Review Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Climate Change, Fossil-Fuel Pollution, and Children’s Health
— Read on www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2117706
Tag: anthropology
Scientists spot a massive group of feeding fin whales | Popular Science
Once hunted to the brink of extinction, a new survey signals that the world’s second-largest animal is staging a comeback.
— Read on www.popsci.com/environment/fin-whales-rebound-feeding-frenzy/
60. Cassandra Quave Thinks the Way Antibiotics Are Developed Might Kill Us | People I (Mostly) Admire
By mid-century, 10 million people a year are projected to die from untreatable infections. Can Cassandra, an ethnobotanist at Emory University convince Steve that herbs and ancient healing are key to our medical future?
Humanity’s Impact | Studio Birthplace
Short film Humanity’s Impact explores the question:
‘How many plastic bottles do we produce globally in real time?’
And the accompanying Augmented Reality app
invites users to interact with the data on a personal level.
Animated Series
Did you know that globally, we produce about 1 million plastic bottles per minute?
What does that number even look like? This is what you’re about to find out in Humanity’s Impact.Set in a 1960s American suburb test site that is populated with plastic test dummies, the film unleashes 20,000 bottles per second that crash onto the unknowing cast of dummies. The bottles burst through the kitchen window, and engulf the family dog. The suburban paradise is quickly flooded, revealing the terrifying scale and rate at which we pollute our planet. Only 9% of the overwhelming pile of plastic bottles actually gets recycled, the rest is dumped or burnt, or ends up in landfills and our oceans.
Augmented Reality App
To be able to understand our own consumption behavior better, we partnered with interactive design studio Superposition to release the augmented reality app Humanity’s Impact to help users relate to consumption-related data on an even more personal level. For example, users can drop 20,000 bottles into their own kitchen or bedroom, pledge to reduce their own plastic use, track their progress, take a photo with their data and share it on social media to motivate others to take part. The app is available for free right now on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
view more work
Before we made the highly successful film Wasteminster for Greenpeace, we made the pilot film Humanity’s Impact. With the film, we wanted to explore if we could make visible the incredible data related to humanity’s impact on our planet, putting a picture to the numbers.Both the animated series and the accompanying augmented reality app unleash impressive data simulations, visualizing the tremendous scale in which our consumer culture operates.
The project aims to create awareness and inspire action towards a more sustainable future
— Read on www.studiobirthplace.com/humanitysimpact
Why flat-Earthers are a clear and present threat to an AI-powered society
There are almost certainly people from every walk of life, in every industry, at every school, in every police precinct, and working for just about every news outlet who believe things about artificial intelligence that are simply not true.
Let’s make a short list of things that are demonstrably untrue that the general public tends to believe:
Big tech is making progress mitigating racial bias in AI
AI can predict crime
AI can tell if you’re gay
AI writing/images/paintings/videos/audio can fool humans
AI is on the verge of becoming sentient
Having a human in the loop mitigates bias
AI can determine if a job candidate will be successful
AI can determine gender
AI can tell what songs/movies/videos/clothes you’ll like
Human-level self-driving vehicles exist
And that list could go on and on. There are thousands of useless startups and corporations out there running basic algorithms and claiming their systems can do things that no AI can do.Those that aren’t outright pedaling snake oil often fudge statistics and percentages to mislead people concerning how efficacious their products are.
— Read on thenextweb.com/news/why-flat-earthers-clear-present-threat-ai-powered-society
UN Committee Finds Violation of Indigenous Peoples’ Right to Traditional Lands | ASIL
The community complained that the process killed their animals and plants, and had an adverse impact on the environment. The Committee found that Paraguay failed to prevent contamination in violation of the their right to traditional lands, and recommended that Paraguay complete the relevant criminal and administrative proceedings. This decision affirms that the term “home” in the context of the indigenous community should be interpreted “within the context of the special relationship between them and their territories including their livestock, crops and their way of life such as hunting, foraging and fishing.”
— Read on www.asil.org/ILIB/un-committee-finds-violation-indigenous-peoples-right-traditional-lands
Running Machine Learning Projects: Things to know | by Prashant Mudgal | Oct, 2021 | Towards Data Science
In my experience, ML projects come in all shapes and sizes and vary greatly in their complexity. In the initial 2000/10s, the emphasis was on the model-centric approach which I always found a little bizarre as I heard umpteen times about the fancier models than the results(well, it was a different time and folks used to get awestruck when they would hear ML, AI, DS etc); slowly and steadily the focus has shifted to the result centric approach i.e. use whatever model you can but make use of the data and produce results that are directional, applicable, and coherent.
— Read on towardsdatascience.com/running-machine-learning-projects-things-to-know-316775338eab
Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well. Maybe we do, too.
— Read on m.nautil.us/blog/weird-dreams-train-our-brains-to-be-better-learners
Scientists Show How They Gave A 70,000-Year-Old Neanderthal His Smile
Experts reconstructed the caveman’s face from just a fossilized orbital bone.
— Read on www.newsweek.com/scientists-show-how-they-gave-70000-year-old-neanderthal-his-smile-1637223
New ages for Saudi Arabia’s Camel Site| Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine
New research suggests the animal reliefs date to between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago
— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/life-size-camel-sculptures-in-saudi-arabia-are-older-than-stonehenge-pyramids-of-giza-180978693/