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...
Dreadful user experience can be expensive.
"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
A Convolutional Neural Network architecture for the recognition of cutaneous manifestations of COVID-19
To our best knowledge, this is the first machine learning-based study for automated detection of COVID-19 based on skin images and may provide a useful decision support tool for physicians to optimize contact-free COVID-19 triage, differential diagnosis of skin lesions and patient care. Mathur J, Chouhan...
Source: nih.gov
WhatsApp to go ahead with changes despite backlash
The messaging app is making a second attempt to convince users to accept its new privacy policy.
Source: bbc.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
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
Nasa's Perseverance rover in 'great shape' after Mars landing
"Perseverance will now spend at least two years looking for evidence of past life on the Red Planet. The American space agency has successfully landed its Perseverance rover in a deep crater near the planet's equator called Jezero. "The good news is the spacecraft, I think, is in great shape," said Matt...
Source: bbc.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
Abydos beer factory: Ancient large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt.
"The archaeological find in the Abydos burial ground is thought to date back about 5,000 years." They brewed beer in batch sizes of about 220 hectolitres and I bet they got away without paying much beer duty. Wonder if we can work out some of the recipes.
Source: bbc.com
Abundant Rain Turns Namibia Green
The landscape has been transformed by the wettest rainy season since 2011. "January 2021 saw rainfall totals double to triple the norm in the northeastern, central, and southern parts of Namibia. According to a weather monitor in Windhoek, 228 millimeters (9 inches) of rain fell in January; the long-term...
Source: nasa.gov
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
Greeks domesticated grapes about 4000 years ago to improve wine-making
We know that the ancient Greeks made wine as early as 4300 BC, but a new analysis of preserved seeds suggests grapes were domesticated around 2000 BC
Source: newscientist.com
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
3D Scene Understanding with TensorFlow 3D
Posted by Alireza Fathi, Research Scientist and Rui Huang, AI Resident, Google Research "The growing ubiquity of 3D sensors (e.g., Lidar, depth sensing cameras and radar) over the last few years has created a need for scene understanding technology that can process the data these devices capture. Such...
Source: googleblog.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
Frontline workers left "risking lives to provide treatment and care"
"The Department for Health and Social Care's decision to prioritise hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic meant social care providers were left exposed by lack of PPE, says the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in its first report on PPE procurement published today." "While government...
Source: parliament.uk
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological
11 TOPS photonic convolutional accelerator for optical neural networks: Convolutional neural networks, inspired by biological visual cortex systems, are a powerful category of artificial neural networks that can extract the hierarchical features of raw data to provide greatly reduced parametric complexity...
Source: nature.com
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