172200759
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Press2ToContinue writes:
In the great digital commons of the brain, the call for open-source neuron-nuggets is hitting some serious firewalls. Despite NIH playing Gandalf with "Thou shalt share!" policies, some boffins are clutching their precious data like Gollum with a golden ring. This Neuron paper is like a fanfic crossover where data sharing heroes from UPenn, Cedars-Sinai, and Harvard-MGH team up, showing that when you de-identify and dish out your data, you might just level up in the academic game.
FAIR enough, but can we talk about the real struggle—convincing researchers that sharing is caring? Kudos to the BRAIN Initiative for not only managing to pry precious data from the hands of researchers but also demonstrating that it won't end in an academic Armageddon. It's almost as if collaboration and progress go hand-in-hand—who knew?
172200701
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Press2ToContinue writes:
Starting next year, Meta will play the role of a strict schoolteacher for political ads, making them fess up if they've used AI to tweak images or sounds. This new 'honesty policy' will kick in worldwide on Facebook and Instagram, aiming to prevent voters from being duped by digitally doctored candidates or made-up events. Meanwhile, Microsoft is jumping on the integrity bandwagon, rolling out anti-tampering tech and a support squad to shield elections from AI mischief.
In a world where Photoshop skills can almost land you a seat in Congress, Meta's new 'truth in advertising' decree is like a CAPTCHA test for political ads: 'Click all the squares with an authentic candidate.' Now, we just wait for someone to claim their deepfake was just a 'glitch in the Matrix' or their policy plan was 'lost in translation' from Python code.
135263549
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Press2ToContinue writes:
A new puzzle game from the university challenges scientists and the public alike to build a protein that could block the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game is on Foldit, a 12-year-old website created by the university’s Center for Game Science designed to crowdsource contributions to important protein research from more than 750,000 registered players.
The most promising ideas generated by the game will be tested and possibly manufactured by UW’s Institute for Protein Design in Seattle.
133103462
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Press2ToContinue writes:
Since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of four police officers heightened awareness about racial justice, the experiences of Black people in tech — and the industry’s lack of racial diversity — are getting new attention.
In the tech ecosystem at large, the industry is still predominantly white and male, and venture capital is no different. Just 3% of investment partners are Black, according to a 2018 survey from by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte. Meanwhile, more than 80% of VC firms don’t have a single Black investor and just 1% of venture-backed startups have a Black founder, according to BLCK VC.
131149748
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Press2ToContinue writes:
The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.
Professor Neil Ferguson's computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on".
Many have claimed that it is almost impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data, using the same code. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported such an issue, saying they got different results when they used different machines, and even in some cases, when they used the same machines.
“There appears to be a bug in either the creation or re-use of the network file. If we attempt two completely identical runs, only varying in that the second should use the network file produced by the first, the results are quite different,” the Edinburgh researchers wrote on the Github file.
After a discussion with one of the Github developers, a fix was later provided. This is said to be one of a number of bugs discovered within the system. The Github developers explained this by saying that the model is “stochastic”, and that “multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour”.
However, it has prompted questions from specialists, who say “models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters...otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable.”
129989156
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Press2ToContinue writes:
Creative Realities are offering for sale their "Thermal Mirror." They use the word "kiosk" to describe it, but its basically a combination iPad plus thermal camera mountable wall-unit that a business can hang at the entrance to a building to give you a quick temperature checkup, and print out a badge to say you are clear and grant entry.
If this garners wide-spread adoption, will you soon be required to be scanned everywhere you go? Public parks and beaches? Every building you enter? Your workplace? Every restaurant? Your kids' school? Every street? Your home?
Do you then need one badge you wear daily, everywhere you go, and without it, you must step up to the automated kiosk and get scanned to grant admission?
Have we turned a corner into a surveillance scenario right out of Hollywood?
Press release here.Link to Original Source
129302124
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Press2ToContinue writes:
Since the introduction of layers to HTML, the web has its own pandemic: pop-ups, cover-overs, click-to-accepts and endless interruption offering me things I don't want: join our mailing list, get notifications, get 20% off. There was a time that pop-ups infested websites so thoroughly and invasively that eventually Google Chrome had to default to blocking pop-ups from automatically showing up on your screen.
But they're back — enabled by HTML layers. I know that layers are nice for coding, but they have turned websites into an even worse land-of-pop-up scenario, with no real way of blocking them.
How do we address this issue? Will we eventually be forced to deprecate HTML layers anyway due to pop-up proliferation making the web practically unusable?
Or is there another solution? What could it be?
127022220
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Press2ToContinue writes:
In a paper titled “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus,” Chinese researchers explained why they believed the deadly disease originated from a lab in Wuhan. The paper, written by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, noted that the WCDC houses disease-ridden animals, including 605 bats.
