1,141 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2017
    1. North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff,

      This is actually bad news, as it will have made Kim angrier and more likely to do something reckless...

    1. Using 3-D cameras, it builds a picture of the crops, looking for individual plants under stress. Should the tower spot something awry, it dispatches Vinobot. The rover uses its robotic arm to create a detailed 3-D model of the plant, showing scientists the exact angles of leaves, for instance, to determine how different kinds of corn handle drought.

      Really interesting!

    1. The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it outrageous that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without consent at all—otherwise known as “attention theft.” 

      This will become more and more prevalent...

    1. Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions has completed its review of applications for the Class of 2021 and has offered admission to 2,272 students from a pool of 32,900 applicants. With Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges scheduled to open in fall 2017, the incoming freshman class will be the largest in Yale College history —  with approximately 1550 students, 15% larger than recent classes.

      Interesting to see how the bigger class will impact the university.

    1. Chiang’s story is driven by the obsolescence of the virtual world that is the host platform for the digients, who can continue to exist as social beings only if their software engine is ported to its successor. Unfortunately, their parent corporation has gone bankrupt and so porting the software is not commercially viable. The digients, who are themselves clamoring for individual liberties—you can think of them as woke Tamagotchi—have become what the industry would term abandonware. It is thus left to their small circle of caretakers and enthusiasts to create an incentive for the port—for example, by licensing the digients to a company specializing in artificial sex partners. In all cases, however, the real value of the digients turns out to be their accumulated experiential history as sentient lifeforms.

      Sounds so thought-provoking!

    2. Feral spambooks will deploy probabilistic text generators seeded with the contents of your own ebook library to write a thousand vacuous and superficially attractive nuisance texts … They’ll slide them into your ebook library disguised as free samples, with titles and author names that are random permutations of legitimate works, then sell advertising slots in these false texts to offshore spam marketplaces.5

      Whoa!

    3. This is something the digients of Chiang’s story would understand very well, for their existence is continually imperiled by the limited capacity of the virtual worlds they inhabit to render their digital selfhood across changing platforms.

      Fascinating thing to think about!

    1. “The current measures are not an acceptable long-term solution to whatever threat they are trying to mitigate. Even in the short term it is difficult to understand their effectiveness. And the commercial distortions they create are severe,” said IATA director general Alexandre de Juniac.

      Hard to understand what any of this achieves...

  2. Mar 2017
    1. In 1990, eight shades — maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, raw umber, green blue, orange red, orange yellow and violet blue — were retired and eight new ones, including the yellow hue known as dandelion, were introduced.

      I remember many of these...

    1. Small, portable medical devices can offer patient's newfound mobility. Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh developed an artificial lung that can be carried in a patient’s backpack. Trials have so far shown that the device works on sheep and could offer relief and mobility for people who suffer from lung failure.

      This is incredible!

    1. This weekend saw a new eruption from Kambalny in southern Kamchatka. Now, the Kamchatka Peninsula is a very volcanically active area, with multiple eruptions going on simultaneously much of the time. There are certain volcanoes that are in almost-constant unrest, like Shiveluch, Kliuchevskoi, and Karymsky. However, Kambalny is not one of the usual suspects for activity.

      Would love to see it!

    1. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) may trade some zingers, but they do it in monochromatic outfits … at night … on rock formations roughly the color of slate. And nearly every other scene hews to the same palette.

      I hadn't thought about it, but it is so true.

    1. A U.S. Supreme Court decision on cheerleader uniform design copyrights will expand the number of 3-D printed objects with intellectual property protection, attorneys told Bloomberg BNA March 22.

      I was wondering how long this would take to come about.

    1. President Trump’s childhood home in Queens has been sold, in a transaction facilitated by a lawyer who specializes in shepherding real estate investments made by overseas Chinese buyers.

      At least it wasn't the Russians!

    1. To create it, Musk has said that he thinks we will probably have to inject a computer interface into the jugular where it will travel into the brain and unfold into a mesh of electric connections that connect directly to the neurons.

      Yeah, nothing could go wrong with this approach...

    1. As film genres go, science fiction is often the one that’s hardest for folks to get into. Literal-minded moviegoers often have a hard time with worlds where anything—and everything—is possible and, well, some people just don’t like space.

      I guess this is true. You either love it or you hate it.

    1. Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

      Whoa. Really?

    1. President Donald Trump relishes the comforts of his Mar-a-Lago estate for repeated weekends away from Washington, but former Secret Service and intelligence officials say the resort is a security nightmare vulnerable to both casual and professional spies.

      Yep. Saw this coming!

    1. fast radio bursts sweeping across outer space have puzzled scientists for years, but some scientists are examining the possibility that these millisecond-long radio emission flashes come from advanced alien technology in extragalactic civilizations.

