"From bugs to unqualified staff, the Post Office's point-of-sale system was inadequate on many levels." The code was poor from the start and the small team of developers were not up to the job. However, the problems were apparent in 1999 before it was launched. Includes a discussion of the Dalmellington...
Source: theguardian.com
Researchers are applying artificial intelligence and other techniques in the quest to forecast quakes in time to help people find safety.
Source: technologyreview.com
Paul LeBlanc and George Siemens are teaming up to explore how AI is going to change higher education. "LeBlanc transformed SNHU from 2500 students in 2003 to over 200,000 students in 20 years by using technology to switch delivery online." Siemens is one of the proposers of connectivism - a theory...
"Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems." Links to further papers and discussion on topics including: Tackling "P versus NP" Emergent behaviours in large language models...
Source: quantamagazine.org
Great literature synthesis on reflection. "We present a novel description of a hierarchy from discrete episodes of reflection, to cyclic processes that involve reflection, through to a state in which the practitioner is reflective. There is no unified understanding of how an individual ascends this...
Source: wiley.com
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
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
Filing status, dependent names, adjusted gross income...once it's on any of these three websites, it's likely in Facebook's hands. ”H&R Block, one of the country’s most recognizable tax filing firms, was found using Meta Pixel to obtain users’ health savings account usage data as well as dependents’...
Source: extremetech.com
An authoritarian resistance to scrutiny. Very un-British.
“it is becoming abundantly clear that the true objective underpinning this Bill (and the Government’s wider project) concerns not the so-called restoration of parliamentary sovereignty or the strengthening of democracy, but the entrenchment...
Source: publiclawforeveryone.com
Good example of analysing behaviour by barriers and enablers. “Two studies carried out with the Centre for Behaviour Change examined factors affecting the purchase, repair, repurpose and disposal of clothes by people in the UK before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Source: ucl.ac.uk
The West and Russia may be entering into the terminal stages of an insecurity spiral, which could produce a larger European war even if it doesn’t go nuclear.
Source: foreignaffairs.com
The Snoqualmie Indian Tribe has purchased thousands of acres of ancestral forestlands in East King County.
Source: opb.org
Stephen Casper - medical historian at Clarkson University - offers a worrying prediction for COVID for the end of 2022. The analogy for COVID-19 won't be influenza but 'tuberculosis before the discovery of antibiotics'. A new hospital specialty might even exist - looking after COVID patients - and they...
Source: twitter.com
"This systematic literature review has provided insights into the factors that affect new drug uptake—primarily, doctors’ scientific orientation, prescribing habits, exposure to pharmaceutical marketing, and interpersonal communication." "Background The successful diffusion of new drugs is crucial...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Does teaching ECGs with a clinical vignette improve training? Not greatly ... but having seen a condition previously (and presumably the ECG that went with it) is probably best. The researchers concluded that "ECG training should therefore not rely on experiential learning
alone, but instead be supplemented...
Source: biomedcentral.com
The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was imported illegally into the US before being bought by Hobby Lobby.
Source: bbc.com
Major fires and resulting emissions are set to continually increase across the world’s forested regions, fueling more warming and more fires to come.
Source: technologyreview.com
In two separate observations, just ten days apart, astronomers discover a neutron star circling a black hole before being gobbled up.
Source: singularityhub.com
"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
Divergent economic performance in many countries has led to renewed interest in place-based policies, such as the UK’s local industrial strategies at the level of Combined Authorities or Local Economic Partnerships. However, an analysis of employment data using methods from the economic complexity...
Source: springer.com