Thinking Allowed

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showing posts for 'thing'

Newspocalypse now

"We will learn that the less something looks like what we have now, the better chance it has of being the thing on the other side of death."
Source: niemanlab.org

This AI Trained on the Life Events of Every Person in Denmark. It Can Now Predict Their Future.

Artificial intelligence is very good at finding patterns. Given enough data it will start making telling you what's going to happen. "The AI can make highly accurate predictions about people’s lives, including how likely they are to die in a given time window and their personality traits." ... ...
Source: singularityhub.com

Innovating Pedagogy 2023

blog post image Looking for something innovative to try in 2024? MedEd professionals would benefit by looking through these ideas first. Open University's, Institute of Educational Technology's latest innovating pedagogy report from August 2023. This is the 11th annual report on emerging technologies in education...
Source: open.ac.uk

These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI

Generative AI took the world by storm in 2023. Its future—and ours—will be shaped by what we do next. TL;DR 1. Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? (Probably) 2. How will AI change the way we apply copyright? (A lot) 3. How will it change our jobs? (Maybe not as much as feared but things will...
Source: technologyreview.com

Remembering the people

blog post image Please suggest some technology that might help ... but remind me who you are first. What do you use to keep track of everyone that you work with, live near, party with, study with, or just share time with? Mere humans can only maintain about 150 close relationships (Dunbar's number) so just wondering...
Source: wikipedia.org

Spem in alium nunquam habui (Hope in any other, never did I have)

This piece of music is probably like nothing you have ever heard. Maybe because it is nearly 500 years old it feels like it is from another world. Maybe because it is written for eight choirs with five voices each the forty parts it's so complex you'd be pressed even to hum some of the tune afterwards....
Source: wikipedia.org

Will electric motorbike sales take off across Asia?

"Soaring petrol prices could speed up the transition to electric much faster than expected." Could electric motorbikes become a thing in the UK? Not so much in hilly Cornwall perhaps but cities maybe. The smaller size of a motorbike battery lends itself to being swappable.
Source: bbc.com

Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future

When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops flying machines, and his latest projects are pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight -- from a flying wing that...
Source: ted.com

Quantum computing: The next big thing in healthcare?

IEEE newsletter on Quantum computing "quantum computers will give us a new understanding of the functioning of the human body based on their ability to process large amounts of data in a short time and identify new information and connections. At the same time, by obtaining and making more and more...
Source: ieee.org

The AI Hierarchy of Needs | Hacker Noon

Sometimes you come across something that someone has written which makes what was a whole complicated mess in your head very simple indeed. Monica Rogati has done that with AI using an analogy of Maslow's (in)famous hierarchy of needs. For AI it translates to something like collecting, storing, preparing,...
Source: hackernoon.com

How global conferences are using tech to stay in business

"Moving events online kept the industry going during the pandemic and now they're here to stay." Notable mentions of the conferences Collision, Web Summit, and RISE, and the speed networking software Mingle. "[T]he Distance Learning Association's Thomas Capone says that the future of meetings and events...
Source: bbc.com

Pegasus: Spyware sold to governments 'targets activists'

Israeli tech firm NSO denies media reports that its software has been sold to authoritarian regimes. The Android and iOS spyware can apparently see photographs and contacts, log everything that is typed, and turn on the camera and microphone.
Source: bbc.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

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...

COVID-19 has transformed education – here are the 5 innovations we should keep

"Five changes made to higher education during COVID-19 will be beneficial afterwards, according to an expert, including more creative assessment methods." Whilst this is written from the perspective of university education this authentic, rich, and active learning approach can and should be applied to...
Source: weforum.org

'Undiscovered Titian painting' found in Ledbury church

"An art historian claims to have found the Renaissance master's signature during restoration work." Fascinating story especially the then - plague - and now - pandemic angle. Enormous dedication from the historian and team who have been working on it - over 11,000 hours of work. Can't remember seeing...
Source: bbc.com

The Edge: Where Ed Tech’s $2-Billion Year Leaves Colleges

It’s not too late to pay attention to something perennially missing from these booms: whether the tools are working.
Source: chronicle.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 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