      Need to learn more about these.

    1. Ready to fly, drive and take the train to work? Airbus and Italdesign have taken the wraps off an incredible pod design that combines all three into the last vehicle you could ever need. The Pop.up system is a concept that combines artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and Hyperloop into a futuristic machine designed to traverse cities at speed.

      Future of transport?

    1. Bringing Bridj to Kansas City seemed like a no-brainer to transit officials. For just $1.50, anyone could use an app to summon a ride downtown in van that would follow a route calculated on the fly by an algorithm. No one within the service area was ever more than a 10 minute walk from a stop, and as an added incentive, your first 10 rides were free.

      Never heard of it.

    1. It’s interesting that places like Stanford or Harvard, where Facebook was launched in a dorm room in a similar tale to Snap, Inc (right down to the lawsuit), are considered our top educational institutions when we know that the chief benefit of going to such a place is not necessarily the learning that happens, but the chance to rub elbows with people from well-resourced backgrounds.

      Yep. Not everyone who goes can benefit from this aspect...

    1. My own view of where academic book publishing is heading is that it will mostly continue to publish the kinds of things it does now, but there will be increasing experimentation with formats, a renewed interest in selling directly to libraries, and enlarged activity in D2C — selling directly to end-users.

      Probably about right.

    1. The listing represented an extraordinary opportunity in American history, one facilitated by both modern technology and a president with a large real estate portfolio: a chance for travelers to book a room in a building housing the president’s family — one of the most secure buildings in New York City, if not the world — with nothing more than the click of a mouse.

      Crazy!

    1. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

      Too much pressure for such young kids! This is pre-school!

    1. If Kriegeskorte is invited by a journal to write a review, first he decides whether he’s interested enough to review it. If so, he checks whether there’s a preprint available—basically a final draft of the manuscript posted publicly online on one of several preprint servers like arxiv and biorxiv. This is crucial. Writing about a manuscript that he’s received in confidence from a journal editor would break confidentiality—talking about a paper before the authors are ready. If there’s a preprint, great. He reviews the paper, posts to his blog, and also sends the review to the journal editor.

      Interesting workflow and within his rights.

  3. Feb 2017
    1. Get a tour bus full of unsuspecting movie fans and tell them they’re going to get to see a special exhibit about the Oscars. Then: Surprise! After winding their way through a backstage labyrinth, they’re at the Oscars. For real!

      This is so awesome!

    1. To some degree, the challenge Spicer and other press aides face is unique — they are working for a president who takes an unusually intense interest in the work his communications office does. Trump is known to watch Spicer’s daily press briefings while eating lunch in the White House dining room.

      That's a pretty picture...

    1. Menlo Park-based LeoLabs currently tracks some 13,000 objects in low Earth orbit — a zone that extends from about 100 miles to 1,200 miles away from the Earth’s surface and is home to the International Space Station, Hubble Space Telescope and many hundreds of commercial satellites.

      Very important work!

    1. The Yale Science Building will be a seven-level structure that includes a rooftop greenhouse, aquatics and insect labs, state-of-the-art imaging technology, a quantitative biology center, innovative physics labs, and a 500-seat lecture hall. It has an expected completion date of late 2019.

      It sounds like it will be really cool and useful!

    1. I learn from space.com that a research group is going to try to get a new geophysical definition of the word planet approved by the International Astronomical Union, and is drafting it in a way that will allow Pluto to count as a planet once more. (It lost that status in 2006 and was reclassified as a dwarf planet.)

      Fingers crossed!

    1. The biggest challenge in building an autonomous vehicle is giving the car the ability to see the world. It requires a thorough understanding of lidar, the radar-like system of lasers that creates the digital map each car needs to navigate the world safely and competently.

      I was thinking about this the other day...

    1. The exhibit’s centerpiece, however, was a gargantuan slab of Titanic’s hull, known as the “big piece,” that weighs 15 tons and was, after several mishaps, hoisted by crane from the seabed in 1998. Studded with rivets, ribbed with steel, this monstrosity of black metal reminded me of a T. rex at a natural history museum: impossibly huge, pinned and braced at great expense—an extinct species hauled back from a lost world.

      Wow, I hope I get to see this someday!

    1. you can leave a comment a few inches below this text, email or tweet at me through the links a few inches above it, or react to it with an emoji on Facebook. Some random Twitter bots will tweet the link, advertisers will track its success, and sophisticated search engines will rank it.

      And if you use annotation, it can be annotated in-line already!

    1. Some fans of both fantasy and science fiction will cite the 2004 Best Picture win for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as the compensation for Star Wars not winning in 1978 since Hobbits fighting off a dark lord is the closest thing to Jedi Knights and Darth Vader.

