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showing posts for '2021'

Greta Thunberg aims to change how food is produced

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has set her sights on changing how the world produces and consumes food in order to counteract a trio of threats: carbon emissions, disease outbreaks and animal suffering.
Source: reuters.com

Germany declares U.K. a virus variant region

Germany's public health institute on Friday declared Britain and Northern Ireland a virus variant region, requiring anyone entering the country from the United Kingdom to quarantine for two weeks on arrival.
Source: reuters.com

Facebook faces prospect of 'devastating' data transfer ban after Irish ruling

Ireland's data regulator can resume a probe that may trigger a ban on Facebook's transatlantic data transfers, the High Court ruled on Friday, raising the prospect of a stoppage that the company warns would have a devastating impact on its business.
Source: reuters.com

Watch a Jet Suit Pilot Fly Onto a Ship to Trial the Tech for Fighting Pirates

The jet suit is made by UK-based Gravity Industries, whose founder Richard Browning was himself in the Royal Marine Reserves for a time.
Source: singularityhub.com

I tracked my kid with Apple's Airtags to test its privacy features

I clipped a keychain with one of Apple's tiny new Bluetooth trackers, AirTags, onto my son's book bag and waved goodbye to him on the school bus. I watched on my iPhone's Find My app as the bus stopped at a light a few blocks down from our street.
Source: cnn.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

Founded Upon an Error

A recent post on Reddit asks, “Why was Bayes’ Theory not accepted/popular historically until the late 20th century?” Great question! As always, there are many answers to a questio…
Source: allendowney.com

Flat Pasta That Turns Into 3-D Shapes - Just Add Boiling Water

The engineers are in the kitchen, again.
Source: nytimes.com

No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents' Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased

Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate whether technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and...
Source: sagepub.com

Human remains from Mary Rose show diversity of Tudor crew

A team of researchers with Cardiff University, the Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base and the British Geological Survey's National Environmental Isotope Facility has found evidence of racial diversity among the crew of the Mary Rose—a warship from the time of King Henry the VIII. In their paper published...
Source: phys.org

Bank of England predicts rebound in the economy

"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

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