'Undiscovered Titian painting' found in Ledbury church
"An art historian claims to have found the Renaissance master's signature during restoration work." Fascinating story especially the then - plague - and now - pandemic angle. Enormous dedication from the historian and team who have been working on it - over 11,000 hours of work. Can't remember seeing...
Source: bbc.com
Human origins: 'Little Foot' fossil's big journey out of Africa
"How the priceless skull of an ancient ancestor was brought to the UK from South Africa for study."
Source: bbc.com
Covid vaccines cut risk of serious illness by 80% in over-80s
"The UK will soon be in a "very different world", government scientists promise after the success of the jabs."
Source: bbc.com
Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests
"A study also found body-camera use and community policing increased in places with the most active movements."
Source: scientificamerican.com
The Namib Desert bears a scar from a meteorite impact.
"In the vastness of one of the world’s oldest deserts lies a relatively recent geologic feature: the Roter Kamm crater (“red comb” or “red crest/ridge” in German). An astronaut onboard the International Space Station photographed the crater while orbiting over the Namib Desert. It is approximately...
Source: nasa.gov
'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
Covid: Bedfordshire counselling service sees rise in caseload
Demand for help from a youth counselling service will "continue to rise" during the pandemic.
Source: bbc.com
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
The bankers are bluffing, don’t scrap the bonus cap
There's no shortage of people wanting to be senior bankers. Luke Hildyard writes for Left Foot Forward
Source: highpaycentre.org
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
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
Climate Change: Government may review road-building policy
It follows a legal challenge from campaigners, who argue the policy does not fit with climate targets.
Source: bbc.com
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
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...
RSS feed