China said Thursday a cohort of astronauts is training for four crewed missions this year as the country works to complete its first permanent orbiting space station. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-03-chinese-astronauts-space-station-crewed.html…
Tag: training
Twitter’s Misinformation-Fighting Tool ‘Birdwatch’ Makes Mistakes
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism school and research organization, analyzed Twitter’s 1,000-user pilot test of its Birdwatch fact-checking platform. Their conclusion? It makes mistakes. On February 5, Twitter flagged a post from controversial YouTuber Tim Pool that said the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. The platform noted that the claim was disputed and turned off engagement…
How To Fall 35,000 Feet and Survive
Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page — an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet, documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the…
Amazon Uses An App Called Mentor To Track and Discipline Delivery Drivers
Amazon has for years been using an app called “Mentor” to monitor and track delivery drivers’ behavior on the road. “The app, which Amazon bills as a tool to improve driver safety, generates a score each day that measures employees’ driving performance,” reports CNBC. From the report: Just like the AI-equipped cameras rolling out to contracted delivery companies, Mentor is framed…
Proofpoint Sues Facebook To Get Permission To Use Lookalike Domains For Phishing Tests
Cyber-security powerhouse Proofpoint has filed a lawsuit this week against Facebook in relation to the social network’s attempt to confiscate domain names the security firm was using for phishing awareness training. From a report: The case is a countersuit to a Facebook filing from November 30, 2020, when the social network used a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution) request to force domain…
3 Ways to Future-Proof Your University
By Shwetabh Mittal, Senior Director, Product Management This article was originally published in Campus Tech, January 2021. When the pandemic led to the initial shutdown of university campuses in early February, Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China, was among the first to move all its courses to an online format. By April, at the height […]
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Machines Are Inventing New Math We’ve Never Seen
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] group of researchers from the Technion in Israel and Google in Tel Aviv presented an automated conjecturing system that they call the Ramanujan Machine, named after the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who developed thousands of innovative formulas in number theory with almost no formal training. The software system has already conjectured several original…
Microsoft Launches Viva, Its New Take on the Old Intranet
Microsoft today launched Viva, a new “employee experience platform,” or, in non-marketing terms, its new take on the intranet sites most large companies tend to offer their employees. From a report: This includes standard features like access to internal communications built on integrations with SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft tools. In addition, Viva also offers access to team analytics and an…
SpaceX Announces First-Ever All-Civilian Space Flight Crew
Jared Isaacman, an entrepreneur behind a payment processing startup, is funding a multimillion trip to space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which could be the first-ever orbital flight crewed entirely by non-astronauts. CNN reports: Isaacman, 37, said he will command the mission, which is slated for late-2021 and will see the spacecraft make a “multi-day” trip into Earth’s orbit, according…
Microsoft Patent Shows Plans To Revive Dead Loved Ones As Chatbots
Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people. The Independent reports: The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages,” and more personal information. “The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present…