Authorities in the United Kingdom have made unauthorized copies of data stored inside a EU database for tracking undocumented migrants, missing people, stolen cars, or suspected criminals. From a report: Named the Schengen Information System (SIS), this is a EU-run database that stores information such as names, personal details, photographs, fingerprints, and arrest warrants for 500,000 non-EU citizens denied entry into…
Tag: reading
Meet a family of NASA space robots
NASA engineers are working on a new family of space robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains on other worlds. Meet the family, here. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nasa-space-robots-lemur-ice-worm-robosimian…
Emotion-Detection Applications Are Built On Outdated Science, Report Warns
maiden_taiwan writes: Can computers determine your emotional state from your face? A panel of senior scientists with backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and public affairs spent two years reviewing over 1,000 research papers on the topic. Two years later, they have published the most comprehensive analysis to date and concluded: “It is not possible…
Trump repeatedly asks NASA administrator why we can’t go straight to Mars
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/19/20701061/president-trump-nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-artemis-mars-direct-moon-apollo-11…
Researchers Have Teamed Up in India To Build a Gigantic Store of Texts and Images Extracted From 73M Journal Articles
A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but whether it is a legal pursuit remains unclear. From a report: Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from…
40 Years Later, Lessons From the Rise and Quick Decline of the First ‘Killer App’
It was the first killer app, the spark for Apple’s early success and a trigger for the broader PC boom that vaulted Microsoft to its central position in business computing. And within a few years, it was tech-industry roadkill. From a report: The story of VisiCalc, a humble spreadsheet program that set the tech world ablaze 40 years ago, has reverberated…
Doing Five Things Could Decrease Your Risk of Alzheimer’s By 60%
“Light-to-moderate” alcohol consumption can help reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:
A study presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Los Angeles found that combining five lifestyle habits — including eating healthier, exercising regularly and refraining from smoking — can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent. A separate study showed that…
We Asked, You Answered: The Top 10 Learning Hacks from edX Learners
We took to social media to ask edX learners to share their best learning hacks: tried and true ways to make the most of their learning and studying experience. Keep reading for the top 10 trends we picked up from their responses. 1) Bite-sized learning A popular learning hack was breaking large concepts down into smaller, more digestible pieces. When faced with…
Google Contractors Are Secretly Listening To Your Assistant Recordings
A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by contractors — and the scary part is that it apparently doesn’t take much, if anything, to start a recording. While the recordings are not listened to live, audio clips are sent to subcontractors. The Next Web reports: VRT, with…
Alibaba Claims New Record in AI Language Understanding
An AI program developed by Alibaba has notched up a record-high score on a reading comprehension test. The result shows how machines are steadily improving at handling text and speech. From a report: The new record was set using the Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension (MS MARCO) data set, which uses real questions that Bing users have asked in the past. The…