      Nah. Not the same thing at all....

    1. Electric trains accelerate faster than diesel ones, cutting travel times between stops. Their rail cars each carry their own propulsion system, so hitching up a few more of them doesn’t slow the whole train down. In exchange for electricity, Caltrain promises more frequent service, shorter rides, and space for up to 25 percent more passengers.

      Benefits of electric trains.

    1. OABot is the next step in bringing that openness to readers. OABot, technically approved but still pending community consensus, scans closed Wikipedia citations and finds free-to-read links available in open web repositories; it then adds a link to the open version into the existing Citation. Ideally, this added link will be tagged with an icon indicating that it’s free-to-read.

      Interesting.

    2. Through the Wikipedia Library program, the encyclopedia’s editors have free access to a collection of over 80,000 unique periodicals, like journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, and series, in addition to an untallyable number of books.

      What a resource!

    1. She points to the popular idea that Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t take what he said seriously, but took him seriously — while his detractors didn’t take him seriously, but took what he said seriously.

      This is a really interesting thing to think about.

    1. According to the Washington Post, this week acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot sent a letter to employees saying he’d instructed the top NASA official for human spaceflight to study whether NASA could put astronauts on a lunar orbiter called EM-1—scheduled for launch in 2018.

      Wow! 2018 is soon!

    1. studio is coming to terms on new contracts with the show’s five core cast members: Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Kaley Cuoco, Kunal Nayyar and Simon Helberg. The current contracts expire at the end of this season, the show’s 10th,

      I hope so!

    1. In the United Kingdom, the arguments rage over the rights and wrongs of the Brexit referendum result. I begin to think this is what it must be like to be the child of divorcing parents. Before, there was one truth, one story, one reality; now there are two.

      Interesting analogy.

    1. at Davos it was announced that in 2010, 43 people were as rich as 50% of the poorest on this earth. In 2016, this has now gone down to 8 people! 8 people as rich as half the world combined.

      This is scandalous!

    1. There are two reasons why signing in is so important. Firstly, when a researcher signs in (or “authenticates”), they can choose what happens to their account - it keeps them in control of their own information. Secondly, once a researcher has signed in, the connections they make to their ORCID iD are more useful - to them and to anyone else who wants to see those connections.

      Important to note.

    1. Full Fact is turning away from the glitz and glamour of AI and machine learning and are instead focusing on customizing Solr, a search engine, with APIs that will collate information on repeated claims made over the internet or television.

      Interesting approach.

    1. They looked up at the sky. It was flush with cosmic bodies that had been invisible up to that point — twinkling stars, clustered galaxies, distant planets, even a satellite or two. Then some people became nervous. What was that large silvery cloud that trailed over the city? It looked so sinister they called 911.

      Amazing!

    1. The W3C’s existence depends on its mission being grounded in moral certainty. That certainty is the only substantial obstacle preventing it from being replaced with easier, more pragmatic standardisation efforts that focus exclusively on implementation.

      End of the W3C's influence?

    1. Just like with digital photography, it is only a matter of time before a court establishes a precedent where a piece of written, audio or video evidence isn’t admissible because there is no way to prove it wasn’t forged using AI-powered tools — even though it looks or sounds perfectly real.

      Huge problem.

    2. Even creepier, a startup created an AI-powered memorial chatbot: software that can learn everything about you from your chat logs, and then allow your friends to chat with your digital-self after you die.

      Does this sound familiar?

    1. We attempted this, but ran into the problem that OCLC does not identify books as publishers do (OCLC is far less reliant on ISBNs). Thus the mapping to WorldCat was only partly successful.

      I can't believe that OCLC doesn't use ISBNs!

    1. Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and founder of a stealth security startup brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone SE that’s set up to sync with a separate, non-sensitive Apple account.

      You do what you have to do...

    1. (Among the recommendations: Greater emphasis on visuals, greater variety of formats and voices. They also announced that the Times would be introducing an alternative metric to pageviews that would “measure an article’s value to attracting and retaining subscribers.”)

      How would they measure this exactly?

    2. He has no public presence on Facebook or Twitter, which Sulzberger can get a ­little defensive about—he was promoted to management in 2015 to help implement the recommendations of the Innovation Report, and he knows there’s an easy joke to be made about how the person charged with leading the Times into a digital future has never liked, tweeted, or snapped.

      Maybe that distance is a good thing?

    3. inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering (which, for the Times, is journalism) while continuously adding new online services and features (from personalized fitness advice and interactive newsbots to virtual reality films) so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones.

      Not sure I really see this happening...

    4. It’s to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever

      Cool plan.