UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
Consumer group Which? staged a sting operation to investigate fake Google reviews in the UK.
Source: bbc.com
'Deepfake is the future of content creation'
Deepfake, or AI-generated videos, are increasingly being used commercially.
Source: bbc.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
Betting on death of petrol cars, Volvo to go all electric by 2030
"Volvo's entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of carmakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade." Maybe the transition to all electric cars is going to go faster than it appeared only a few...
Source: reuters.com
Volvo Cars to go fully electric by 2030
"The Swedish firm is to phase out all models with internal combustion engines over the next few years."
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
A Psychologist's Journey to Treating Phobias with VR - VR for Health
VRforHealth invites you to learn about the work of Howard Gurr, licensed psychologist in New York State, and his journey toward the use of Virtual Reality Therapy in helping patients overcome phobias and anxieties and assist in the enhancement of mindfulness. Since the pandemic, Howard practices VR therapy...
Source: vrforhealth.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
Drones fly to protect rare New Zealand dolphins
New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday (February 26) that her government was backing a new project that uses drone technology to understand and protect the endangered Maui dolphins in the country. Gloria Tso reports. Reuters Video.
Source: reut.rs
Bird believed extinct for 170 years spotted in Borneo
A team of researchers from Indonesia and Singapore has found evidence of the continued existence of a bird long thought extinct. In their paper published in the journal BirdingASIA, the team describes the history of the bird, why it was thought to be extinct and how it was found in Borneo.
Source: phys.org
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
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
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...
Facebook and Australia's media bargaining law
In Australia, Facebook’s ban on sharing news stories has sent publishers’ traffic tumbling: Audience declines of 20 percent or more have followed Facebook taking its traffic ball and going home. "Even people outside Australia can no longer share stories [on Facebook] from Australian publishers big...
Source: niemanlab.org
Perseverance on Mars: Where it is, and what the next steps are
NASA's first chat about its newest rover talks about the landing and what's next. "In their first press conference following Perseverance's successful landing on Mars, NASA and JPL scientists revealed some information on where the rover landed and what to expect for the next several days and weeks as...
Source: arstechnica.com
Increasing Students Critical Thinking Skills and Learning Motivation Using Inquiry Mind Map
These researchers from Indonesia explore the use of inquiry-based models in encouraging critical thinking in medical students. "Critical thinking skills are very important to have for students given the rapid distribution of information. To promote the critical thinking skills of the student, it could...
Source: online-journals.org
Declining Life Expectancy in the United States
This Viewpoint reviews the social and economic drivers of declines in longevity in the US, especially among lower socioeconomic status groups, and proposes policy options for the Biden-Harris administration to mitigate the trend, including an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage. Atheendar...
Source: jamanetwork.com
No, frozen wind turbines aren't the main culprit for Texas' power outages
"Lost wind power makes up only a fraction of the reduction in power generating capacity that has brought outages to millions of Texans across the state during a major winter storm." Plenty of disinformation out there. There have been posts apparently showing a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine but it...
Source: texastribune.org
Opinion: It
Hopefully that openness is here to stay: The pandemic has created greater understanding of the importance of good communication, particularly around health issues.
Source: independent.co.uk
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