Is this what we will look like in 20 years’ time ?

Researchers have created a life-sized model of what the typical office worker of the future might look like. Named Emma, this unnerving representation… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/331621/is-this-what-we-will-look-like-in-20-years-time…

New LGBTQ+ Courses: Free, High-Quality Resources for Allyship and Awareness

By Kyle Shiells, Data Science Manager & Queersera Co-Lead Queersera, Coursera’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group, celebrated its fourth anniversary at San Francisco Pride in June of this year. In the last four years, we’ve had the opportunity to not just march in Pride parades, but also host community events for Coursera employees, connect our team […]
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Fomalhaut: The loneliest star

It’s also sometimes called the autumn star for us in the Northern Hemisphere. In its large dark patch of sky, only Fomalhaut shines brightly. Here’s how to see it. Source: https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/solitary-fomalhaut-guards-the-southern-sky…

A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. From a report: The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’…

What’s new on Coursera for Business – August 2019

By Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant Coursera released 44 courses on our platform in August. We are particularly excited to announce a range of new courses from the manufacturing, architecture, and engineering design software industry leader, Autodesk, on Generative Design and CAD/CAM for manufacturing. Here are our top picks for enterprise for this past […]
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Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line

If you go by cartoons and T-shirts, you might think evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But evolution has no endpoint in mind. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/evolution-not-straight-line…

Is Silicon Valley Building a Chinese-Style Social Credit System?

schwit1 shared this thought-provoking article from Fast Company:
Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity…

Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Contract workers at Google’s office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the…

Microsoft Demos Hologram ‘Holoportation’

Microsoft “continues to plug away at making holoportation possible,” reports ZDNet: In a new demonstration, officials showed off a scenario where a life-sized holographic representation of a person could be beamed into a scenario with real-time simultaneous language translation happening — a communication scenario on which Microsoft has been working for years. At Microsoft’s Inspire partner show (which is co-located with…

Gaia starts mapping our Milky Way’s bar

“We knew the Milky Way had a bar, like other barred spiral galaxies. But we only had indirect indications from the motions of stars and gas. This is the first time we see the galactic bar in 3D space, based on geometric measurements of stellar distances.” Source: https://earthsky.org/space/gaia-starts-mapping-our-milky-ways-bar…