Thinking Allowed

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showing posts for 'ly'

The Technology Behind Cinematic Photos

There has been some work by teams at Google looking at analysing images to extract their 3D features. They launched a new feature called 'cinematic photos' and this blog posted by Per Karlsson and Lucy Yu, Software Engineers, of Google Research tries to explain how it works. "Looking at photos from...
Source: googleblog.com

'How many dead bodies?' asked Myanmar protester killed on bloodiest day

Shocking news from Myanmar reported by Reuters. "The day before he was killed, internet network engineer Nyi Nyi Aung Htet Naing had posted on Facebook about the increasingly violent military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Myanmar." "“#How_Many_Dead_Bodies_UN_Need_To_Take_Action,” he wrote,...
Source: reuters.com

Drones fly to protect rare New Zealand dolphins

New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday (February 26) that her government was backing a new project that uses drone technology to understand and protect the endangered Maui dolphins in the country. Gloria Tso reports. Reuters Video.
Source: reut.rs

Rocket Report Cornwall

Cornwall says “LOL, no” to space tourism. "If we're being blunt about it ... One council member, John Fitter, was more explicit, saying, 'If we were to entertain this, it would be quite ridiculous and send out the wrong message to those people in Cornwall who could possibly be suffering on below...
Source: arstechnica.com

Cornish couple feel 'discriminated against' over wedding language

"Steph Norman and Aaron Willoughby cannot have their ceremony entirely in Cornish." Apparently they could conduct it English obviously but also in Welsh (which is close to Cornish) but it highlights the lack of legal formality to the Cornish language.
Source: bbc.com

The Edge: Where Ed Tech’s $2-Billion Year Leaves Colleges

It’s not too late to pay attention to something perennially missing from these booms: whether the tools are working.
Source: chronicle.com

Open Access, Conspiracy Theories and the Democratization of Knowledge

The Scholarly Kitchen "We are in the middle of a new political dynamic here in the US – one that has been building for over a decade. This new dynamic has meant that science and scientists are being viewed with a level of distrust – and even, at times, hostility – that is unprecedented in modern...
Source: sspnet.org

Most brain activity is "background noise"

"Most brain activity is "background noise" and that's upending our understanding of consciousness." This complexity view of the mind is not new but this article explains it quite clearly.
Source: salon.com

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

Fires Raged in the Amazon Again in 2020

"After intense fires in the Amazon captured global attention in 2019, fires again raged throughout the region in 2020. According to an analysis of satellite data from NASA’s Amazon dashboard, the 2020 fire season was actually more severe by some key measures." “Our system identified about 23,000...
Source: nasa.gov

NHS sets up mental health hubs for staff traumatised by Covid

Forty hubs in England will field calls from frontline staff and contact those at higher risk directly
Source: theguardian.com

Ancient Northland swamp kauri solves 42,000 year old mystery

NZ Herald: Ancient Northland swamp kauri shows breakdown of Earth's magnetic field 42,000 years ago. "For the first time ever, we have been able to precisely date the timing and environmental impacts of the last magnetic pole switch," Chris Turney, a professor at UNSW Science and co-lead author of the...
Source: nzherald.co.nz

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

Eeek! or E484K mutation and the coronavirus pandemic

Rupert Beale · Eeek! · LRB 19 February 2021: "Uncontrolled spread – as we knew it would – led to an even greater wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths than last spring. Children were sent to school for one day before the necessary ‘lockdown’ was reimposed. The impulse to keep schools...
Source: lrb.co.uk

AI uses "ugly duckling" technique to spot melanoma with high accuracy

"Artificial intelligence is starting to combine with smartphone technology in ways that could have profound impacts on the way we monitor health, from tracking blood volume changes in diabetics to detecting concussions by filming the eyes." "Using the technology to spot melanoma in its early stages is...
Source: newatlas.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...

Australian news app beats Facebook in App Store

"Take that Facebook. A homegrown app from Australia Broadcasting Company (ABC) topped iOS download charts in Australia, outpacing Facebook. That's important for one big reason: Facebook just banned news from appearing on Australian newsfeeds in response to a law that would require the social giant...
Source: mashable.com

Preventing critical failure

Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com

How Norway is offering drug-free treatment to people with psychosis

People with psychosis are usually given powerful medication - in Norway they can now choose to go drug-free.
Source: bbc.com

Decade-long study shows half of all rivers in the world heavily impacted by humans

A team of researchers from several institutions in France and China has conducted a decade-long study of the degree of human impact on river systems around the world over the past two centuries. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study and what their findings revealed.
Source: phys.org