REPLAY IN BIOLOGICAL AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS
Our waking and sleeping lives are punctuated by fragments of recalled memories: a sudden connection in the shower between seemingly disparate thoughts, or an ill-fated choice decades ago that haunts us as we struggle to fall asleep. By measuring memory retrieval directly in the brain, neuroscientists have noticed something remarkable: spontaneous recollections, measured directly in the brain, often occur as very fast sequences of multiple memories. These so-called ‘replay’ sequences play out in a fraction of a second–so fast that we’re not necessarily aware of the sequence.
Read moreAWS POWER OUTAGE WITH DATA LOSS
On August 31st, 2019, an Amazon AWS US-EAST-1 datacenter in North Virginia experienced a power failure at 4:33 AM, which led to the datacenter’s backup generators to kick on. Unfortunately, these generators started failing at approximately 6:00 AM , which led to 7.5% of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes becoming unavailable. ‘1:30 PM PDT At 4:33 AM PDT one of ten data centers in one of the six Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Region saw a failure of utility power.
Read moreNEW WAYS TO MAKE VERTICAL FARMING STACK UP
Mr Elder is product manager for Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a “vertical farming” company based at Invergowrie, near Dundee, in Scotland. Each of the nine-metre-high towers in the demonstration unit that he runs occupies barely 40 square metres. But by stacking the trays one on top of another an individual tower provides up to 350 square metres of growing area. Using his phone again, Mr Elder changes the colours and brightness of the 1,000 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) strung out above each tray. The app can also control the temperature, humidity and ventilation, and the hydroponic system that supplies the plants, growing on various non-soil substrates, with water and nutrients. Armed with his trusty phone, Mr Elder says he can run the farm almost single-handedly.
Read moreHOW CHINA IS CASHING IN ON GROUP CHATS
One sunny afternoon this April, a Chinese teenager nicknamed Gallen was backpacking through Bali, hunting for things to do. But he didn’t turn to TripAdvisor for crowd-sourced suggestions (too time consuming) or scroll through Instagram for local geotags (too imprecise). Instead, Gallen enlisted recommendations from other nearby tourists through a WeChat group chat organized by the online travel provider Ctrip. The Chinese company’s virtual-tour-manager program (VTM) uses WeChat group chats—populated by other Ctrip travelers in your destination city at the same time and overseen by a Ctrip representative—to provide a real-time concierge service. Through the group chat, Gallen ended up renting a car with a local Chinese-speaking driver and spending the day with other solo travelers at Pandawa Beach on Bali’s southern coast. In early 2015, “conversational commerce” was hailed as the future of online shopping.
Read moreEVEN PHYSICISTS DON’T UNDERSTAND QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanics, assembled gradually by a group of brilliant minds over the first decades of the 20th century, is an incredibly successful theory. We need it to account for how atoms decay, why stars shine, how transistors and lasers work and, for that matter, why tables and chairs are solid rather than immediately collapsing onto the floor. Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence.
Read moreINSIDERS SAY AN AMBITIOUS MIT MEDIA LAB PROJECT IS MOSTLY SMOKE AND MIRRORS
An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider. The ‘personal food computer,’ a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn’t work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Read moreANATOMY OF A POWER OUTAGE: EXPLAINING THE AUGUST OUTAGE AFFECTING 5% OF BRITAIN
Without warning on an early August evening a significant proportion of the electricity grid in the UK went dark. It was still daylight so the disruption caused was not as large as it might have been, but it does highlight how we take a stable power grid for granted. The story is a fascinating one of a 76-second chain of unexpected shutdown events in which individual systems reacted according to their programming, resulted in a partial grid load shedding — what we might refer to as a shutdown.
Read moreHOW LYFT CREATES HYPER-ACCURATE MAPS FROM OPEN-SOURCE MAPS AND REAL-TIME DATA
At Lyft, our novel driver localization algorithm detects map errors to create a hyper-accurate map from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and real-time data. We have fixed thousands of map errors in OSM in bustling urban areas. Later in the post, we share a sample of the detected map errors in Minneapolis with the OSM Community to improve the quality of the map.
Read moreINTRODUCING KILOGRAM, A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR AI DETECTION OF MALWARE
A team of researchers recently presented their paper on KiloGram, a new algorithm for managing large n-grams in files, to improve machine-learning detection of malware. The new algorithm is 60x faster than previous methods and can handle n-grams for n=1024 or higher. The large values of n have additional application for interpretable malware analysis and signature generation. Source: infoq.com
WHY OUR TEAM CANCELLED OUR MOVE TO MICROSERVICES
Recently our development team had a small break in our feature delivery schedule. Technical leadership decided that this time would be best spent splitting our monolithic architecture into microservices. After a month of investigation and preparation, we cancelled the move, instead deciding to stick with our monolith. For us, microservices were not only going to not help us; they were going to hurt our development process. Microservices had been sold to us as the ideal architectural for perhaps a year now. So we were surprised to find out they weren’t a good fit for us.
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