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What (else) happened? A key question for learning programmes.

blog post image Good paper from 2013 on the need to go beyond just asking 'did our programme work?' "It is clear that programme evaluations using traditional ‘outcomes-based’ models are inadequate for the health professions context. Consequently, the scholarship in health professions education has begun to incorporate...
Source: wiley.com

gathio - events without the big tech

An easier, quicker, and much less privacy-invading way to make and share events
Source: gath.io

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

Will electric motorbike sales take off across Asia?

"Soaring petrol prices could speed up the transition to electric much faster than expected." Could electric motorbikes become a thing in the UK? Not so much in hilly Cornwall perhaps but cities maybe. The smaller size of a motorbike battery lends itself to being swappable.
Source: bbc.com

The Lyonesse Project: a study of the coastal and marine environment of the Isles of Scilly (OASIS ID cornwall2-58903)

This project was commissioned by English Heritage and carried out between 2009 and 2013 by Historic Environment Projects, Cornwall Council with a team of specialists from Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Exeter and Plymouth Universities, English Heritage's Scientific Dating Team, volunteers and local experts and...
Source: archaeologydataservice.ac.uk

How the War in Ukraine Could Get Much Worse

The West and Russia may be entering into the terminal stages of an insecurity spiral, which could produce a larger European war even if it doesn’t go nuclear.
Source: foreignaffairs.com

Are Electric Cars the Solution?

Industries pushing electric cars are not so much concerned with slowing down climate change as they are accelerating technological control
Source: resilience.org

What happened when a 'wildly irrational' algorithm made crucial healthcare decisions

Advocates say having computer programs decide how much help vulnerable people can get is often arbitrary - and in some cases downright cruel
Source: theguardian.com

Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com

Constructing Transformers For Longer Sequences with Sparse Attention Methods

"We show that carefully designed sparse attention can be as expressive and flexible as the original full attention model. Along with theoretical guarantees, we provide a very efficient implementation which allows us to scale to much longer inputs. As a consequence, we achieve state-of-the-art results...
Source: googleblog.com

Building customer relationships with conversational AI

We’ve all been there. “Please listen to our entire menu as our options have changed. Say or press one for product information…” Sometimes, these automated customer service experiences are effective and efficient—other times, not so much. Many organizations are already using chatbots and virtual...
Source: technologyreview.com

Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets

blog post image Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...

Moving fast and breaking us all: Big Tech’s unaccountable algorithms

Much of the technology driving revenues for the world’s most powerful digital platforms is accountable to no one—not even the companies themselves.
Source: rankingdigitalrights.org

Why Are COVID-19 Case Numbers Dropping?

"We don’t know. That part is easy. Also easy is that case numbers really are falling — it’s not just reduced testing — and it’s happening pretty much everywhere. Urban areas and rural. Red states and blue. Places with broad vaccine rollouts and those with hardly any. North and South America,...
Source: jwatch.org

Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii

When in Rome ... or Pompeii. "Eat like a first-century Roman, using recent archaeological discoveries as your guide." "In consideration of some of this evidence, if we were to hypothesize that what we’ve read in the Latin literary record about “boiled meat,” “broth and chunks of meat,” and...
Source: atlasobscura.com

Goondiwindi Argus says that Government sets talks with Facebook

"Frydenberg and Zuckerberg to talk on Friday in an attempt to resolve news stand-off." Apart from the fact that Facebook has blocked them - sharing news stories from Australian newspaper websites would be so much easier if they configured their pages for sharing.
Source: goondiwindiargus.com.au

46,218 news transcripts show ideologically extreme politicians get more airtime

"We found that the House that’s shown on the news is much more ideologically extreme than the actual House."
Source: niemanlab.org

Abydos beer factory: Ancient large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt.

"The archaeological find in the Abydos burial ground is thought to date back about 5,000 years." They brewed beer in batch sizes of about 220 hectolitres and I bet they got away without paying much beer duty. Wonder if we can work out some of the recipes.
Source: bbc.com

11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological

11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological visual cortex systems, are a powerful category of artificial neural networks that can extract the hierarchical features of raw data to provide greatly reduced parametric complexity...
Source: nature.com

Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game

Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game: The current enthusiasm of generations of students for video games and the marked interest of training institutions for the use of playful strategies, which facilitate learning, has encouraged the development and use of formative games called Serious...
Source: online-journals.org