NYC Will Close Public Roads To Traffic To Create More Recreational Space

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday the city will close 40 miles worth of streets near parks to give residents a lot more room to get out of their homes. CNET reports: The eventual goal is to open 100 miles of public roads for residents to bike, walk, jog and more while spreading groups of people out….

Milan Announces Ambitious Scheme To Reduce Car Use After Lockdown

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Milan is to introduce one of Europe’s most ambitious schemes reallocating street space from cars to cycling and walking, in response to the coronavirus crisis. The northern Italian city and surrounding Lombardy region are among Europe’s most polluted, and have also been especially hard hit by the Covid-19 outbreak. Under the nationwide…

Boeing 787s Must Be Turned Off and On Every 51 Days To Prevent ‘Misleading Data’ Being Shown To Pilots

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called “several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios” — including the crashing of onboard network switches. The Register reports: The airworthiness directive, due to be enforced from later this month, orders airlines to power-cycle their B787s before the aircraft…

School Quits Video Calls After Naked Man ‘Guessed’ the Meeting Link

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A school in Norway has stopped using popular video conferencing service Whereby after a naked man apparently “guessed” the link to a video lesson. According to Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, the man exposed himself in front of several young children over the video call. The theory, according to the report, is that the…

A Chinese perspective on spring

In Chinese thought, spring is associated with the direction east, the sunrise direction as Earth spins us toward the beginning of each new day. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/a-chinese-perspective-on-the-spring-equinox…

What’s new on Coursera for Business – January 2020

By Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant 2020 is already proving to be an exciting year for skill development on Coursera. Our university and industry partners launched over 60 courses in January – an average of 2 courses per day. Our new courses range in topic from IT automation and feature engineering to visual analytics, […]
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Nearly Half of Americans Didn’t Go Outside For Recreation In 2018

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Colorado Sun: Outdoor businesses need people to get outside, but almost half of Americans don’t venture outdoors to play. The steady decline in participation threatens not just the bottom line but the outdoor industry’s mission to collectively steer policy on critical issues like climate change, environmental protection and public lands. While the Outdoor…

City Planners Zero in on Cyclists Through Exercise App

With 47m global users Strava has the potential to generate big data for public development [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: When the UK capital built a “cycle superhighway” in 2016, Strava indicated where people had changed their route and showed that the number of cyclists increased by 60 per cent when a bike-only lane was built…

New biomass map takes stock of Earth’s carbon

ESA released the 1st of a series of global maps aimed at quantifying change in carbon stored as biomass across the world’s forests and shrublands. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/new-biomass-map-earths-carbon…

Can AI Predict the Stock Market? No, But the Attempt Was Interesting

“We all want to be rich by having a computer just generate piles of money for us,” writes long-time Slashdot reader TekBoy. “Here’s one man’s attempt at using AI to predict the market. From the article (by tinkerer/writer/network guy Jason Bowling): Models that did great during their initial training and validation runs might do ok during runs on later data, but…