The paper found that the “genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).” The closest population of these bats living in the wild is in the Zhejiang province, which is 600 miles away.
“This laboratory reported that the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the 2002-3 pandemic,” according to the report.
According to the paper, a researcher at the WHCDC allegedly quarantining himself for two weeks after the blood of one of the bats in the lab dripped on his hand. The same scientist quarantined himself after one of the infected bats urinated on him.
The same researcher discovered a tick on a bat, and ticks can spread diseases from one host to another.
“It is plausible that the virus leaked around, and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in a future study,” the report said.
“The principal investigator participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence 10,” the report says according to Daily Mail. “A direct speculation was that SARS-CoV or its derivative might leak from the laboratory.”
125616652
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Press2ToContinue writes:
In a PubMed study performed in North Carolina in 2015 titled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence researchers wondered if bat coronoavirus could make the leap to a human host. In testing this theory, they "synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo."
One of the researchers who co-authored the study, named Shi ZL, later returned to her native China, where according to her online profiles and Wikipedia, works as a Chinese virologist and researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Did this study predict the emergence of COVID-19? And I wonder how an oddsmaker would calculate the odds of such an outbreak occuring only a mile from the lab where this researcher who synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus from bat coronavirus works?
99882013
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Press2ToContinue writes:
“Two years is too short a period to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a big experiment. We should have had extra time and more money to achieve reliable results.”
WTF Finland?
99853097
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Press2ToContinue writes:
What you’re looking at is the surface of the comet 67p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is orbited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe. The photo comes from Rosetta’s OSIRIS, or Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System. The raw data was collected on June 1, 2016, and posted publicly on March 22 of this year.
84168041
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Press2ToContinue writes:
"The (tax) benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1%” of taxpayers, Congresswoman Gwen Moore says, “It’s a drop in the bucket.” Many states implement drug-testing programs to qualify for benefit programs so that states feel they are not wasting the value they dole out.
However, seven states who implemented drug testing for tax benefit program recipients spent $1m on drug testing from the inception of their programs through 2014. But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average – around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population – meaning there’s been little cost savings from the drug testing program. Why? “Probably because they can’t afford it,” say Moore.
“We might really save some money by drug-testing folks on Wall Street, who might have a little cocaine before they get their deal done,” she said, and proposes a bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000.
“We spend $81bn on everything – everything – that you could consider a poverty program,” she explained. But just by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income, a bit of the tax code far more likely to benefit the rich than the poor, “that’s a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains,” she added. Why not drug-test the rich to ensure they won't waste their tax benefits?
She is “sick and tired of the criminalization of poverty”. And, she added: “We’re not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off Snap. But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let’s start on the other end of the income spectrum.”
83989543
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Press2ToContinue writes:
The proposed names for recently discovered superheavy elements are:
Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113
Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115
Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117
Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118
This isn't finalized. Not sure I even like some of these, and maybe you feel the same way. Above are the proposed names that will substitute for the current placeholders (e.g., ununpentium, ununseptium). Nilhonium, Moscovium, and Tennesine are all named for places; Oganessen is named for the Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian.
But we have until November to lobby for other names. Here's a chance to go down in history and name an element on the periodic table. How about naming one Elementy McElementface?
81127123
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Press2ToContinue writes:
When Intel CEO Brian Krzanich asked marketing director of perceptual computing Anil Nanduri what he would do with 100 flying drones, Nanduri being a director of course passed that on to someone else, and laid that labor in the lap of a group of artists at Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria.
And the team responded by creating an outdoor flying drone light show syncopated to a live orchestra. Of course.
Judging from the drone performance beginning at video marker 3:40, this concept might not be actually be as entertaining as it sounds, or at least maybe not Intel's rendition, but Intel is not Disney. And in January, Disney filed for FAA approval to add drones to live shows at parks, calling them Flixels.
According to the application, ‘Flixels are to accompany entertainment at the Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resorts, including during each resort’s nightly Fireworks Spectaculars. Deployed from a monitored platform designated as the launch/land area in restricted access areas of each resort, Flixels will be “magically” incorporated into Disney story elements that engage and inspire children and their families."
The future is nigh, and it's filled with flying syncopated robots.
81065331
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Press2ToContinue writes:
Forging a bold step in the right direction, Stack Overflow announced today that they don't care if you use an ad blocker when you visit their site.
"The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance."
"Publishers can’t win by forcing ads — especially low-quality ads — in people’s faces. Think scantily-clad women selling flight deals, weight-loss supplement promos or wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube-men promoting car dealerships."
It's possible that this declaration by SO might help to clarify to advertisers that it is the overabundance of low quality ads that practically force the public to seek out ad blockers. But seriously, what is the likelihood of that?
