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
Covid: Bedfordshire counselling service sees rise in caseload
Demand for help from a youth counselling service will "continue to rise" during the pandemic.
Source: bbc.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
Microsoft Teams AI could tell you who is most enjoying your video call
Researchers at Microsoft have developed an AI for the firm's Teams videoconferencing software that highlights positive audience reactions during a virtual presentation
Source: newscientist.com
Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii
When in Rome ... or Pompeii. "Eat like a first-century Roman, using recent archaeological discoveries as your guide." "In consideration of some of this evidence, if we were to hypothesize that what we’ve read in the Latin literary record about “boiled meat,” “broth and chunks of meat,” and...
Source: atlasobscura.com
Google fires Margaret Mitchell, co-lead of its Ethical AI team
"Last December, Gebru was fired from Google after she tried to be outspoken about unethical AI. This prompted some 225 Google employees to club together to create a union, in the hope of preventing further unfair dismissal and protecting employee rights. Mitchell was a member of said union, but that...
Source: techspot.com
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...
Australian news app beats Facebook in App Store
"Take that Facebook. A homegrown app from Australia Broadcasting Company (ABC) topped iOS download charts in Australia, outpacing Facebook. That's important for one big reason: Facebook just banned news from appearing on Australian newsfeeds in response to a law that would require the social giant...
Source: mashable.com
Preventing critical failure
Can routinely collected data be repurposed to predict avoidable patient harm? A quantitative descriptive study Objectives To determine whether sharing of routinely collected health service performance data could have predicted a critical safety failure at an Australian maternity service. Design Observational...
Source: bmj.com
How Norway is offering drug-free treatment to people with psychosis
People with psychosis are usually given powerful medication - in Norway they can now choose to go drug-free.
Source: bbc.com
Feeding your cat a very meaty diet may mean it kills less wildlife
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
Goondiwindi Argus says that Government sets talks with Facebook
"Frydenberg and Zuckerberg to talk on Friday in an attempt to resolve news stand-off." Apart from the fact that Facebook has blocked them - sharing news stories from Australian newspaper websites would be so much easier if they configured their pages for sharing.
Source: goondiwindiargus.com.au
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
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
'Concerning' rise in pre-teens self-injuring.
"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
Twitter a goldmine for tracking consumer mood on prices, Bank of Italy finds.
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
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean’s floor: Seismic data generated by whale songs helps build a picture of the ocean's base. "The song of a fin whale is not exactly the sort of thing you'd typically describe as musical. It's generally in the area of 20Hz, which sounds more like a series of...
Source: arstechnica.com
Using Technology to Teach the Complex Science of Climate Change
"The world of education is no stranger to controversy. Every year, you'll find a splashy headline about how different school districts teach different versions of history from very different history textbooks. Or you'll encounter one special interest group or another objecting to teachers covering topics...
Source: emergingedtech.com
Amazon India launches online academy to coach future engineers: Amazon.com Inc has launched an online academy to train students
Amazon India launches online academy to coach future engineers: Amazon.com Inc has launched an online academy to train students for one of India's most competitive college entrance tests, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday, as it taps a boom in virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Source: reuters.com
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