FEELING THE HEAT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY TRADING
It’s high summer here in North America, and for a lot of us, this one has been a scorcher. Media reports have been filled with coverage of heat wave after heat wave, with temperature records falling like dominoes. But as they say, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, and that was painfully true in the first week of July as a slug of tropical air settled into the northeast United States.
Read moreTHE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT CANCER AND MOBILE PHONES
On 28 March this year, the scientific peer review of a landmark United States government study concluded that there is “clear evidence” that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, specifically, a heart tissue cancer in rats that is too rare to be explained as random occurrence. Eleven independent scientists spent three days at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, discussing the study, which was done by the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services and ranks among the largest conducted of the health effects of mobile phone radiation. NTP scientists had exposed thousands of rats and mice (whose biological similarities to humans make them useful indicators of human health risks) to doses of radiation equivalent to an average mobile user’s lifetime exposure.
Read moreFIRST EVER COLOR X-RAY ON A HUMAN
New Zealand scientists have performed the first-ever 3-D, colour X-ray on a human, using a technique that promises to improve the field of medical diagnostics, said Europe’s CERN physics lab which contributed imaging technology. The new device, based on the traditional black-and-white X-ray, incorporates The CERN technology, dubbed Medipix, works like a camera detecting and counting individual sub-atomic particles as they collide with pixels while its shutter is open.
Read moreUBER LAYS OFF 100 SAFETY DRIVERS AS IT SCALES BACK SELF-DRIVING TESTS
Uber is laying off its safety drivers in Pittsburgh and San Francisco—about 100 people in total. It’s the latest sign that Uber is scaling back its testing operations as it tries to move beyond the March crash that killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. Uber’s testing operations have been suspended nationwide since that fatality. It already laid off its safety drivers in the Phoenix metropolitan area—previously the company’s most significant testing location. And the company decided not to renew its permit to test self-driving cars in California. But Uber says it’s still aiming to resume testing in the Pittsburgh area.
Read moreCOLLECTION OF INTERACTIVE MACHINE LEARNING EXAMPLES
Each seed is a machine learning example you can start playing with. Explore, learn and grow them into whatever you like. Source: google.com
FOUNDATIONS MACHINE LEARNING
Bloomberg presents ‘Foundations of Machine Learning,’ a training course that was initially delivered internally to the company’s software engineers as part of its ‘Machine Learning EDU’ initiative. This course covers a wide variety of topics in machine learning and statistical modeling. The primary goal of the class is to help participants gain a deep understanding of the concepts, techniques and mathematical frameworks used by experts in machine learning.
Read moreCANCER CELLS ENGINEERED WITH CRISPR SLAY THEIR OWN KIN
Using gene editing, scientists have hoodwinked tumor cells into turning against their own kind. Cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream have something of a homing instinct, able to find and return to the tumor where they originated. To capitalize on that ability, researchers engineered these roving tumor cells to secrete a protein that triggers a death switch in resident tumor cells they encounter.
Read moreSPIDERS CAN FLY THOUSANDS OF MILES WITH ELECTRIC POWER
Small spiders achieve flight by aiming their butts at the sky and releasing tendrils of silk to generate lift. Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force, but many scientists assumed that the arachnids, known as “ballooning” spiders, were simply sailing on the wind like a paraglider. The wind power explanation has thus far been unable to account for observations of spiders rapidly launching into the air, even when winds are low, however.
Read moreSELF-DRIVING CARS ARE HEADED TOWARD AN AI ROADBLOCK
If you believe the CEOs, a fully autonomous car could be only months away. In 2015, Elon Musk predicted a fully autonomous Tesla by 2018; so did Google. Delphi and MobileEye’s Level 4 system is currently slated for 2019, the same year Nutonomy plans to deploy thousands of driverless taxis on the streets of Singapore. GM will put a fully autonomous car into production in 2019, with no steering wheel or ability for drivers to intervene. There’s real money behind these predictions, bets made on the assumption that the software will be able to catch up to the hype. On its face, full autonomy seems closer than ever.
Read moreSERVERLESS PERFORMANCE: CLOUDFLARE WORKERS, LAMBDA AND LAMBDA@EDGE
A few months ago we released a new way for people to run serverless Javascript called Cloudflare Workers. We believe Workers is the fastest way to execute serverless functions, but lets prove it. At the 95th percentile, Workers is 441% faster than a Lambda function, and 192% faster than Lambda@Edge. The functions being tested simply return the current time. All three scripts are available on Github. The testing is being done by a service called Catchpoint which has hundreds of testing locations around the world.
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