcamp can get you ready for it. – The Next Web

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