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'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology Sam Becker.

Unstaffed tills were supposed to revolutionise shopping. Now, both retailers and customers are bagging many self-checkout kiosks.
Source: bbc.com

AI will be deeply disruptive to Higher Education

blog post image 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...

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

Coding excursions

blog post image Anonymity with encryption At Outcomes Engine we are working on techniques to gather data from learners, analyse the data, and share the data whilst maintaining anonymity. I was involved in some work in my previous company (pharmaceutical) with the security of personal data - in our case it was data...

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

20mph cuts air and noise pollution to prevent blighted lives

We quite simply campaign for 20mph to become the default speed limit on residential and urban streets.
Source: 20splenty.org

Biopharma futures

blog post image I've been looking at a few industry reports on the future of biopharma as part of a course I'm on with INSEAD Business School on Business Strategy and Financial Performance. I thought I'd share some of my ramblings on Biopharma Futures. Expectations are high Pharmaceutical companies are operating...
Source: agnate.co.uk

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

New WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines aim to save millions of lives from air pollution

"Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, alongside climate change. New guidelines provide clear evidence of the damage air pollution inflicts on human health, at even lower concentrations than previously understood." "Global assessments of ambient air pollution alone...
Source: who.int

New WHO toolkit promotes inclusion of people with dementia in society

“Towards a dementia-inclusive society: WHO toolkit for dementia-friendly initiatives”, launched today, is WHO’s latest response for establishing and scaling-up dementia-friendly initiatives globally. The toolkit helps countries raise public awareness and understanding of dementia to support people...
Source: who.int

Visa-free touring granted for UK artists in 19 EU countries – while industry demands "honesty" from government

"The government has announced that visa-free touring has been negotiated for UK artists in 19 EU member countries" This is great news for musicians but also good to see that individual EU states also still have control over their borders (they always did). It will be great for us all to have freedom...
Source: nme.com

University of Northampton: The impact of COVID-19 on digital delivery - initial trend analysis

The speed and intensity of transitioning to mass online delivery of teaching has left in its wake a unique digital record, the patterns and trends of which reveal the story of the sector grappling to respond.
Source: jisc.ac.uk

Royal Mail trials drone delivery to Isles of Scilly

The drones could be used to fly post to some of the most remote communities in the UK.
Source: bbc.co.uk

Essential Technologies: The Tally Stick - The Scholarly Kitchen

From the Upper Paleolithic Era up until the mid 1800s, the tally stick was a remarkably long-lived piece of technology.
Source: sspnet.org

NASA has flown its Ingenuity drone helicopter on Mars for the first time

The historic moment was livestreamed on YouTube and Ingenuity captured the photo above with one of its two cameras.
Source: technologyreview.com

World's wealthiest (and 'business as usual') 'at heart of climate problem'

"These [polluter elite] are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they’re well insulated or not. … They’re also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels...
Source: bbc.com

Why 2021 Is Graph Data Science's Year for the Enterprise -

Graph data science is becoming increasingly important to business delivering deep insights into data and driving new business cases.
Source: enterprisetimes.co.uk

Build for a crisis: Ideas for the future of local news

Enjoyed this story of the ingenuity of local newspapers when struck with the crisis of extreme weather. What does it say for our other complex technology and business layers? When crisis strikes perhaps that's when you find the lowest common tech that works and exactly what purpose you are using it for....
Source: niemanlab.org

Diabetes: The game-changing research that will save refugee lives

An innovative new study has shown that insulin can be stored at up to 37°C
Source: msf.org.uk

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...