How the Post Office's Horizon system failed: a technical breakdown
"From bugs to unqualified staff, the Post Office's point-of-sale system was inadequate on many levels." The code was poor from the start and the small team of developers were not up to the job. However, the problems were apparent in 1999 before it was launched. Includes a discussion of the Dalmellington...
Source: theguardian.com
These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI
Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next. TL;DR 1. Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? (Probably) 2. How will AI change the way we apply copyright? (A lot) 3. How will it change our jobs? (Maybe not as much as feared but things will...
Source: technologyreview.com
The rise of the AI class
"In an industry shedding publishers and jobs and routinely challenged to do more with less, we’re foolish not to at least try on the generative AI suit."
Source: niemanlab.org
Britishvolt: Electric car battery plant gets government funding
Britishvolt says the money (£100m) unlocks huge private investment for a protect that will create thousands of jobs. See also Britishvolt.com The figure seems to be half of the proposed Government investment which was anticipated to be £200m - £250m in December.
Source: bbc.com
IT tools and gadgets
I really enjoy finding tools that just do the job and don't try to profit from you or your data. Here are some of the ones that I find useful. Send a large file or lots of files Transfer files up to 6GB in size. No registration required. No ads. Links expire. FileTransfer.io ... https://filetransfer.io/...
Overturning 'conventional wisdom' with 'natural experiments'
Via Reuters ... "Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens won the 2021 Nobel economics prize on Monday for pioneering "natural experiments" to show real-world economic impacts in areas from minimum wage increases in the U.S. fast-food sector to migration from Castro-era Cuba." "One experiment...
Source: reuters.com
PAIRED: A New Multi-agent Approach for Adversarial Environment Generation
This Google AI blog describes a method for machine learning using paired agents. The gap between the one that did the best and the one that did the worst is regret. That feeling of 'could have done' better is what pushes the 'unsupervised environment design' algorithm towards a better solution. "The...
Source: googleblog.com
Using the right tools for the job
Since this blog has been up I've fiddled with some text analysis stuff by analysing the text and making recommendations for similar blog entries. Did it all in PHP and MySQL just to understand how the algorithms work. Eventually it started to take about 5 hours to: tokenise and stemming the textcalculate...
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly?
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? The NEJM Editors asks what has gone so wrong in the US and lays the blame with the political leadership. "This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were...
Source: nejm.org
Supporting migrants and refugees with posttraumatic stress disorder: development, pilot implementation, and pilot evaluation
Supporting migrants and refugees with posttraumatic stress disorder: development, pilot implementation, and pilot evaluation of a continuing interprofessional education for healthcare providers: Refugees and migrants face an increased risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Adequate...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Are you a populist right wing conservative? Have you been hooked recently?
If I wanted to find those who have a "conservative ideology" - so that I could share my views or influence them - I would do the following: set up a new account and start making contactsshare several of those technology scare hoax stories that you see posted e.g. Dance of the Pope virus video, the Andrea...
Source: historynewsnetwork.org
A UN framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19.
UNSDG | A UN framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19. The five streams of work that constitute this package include: 1. ensuring that essential health services are still available and protecting health systems; 2. helping people cope with adversity, through social protection...
Source: unsdg.un.org
7 Predictions for a Post-Coronavirus World
1. Companies that traffic in digital services and e-commerce will make immediate and lasting gains 2. Remote work will become the default 3. Many jobs will be automated, and the rest will be made remote-capable 4. Telemedicine will become the new normal, signaling an explosion in med-tech innovation...
Source: medium.com
Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?'
Are there automation-resistant intelligences? The question we all want to ask is 'will my job be taken over by a robot?' "Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations,...
Source: ox.ac.uk
Randomised experiment: If you're really unsure whether to quit your job or break up, you really probably should
Randomised experiment: If you're really unsure whether to quit your job or break up, you really probably should
Source: 80000hours.org
The bilingual brain calculates differently depending on the language used: How do multilingual people solve arithmetical
The bilingual brain calculates differently depending on the language used: How do multilingual people solve arithmetical tasks presented to them in different languages? The question will gain in importance in the future, as an increasingly globalized job market and accelerated migration will mean that...
Source: eurekalert.org
IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close - Slashdot: "IBM began selling
IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer as a Revolution in Cancer Care. It's Nowhere Close - Slashdot: "IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world three years ago. But is it really doing its job? Not so much. An investigation by Stat found that the supercomputer...
Source: slashdot.org
The Future of Education is the Microdegree. "Microdegrees, such as Udacity’s nanodegrees, appear to be here to stay.
The Future of Education is the Microdegree. "Microdegrees, such as Udacity’s nanodegrees, appear to be here to stay. The reason is simple. Increasingly, what people learn during college holds little or no relevance to what they end up doing on the job. This isn’t because what they are learning is...
Source: elearninginside.com
Japan's 'golden coder' making games apps aged 82 - BBC News: Masako Wakamiya took up programming when she retired from her
Japan's 'golden coder' making games apps aged 82 - BBC News: Masako Wakamiya took up programming when she retired from her bank clerk job.
Source: bbc.co.uk
The secret of passing the MRCP part 1 exam. You may not like the answer but read on ... Going on the right course? Reading
The secret of passing the MRCP part 1 exam. You may not like the answer but read on ... Going on the right course? Reading the right books? Forming a question group? Signing up to an online question bank? Doing the right job whilst sitting the exam? Joining a Facebook forum? Doing past papers? All of...
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