Tag Archives: Social Media

MIT Technology Review – The Top Stories (11.24.24)

a person with luggage walks through and airport setting

MIT Technology Review (Novemer 24, 2024): This week’s round up includes Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”. Inside Clear’s ambitions to manage your identity beyond the airport. Who’s to blame for climate change? And more.

Inside Clear’s ambitions to manage your identity beyond the airport
The company that has helped millions of people cut security lines wants to give you a frictionless future—in exchange for your face.

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Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”
Autoencoders are letting us peer into the black box of artificial intelligence. They could help us create AI that is better understood, and more easily controlled.

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How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse
A massive volunteer-led effort to collect training data in more languages, from people of more ages and genders, could help make the next generation of voice AI more inclusive and less exploitative.

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Who’s to blame for climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated.The world’s biggest polluters, by the numbers.

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The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social
You may have read that it was a big week for Bluesky. If you’re not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes short-form status updates.

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Politics: The Guardian Weekly – Nov. 22, 2024

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The Guardian Weekly (November 21, 2024): The new issue features ‘The crisis in the Church of England’…

Existentialist crises might more commonly be associated with some who seek out religion, rather than with those religions themselves, but that’s where the Church of England has found itself in recent days.

The resignation of Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, followed a damning report into the church’s shameful failures over the serial child abuser John Smyth, which detailed even more disturbing details of cover-ups by some senior clergy.

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Spotlight | Trump’s shock-and-awe team
A flurry of controversial and extremist picks for Trump’s administration has provoked criticism and made heads spin. David Smith reports from Washington

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Science | The inverse link between cancer and dementia
Scientists have long been aware of a curious connection between these common and feared diseases. At last, a clearer picture is emerging, writes Theres Lüthi

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Feature | Kernels of hope
During the siege of Leningrad, botanists in charge of an irreplaceable seed collection, the first of its kind, had to protect it from fire, rodents – and hunger. By Simon Parkin

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Opinion | Seven lessons from a long-serving economics editor
From Thatcher to Trump and Brexit, the Guardian’s outgoing economics editor, Larry Elliott, reflects on his 28 years in the role.

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Culture | Faking history
Film and TV have a slippery relationship with the truth when it comes to historical epics. Simon Usborne meets the experts whose advice goes unheeded

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 22, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (November 20, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Uncommon Reader’ – Virginia Woolf in literary tradition..

What we want from her books

Virginia Woolf as reader, writer and literary inspiration By Sophie Oliver

A star is torn

The unravelling of Vivien Leigh’s marriage amid her mental health breakdown By Vanessa Curtis

Ignorant armies

History as an ideological battleground By Niall Ferguson

Bergson’s boom and bust

How the world’s most famous thinker fell out of fashion By Mark Sinclair

World Economic Forum: Top Stories – Nov 16, 2024

World Economic Forum (November 16, 2024) – The top stories of the week include:

0:15 AI robot zaps weeds while saving crops – It’s called Concentrated Light Autonomous Weeding and Scouting or CLAWS for short. CLAWS uses AI-powered image processing to identify the crops, then targets weeds around the crop with blasts of concentrated light. This gets rid of unwanted intruders without damaging either crops or soil.

1:52 5 ways bioeconomy affects daily living – The bioeconomy uses renewable resources from land or sea to produce food, energy, and other resources. It focuses on leveraging nature’s processes and products to create sustainable economic outputs. The bioeconomy is already a part of our daily lives, influencing various sectors and industries.

6:08 Iceland sees benefit of a 4-day work week – The Nordic nation of 380,000 is rolling out a new way of working. Between 2020 and 2022, 51% of Iceland’s workers accepted an offer of shorter hours, such as a 4-day week for no loss of pay. The shift has had a positive impact on work-life balance and personal stress, new research shows.

8:17 Restored Amazon ecosystems beat logging – Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is fighting to safeguard 35 million hectares of rainforest through a collaboration between 30 Indigenous nations of the Amazon basin. There’s an economic case for protecting the Amazon, says Atossa Soltani, Director of Global Strategy, Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance.

#WorldEconomicForum

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 15, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (November 13, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Books of the Year’ – TLS writers choose their favourites…

Strings of her heart

A cellist is haunted by the history of her instrument By Norma Clarke

Neighbourhood watch

Frank Auerbach and his visions of north London By Rod Mengham

Who is the real puppet?

