UBER SELF-DRIVING CAR CRASHES INTO ANOTHER CAR IN PITTSBURGH
An Uber self-driving car collided with another vehicle in Pittsburgh on February 24 in an incident first reported by Pittsburgh’s channel 11 last week. No one was seriously injured, but the incident caused serious damage to the vehicles. Uber and the driver disagree on exactly what happened in the seconds before the crash. Source: arstechnica.com
TRAIN YOUR MACHINE LEARNING MODELS ON GOOGLE’S GPUS FOR FREE
Training your model is hands down the most time consuming and expensive part of machine learning. Training your model on a GPU can give you speed gains close to 40x, taking 2 days and turning it into a few hours. However, this normally comes at a cost to your wallet. Source: hackernoon.com
OPEN LOCATION CODE: EASIER LOCATION ENCODING
Open Location Codes are a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than latitude and longitude. They are designed to be used like street addresses, especially in places where buildings aren’t numbered or streets aren’t named. Source: openlocationcode.com
‘NOT WELCOME HERE’: AMAZON FACES GROWING RESISTANCE TO ITS SECOND HOME
That proposition has united an ideologically diverse group of dissenters to Amazon’s grand HQ2 competition, ranging from rightwing organizations linked to the Koch brothers to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Groups and individuals that would normally agree only to mutual disdain and distrust have somehow come around to the same conclusion: that Amazon’s decision to pit 20 cities against each other in a fight to host a future hub is a bad deal for everyone except Amazon.
Read moreFORD RECALLS 1.3 MILLION CARS FOR STEERING WHEELS THAT MIGHT FALL OFF
On Wednesday, Ford announced it was recalling 1.3 million Ford Fusions and Lincoln MKZs for a rather alarming defect: it’s possible their steering wheels could fall off. The problem affects model years 2014 through 2018 and vehicles built at two different factories: Flat Rock and Hermosillo. Source: arstechnica.com
ANCIENT DNA IS REWRITING HUMAN AND NEANDERTHAL HISTORY
Geneticist David Reich used to study the living, but now he studies the dead. The precipitating event came in the form of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave. So well-preserved were the bones that they yielded enough DNA for sequencing, and it became Reich’s job in 2007 to analyze the DNA for signs that Neanderthals interbred with humans—a idea he was “deeply suspicious” of at the time.
Read moreMAKING MUSIC USING NEW SOUNDS GENERATED WITH MACHINE LEARNING
Technology has always played a role in inspiring musicians in new and creative ways. The guitar amp gave rock musicians a new palette of sounds to play with in the form of feedback and distortion. And the sounds generated by synths helped shape the sound of electronic music. But what about new technologies like machine learning models and algorithms? How might they play a role in creating new tools and possibilities for a musician’s creative process? Magenta, a research project within Google, is currently exploring answers to these questions.
Read moreTHE GERMAN ENTREPRENEURS CELEBRATING THEIR MISTAKES
The Berlin-born business owner is addressing an unusual audience – young techies gathered on a Thursday night to celebrate catastrophe. With the help of an amusing slideshow, featuring wisdom from TV’s The A-Team, Max tells the tale of multiple blunders made in the early days of his events company, Holi Concept, which runs festivals and races in cities across Europe. ‘In the last four or five years, I think I made 20 or 25 hard mistakes,’ he says, barely suppressing a cheeky grin.
Read moreTHE BLOOD UNICORN THERANOS WAS JUST A FAIRY TALE
It has been pretty obvious for a few years now that Theranos Inc. was a huge fraud. Theranos is a blood-testing startup that developed devices, which it called ‘TSPUs’ and ‘miniLabs,’ that were supposed to be able to do a wide range of laboratory tests on a finger-prick blood sample. It seems like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes really wanted to build devices that would actually do these things, and thought she could, and tried to.
Read moreTO TEST EINSTEIN’S EQUATIONS, POKE A BLACK HOLE
In November 1915, in a lecture before the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein described an idea that upended humanity’s view of the universe. Rather than accepting the geometry of space and time as fixed, Einstein explained that we actually inhabit a four-dimensional reality called space-time whose form fluctuates in response to matter and energy. Source: quantamagazine.org