Deciphering ancient charred texts - the power of a prize.
The Vesuvius Prize reward has encouraged work on deciphering scans of ancient charred scrolls from Herculaneum. "First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed Marchant, Jo. Nature 2024. ... Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts,...
Source: nature.com
65 Reasons To Celebrate The 6502
"The legendary chip from 1975 that helped start the home computer revolution." I can remember sharing the manual for the 6502 with my school friend, Chris. He had a BBC micro computer and I had a Commodore Vic 20. To do the machine code I remember you had to: compile into 6502 instructions what you...
Source: substack.com
The man filling the City with working-class stars
A recruitment firm has launched an algorithm that weeds out privileged, mediocre people, and identifies talent from disadvantaged backgrounds
Source: positive.news
Mountain gorillas: The ripple effect of conservation
Justin Rowlatt finds out what gorilla conservation can teach us about protecting other species. 'The secret of this success? Dr Gladys Kalema Zikusoka was the Uganda Wildlife Authority's first vet in 1995, then she set up the charity Conservation Through Public Health. Perhaps surprisingly, she says,...
Source: bbc.com
Internet user classification
Grampound it seems is classified as 'e-Rational Utilitarian' ... but who is shouting out for more local facilities and better internet infrastructure? Checks notes ... methodological individualist and political liberals with social stratification (i.e. class, status distinctions) playing a relatively...
Source: cdrc.ac.uk
Thich Nhat Hanh, poetic peace activist and master of mindfulness, dies at 95
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who in the 1960s came to prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday aged 95 surrounded by his followers in the temple where his spiritual journey began. "Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less...
Source: reuters.com
Psychology of panic buying
I've been fascinated by the psychology of panic buying and it is clearly an area for future research. It has an enormous impact on delivery infrastructure and I wonder if anyone has been tracking the data of the causes and the impact in the current fuel 'crisis'. A systematic review from last year identified...
Source: nih.gov
Extinction Rebellion protesters block London's Tower Bridge
Demonstrators from the Extinction Rebellion group, which is demanding urgent action by governments and business to limit climate change and biodiversity loss, staged a sit-down protest that stopped traffic from using Tower Bridge in London on Monday.
Source: reuters.com
Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?
"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com
Effectiveness of a serious game addressing guideline adherence: cohort study with 1.5-year follow-up Tobias Raupach. Insa
Background Patients presenting with acute shortness of breath and chest pain should be managed according to guideline recommendations. Serious games can be used to train clinical reasoning. However, only few studies have used outcomes beyond student satisfaction, and most of the published evidence is...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
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...
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
Why does Netflix’s The Dig exclude the women who photographed Sutton Hoo? - Prospect Magazine
"The filmmakers’ massaging of the facts tells us a lot about how middle-aged women are regarded by Hollywood." Great piece by Emma Hartley in Prospect Magazine about the Netflix film The Dig at Sutton Hoo.
Source: prospectmagazine.co.uk
Fires Raged in the Amazon Again in 2020
"After intense fires in the Amazon captured global attention in 2019, fires again raged throughout the region in 2020. According to an analysis of satellite data from NASA’s Amazon dashboard, the 2020 fire season was actually more severe by some key measures." “Our system identified about 23,000...
Source: nasa.gov
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
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
Covid bereavement group founder is 'inspirational young man'
Covid bereavement group founder is 'inspirational young man': The support group now has about 700 members around the UK and beyond. "On the evening of his father's funeral Liam Meyer launched a group to help other families whose lives had been ravaged by Covid-19. His father, David, died with Covid-19...
Source: bbc.com
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly?
Dying in a Leadership Vacuum Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? The NEJM Editors asks what has gone so wrong in the US and lays the blame with the political leadership. "This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were...
Source: nejm.org
Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game
Proposal for a New Tool to Evaluate a Serious Game: The current enthusiasm of generations of students for video games and the marked interest of training institutions for the use of playful strategies, which facilitate learning, has encouraged the development and use of formative games called Serious...
Source: online-journals.org
Media predictions for 2020 from BBC's Amol Rajan
Amol Rajan's 9 media predictions for 2020: Could we see streamageddon, eco-browsing, the break-up of Amazon and a new owner for ITV? "The data shows we really are living through the most extraordinarily peaceful, prosperous, wealthy, healthy, safe period in human history. There is strong evidence to...
Source: bbc.com
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