Thinking Allowed

medical / technology / education / art / flub

showing posts for 'ple'

Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets

blog post image 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...

Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub

“People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact...
Source: googleblog.com

Vaccination isn’t the quick coronavirus solution many of us hoped for

Varying national approaches to dealing with the coronavirus and variance in how people respond to vaccines put new hurdles on the path to beating covid-19
Source: newscientist.com

The Agile Manifesto 20 years on: agility in software delivery is still a work in progress | ZDNet

We've had two decades to absorb the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. What have we learned, and what are we still learning? 'We are closer and more aware, but we are turning a tanker and it is slow and incremental.'
Source: zdnet.com

Cornwall: Home care issues for people in rural areas

More than 80 people in Cornwall currently have no council-funded care despite being eligible.
Source: bbc.com

UK PM pledges 3 billion pounds for England's bus network

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will invest 3 billion pounds ($4.17 billion) in England's bus network, aiming to provide more frequent, cheaper services to encourage people to catch the bus instead of using the car.
Source: reuters.com

Over 27,000 students share how colleges and universities could improve digital learning

"A Jisc survey of 27,069 higher and further education students reveals that most are pleased with their digital learning, but areas such as wellbeing, mental health and staff digital skills need more attention." Get the basics right (like college WiFi)Make learning sessions more interactive Record lessons...
Source: jisc.ac.uk

Gloves that give people with tremor a helping hand | Reuters Video

One of the word's largest electronics manufacturers has invested in a UK start-up making gloves with built-in spinning gyroscopes that help people overcome the sometimes debilitating tremors that can stop them doing some simple tasks.
Source: reut.rs

French startup lobby to file privacy complaint against Apple

France Digitale will file a complaint against iPhone maker Apple with data privacy watchdog CNIL on Tuesday over alleged breaches of European Union rules, France's leading startup lobby said in a statement.
Source: reuters.com

Rashomon approach to medical education.

"The Rashomon approach was named after the 1950 film, Rashomon. In this film, a single event, a homicide is described from the different perspectives of the characters. In the Rashomon approach, teachers, like film directors, need to fully understand the big pictures so that they can engage characters = students...
Source: biomedcentral.com

Study shows conversations rarely end when people want them to end

"A team of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the University of Virginia has found that conversations between people usually do not end when either partner in the conversation wants them to end. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National...
Source: phys.org

Data-driven humanitarianism

An article from MIT Technology Review showing how the World Food Programme uses geospatial data that is developed and made 'open' to all by people within the areas being served. "It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its people are among the most vulnerable. Afghanistan’s snowy...
Source: technologyreview.com

How private equity squeezes cash from the dying U.S. coal industry

Private equity firms are proving there’s still plenty of profit in the U.S. coal industry despite a decade of falling demand for the fossil fuel. They are spending billions of dollars buying coal-fired plants on the cheap - and getting paid even when they are not providing...
Source: reuters.com

UK rollout data on AstraZeneca shot should guide other countries: vaccine chief

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

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

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

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