China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon's former software chief told the Financial Times.
Source: reuters.com
"Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, alongside climate change. New guidelines provide clear evidence of the damage air pollution inflicts on human health, at even lower concentrations than previously understood." "Global assessments of ambient air pollution alone...
Source: who.int
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that face masks can protect against COVID-19. There is, however, limited rigorous evidence on the extent to which mask-wearing is effective in reducing COVID-19 in a real-life situation with imperfect and inconsistent mask use. In Bangladesh, researchers...
Source: poverty-action.org
Israeli tech firm NSO denies media reports that its software has been sold to authoritarian regimes. The Android and iOS spyware can apparently see photographs and contacts, log everything that is typed, and turn on the camera and microphone.
Source: bbc.com
"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
"The Bank of England said Britain's economy would grow by the most since World War Two this year and slowed the pace of its trillion dollar bond-purchasing programme, but stressed it was not reversing its stimulus." Strong indications finally of a bounce back in the economy highlight the devastating...
Source: reuters.com
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
Even with vaccination efforts in full force, the theoretical threshold for vanquishing COVID-19 looks to be out of reach. Even with vaccination efforts in full force, the theoretical threshold for vanquishing COVID-19 looks to be out of reach.
Source: nature.com
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...
The 2,000-year-old mechanism has baffled experts since it was discovered on a shipwreck in 1901.
Source: bbc.com
MyHeritage have used the same AI technology behind deep fakes to analyse old photographs and link them to movements from a number of videos of other moving faces. Bring your ancestors back to life.
Source: myheritage.com
M.I.T. researchers have devised a virtual-reality technique that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures.
Source: nytimes.com
Natural experiments can be a really useful source of data. "Data from Britain's vaccine rollout on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 shot in older people should help other countries reassess their use of it, the head of the university's vaccine research group said on Tuesday."
Source: reuters.com
"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
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
At age 30, the Python programming language has never been used by more developers across more use cases than it is today.
Source: venturebeat.com
"Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design: Citibank was trying to make $7.8M in interest payments. It sent $900M instead." The screenshot is from court records where the judge ruled against Citibank who had wanted to get their money back. The lesson is to always include...
Source: arstechnica.com
In a small trial in the UK, pet cats fed on an unusually meaty diet brought home 36 per cent fewer prey animals than cats given a typical diet. "Domestic cats seem to hunt less when their diets are richer in animal-sourced protein, suggesting that feeding cats more meat could help reduce their impact...
Source: newscientist.com
"The rate of hospital admissions for nine to 12-year-olds who self-injure has doubled in six years." "In 2019-20, before the coronavirus pandemic, there were 16 hospital admissions per 100,000 nine to 12-year-olds, up from eight in 2013-14. Self-injury admissions for girls in this age group were twice...
Source: bbc.com
The Bank of Italy said on Monday a set of experimental indicators it created from the content of millions of tweets accurately tracked consumer mood on price, offering scope for a powerful new monetary policy tool.
Source: reuters.com