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AI unlocks ancient Dead Sea Scrolls mystery

"Cutting edge technology" reveals how scribes foiled modern scholars with one of the Biblical texts.
Source: bbc.com

UK should set tougher air pollution limits, says Kissi-Debrah coroner

The UK government should impose tougher limits on air pollution, in line with World Health Organization recommendations, to prevent more deaths like those of 9-year old Ella Kissi-Debrah, a coroner has urged.
Source: newscientist.com

Essential Technologies: The Tally Stick - The Scholarly Kitchen

From the Upper Paleolithic Era up until the mid 1800s, the tally stick was a remarkably long-lived piece of technology.
Source: sspnet.org

Why a U.S. hospital and oil company turned to facial recognition

Deployments of facial recognition from Israeli startup AnyVision show how the surveillance software has gained adoption across the United States even as regulatory and ethical debates about it rage.
Source: reuters.com

IEA issues 'dire warning' on CO2 emissions as it predicts 5% rise

Global CO2 emissions from energy are seen rising nearly 5% this year, suggesting the economic rebound from COVID-19 could be "anything but sustainable" for the climate, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
Source: reuters.com

Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create...
Source: eff.org

It just got a little easier to move your Facebook posts to some other platform

Social networks have typically followed the roach motel model of customer data: Make it easy to push data in, but hard/impossible to pull it back out. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter all make money by knowing what information you've (wittingly or unwittingly) handed over â…
Source: niemanlab.org

APOD: 2021 April 18 - Rainbow Airglow over the Azores

"A spectacular sky is visible through this banded airglow, with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy running up the image center, and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, visible near the top left."
Source: nasa.gov

NASA has flown its Ingenuity drone helicopter on Mars for the first time

The historic moment was livestreamed on YouTube and Ingenuity captured the photo above with one of its two cameras.
Source: technologyreview.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

World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'

"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com

Using Markov chain model to evaluate medical students’ trajectory on progress tests and predict USMLE step 1 scores---a

Background Medical students must meet curricular expectations and pass national licensing examinations to become physicians. However, no previous studies explicitly modeled stages of medical students acquiring basic science knowledge. In this study, we employed an innovative statistical model to characterize...
Source: biomedcentral.com

This Robot Taught Itself to Walk in a Simulation—Then Went for a Stroll in Berkeley

Recently, in a Berkeley lab, a robot called Cassie taught itself to walk a little like a toddler might—through trial and error.
Source: singularityhub.com

Use of 360° virtual reality video in medical obstetrical education: a quasi-experimental design Vera Arents. Pieter C.

Background Video-based teaching has been part of medical education for some time but 360° videos using a virtual reality (VR) device are a new medium that offer extended possibilities. We investigated whether adding a 360° VR video to the internship curriculum leads to an improvement of long-term recall...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Databunker secure storage

Really like this approach putting privacy tools all in one place. Warrants some experimentation. "Databunker gives strong, serious, real personal-data protection for customer records without expensive custom coding and with full customer visibility."
Source: databunker.org

UK PM urges calm as Belfast protesters hijack bus, attack police

Crowds of youths in a pro-British area of Belfast set a hijacked bus on fire and attacked police with stones in the latest of a series of nightly outbreaks of violence that began last week.
Source: reuters.com

Left-wing party wins Greenland election, opposes big mining project

Greenland's left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party pledged its opposition to a large rare earth mining project on Wednesday after winning a parliamentary election with more than a third of the votes.
Source: reuters.com

To them that hath: economic complexity and local industrial strategy in the UK Penny Mealy. Diane Coyle. International Tax

Divergent economic performance in many countries has led to renewed interest in place-based policies, such as the UK’s local industrial strategies at the level of Combined Authorities or Local Economic Partnerships. However, an analysis of employment data using methods from the economic complexity...
Source: springer.com

Innovators in Japan are Developing New Technologies to Counter Coronavirus

As the global coronavirus pandemic continues, the world is searching for new measures that will minimize the risk of infection while allowing essential institutions such as hospitals, government, and schools to continue to function.
Source: reuters.com

Winds of change: how Enel and Iberdrola powered up for the energy transition

Europe's biggest utilities Enel and Iberdrola saw the clean energy transition coming decades ago when others baulked at the high cost of producing energy from the sun and wind and instead stuck with coal and oil.
Source: reuters.com