Thinking Allowed

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65 Reasons To Celebrate The 6502

blog post image "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

AI Watermarking Won't Curb Disinformation

blog post image "Generative AI allows people to produce piles upon piles of images and words very quickly. It would be nice if there were some way to reliably distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content. It would help people avoid endlessly arguing with bots online, or believing what a fake image purports...
Source: eff.org

Kenya's push to make 'boda-boda' motorbike taxis go electric

blog post image "The government wants Kenya's three million motorbike taxi riders to go green but only a few have done so." I last went to Kenya over 10 years ago and I got around Kitale on the back of push bikes by local riders. Motorised bikes 'boda-boda' were only just being introduced at the time. Apparently there...
Source: bbc.com

OpenAI announces first partnership with a university

blog post image "Starting in February, Arizona State University will have full access to OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise." "With the OpenAI partnership, ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, not only for certain courses, but also for study topics. STEM subjects are a focus and are “the make-or-break...
Source: cnbc.com

Project Wayward: A wearable for the elderly and those with Dementia.

Get an instant alert for help if the elder falls down, wanders away outside, or in case of an accident. "Hemesh's grandmother was one of many, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She had severe cases of wandering, where she would walk away without the caregiver noticing, resulting in a number...
Source: projectwayward.com

Huge ancient city found in the Amazon

The city was built 2,500 years ago but may have been abandoned after a volcanic eruption.
Source: bbc.com

Yaws could soon be eradicated — 70 years behind schedule Jones, Sam. Nature 2024.

Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the neglected tropical disease could be gone by 2030, but new barriers — including antibiotic resistance and primate reservoirs — might stand in the way. Researchers are cautiously optimistic that the neglected tropical disease could be gone by 2030, but...
Source: nature.com

The Vulnerable World Hypothesis

blog post image "This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the ‘semi-anarchic default condition’. Several counterfactual historical and...
Source: doi.org

Workplace well-being initiatives don't boost employee mental health

"The mental health of people who undertake mindfulness or meditation courses offered by their employer is generally no better than those who are not offered such programmes." "Instead of offering these initiatives, Fleming suggests that employers focus on bettering the work environment. For example,...
Source: newscientist.com

A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.

New AI-generated digital replicas of real experts expose an unnerving policy gray zone. Washington wants to fix it, but it’s not clear how.
Source: politico.com

Wearable Soft Robot Helps Parkinson's Patients Avoid 'Freezing'

A collaboration between Harvard University and Boston University, this device offers a solution to one of the most debilitating hallmarks of Parkinson's disease.
Source: extremetech.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...

Tetris defeated?

blog post image 34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen” says ArsTechnica. "BlueScuti forces the game to crash after 40 minutes and 1,511 lines." Having tried to play the game I can appreciate how difficult - and what an outstanding feat - this has been to basically break the game.
Source: arstechnica.com

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

The internet seems ripe for change, and millions of people seem poised to connect in new ways, as they reconsider their relationship to technology.
Source: rollingstone.com

Apple’s iPhone Design Chief Enlisted by Jony Ive, Sam Altman to Work on AI Devices

Legendary designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are enlisting an Apple Inc. veteran to work on a new artificial intelligence hardware project, aiming to create devices with the latest capabilities.
Source: bloomberg.com

Monkeys in Thailand took up stone tools when covid-19 stopped tourism

Long-tailed macaques on the island of Koh Ped appear to have learned a new way to forage when the pandemic put a stop to feeding by tourists
Source: newscientist.com

Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning.

One of the challenges with deep learning (neural networks) is that although they find patterns the reasoning disappears into an endless detail of numbers. In this paper the researchers built an 'explainable' AI to discover antibiotics instead of such a 'black box'. "The discovery of novel structural...
Source: nature.com

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

(We are not) using eHealth Data to Inform CPD for Medical Practitioners

"There is no formal or well-established correlation between individual performance data obtained through eHealth data analysis and CPD planning and programming for medical practitioners; in particular, the literature shows no consistency in type of eHealth data to analyze, software and tools to use,...
Source: nih.gov

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...