A spectacular production of Offenbach’s opéra fantastique By Paul Griffiths

Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Nov. 14, 2024

Volume 635 Issue 8038

‘Nature Magazine – November 13, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Head Start’ – Well preserved fossil skull offers insight into archaic bird brains…

Don’t blame search engines for sending users to unreliable sites

Analysis of billions of pages of results from searches using the Bing algorithm suggests that reliable sites appear in search results 19 to 45 times more often than do sites with low-quality content.

China’s thriving forests are stockpiling vast amounts of carbon

Satellite observations validate national reports on forest coverage and carbon storage.

No hearing aids needed: bats’ ears stay keen well into old age

Elderly big brown bats showed little sign of age-related degradation in the inner ear.

World Economic Forum: Top Stories – Nov 9, 2024

World Economic Forum (November 9, 2024) – The top stories of the week include:

0:15 Finfluencer financial advice revolution – A finfluencer is a content creator on social media who shares information on budgeting, saving and financial investments, among other topics. Finfluencers use blogs, podcasts or videos to get their message out. They help widen financial access to groups who didn’t have it before.

3:49 These vegetables grow in-store without soil – Instead of soil, they use plugs of rockwool, irrigated with nutrient-rich water in a method called hydroponics. They come in different sizes producing from 2,000 to 15,000 plants monthly. These farms have a tiny environmental footprint. The largest models can grow as much as a 3-hectare farm.

5:44 Telehealth platform empowers millions – Altibbi offers 24/7 access to online doctors along with accessible, up-to-date medical information. It offers a cheaper, more accessible alternative to in-person consultations but it also aims to ‘change the narrative’ around the patient-doctor relationship.

8:43 ‘Underwater tractors’ replant seagrass – They were created by Reefgen, an UpLink Top Innovator. The robot scoots over the seabed, steadily and carefully restoring the ecosystem. Reefgen’s technology aims to aid conservation efforts by augmenting the efforts of human restorers.

#WorldEconomicForum

Research Preview: Nature Magazine – Nov. 7, 2024

Volume 635 Issue 8037

‘Nature Magazine – November 6, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Outside Influence’ – Exploring the contribution extrachromosomal DNA makes to cancer….

Naked mole rats vanquish genetic ghosts — and achieve long life

Comparison of the hairless animals’ genomes with those of several other mammals shows low activity of certain sequences.

The midlife crisis is not universal

Study of thousands of people in rural communities shows that many do not experience a slump in well-being during their forties and fifties.

The seas are on the rise — and that surge is accelerating

Sea-surface data show that the average sea-level rise in 2023 was more than double that in 1993.

Hidden wonders: laser data reveal a dense network of ancient Maya settlements

Survey pinpoints pyramids, rural settlements and a large city in an unstudied stretch of Mexico.

Research Preview: Nature Magazine-October 31, 2024

Volume 634 Issue 8036

‘Nature Magazine – October 30, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Spatial Awareness’ – Cancer cell atlases explore the landscape of tumour evolution…

Atomic smash-ups hold promise of record-breaking elements

Laboratory collisions that create the superheavy element livermorium could help scientists to discover new elements.

This plankton balloons in size to soar upwards through the water

A single-celled alga takes water into a bladder, allowing it to migrate to the sea’s sunlit surface zone.

Giant Turkish quake shifted the ground hundreds of kilometres away

The deadly earthquake led to unexpectedly large deformations some 700 kilometres from the epicentre.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 1, 2024

Times Literary Supplement (October 30, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Scare Stories’ – On modern horror. Asked why he liked horror films, or terror films as he preferred to call them, Kingsley Amis wrote: “like Mark Twain on a dissimilar occasion, I have an answer to that: I don’t know”. He viewed horror as purely “harmless” entertainment. That explanation might satisfy teenage addicts, but moralists, psychologists and literary critics are inclined to examine the bloody entrails of the genre to divine deeper truths.

Dynamic, not doomed

Taking the British Revolution out of the Restoration’s shadow By Jonathan Fitzgibbons

Fiction for geeks and freaks

The decades before horror became respectable By Mark Storey

Married to amazement

How Mary Oliver ‘encourages us to believe’ By Rory Waterman

Green terror

An Australian vision of the eco-apocalypse By Tom Seymour Evans