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Daily Archives: January 30, 2020

The Earth Archive

“An unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR scan the entire surface of the Earth before it’s too late. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our entire cultural & ecological patrimony. We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests.  We’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year. Rising sea levels will make whole cities,  countries, and continents unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will even know they existed. LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it. Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points. Earth Archive is both a program of scanning focused on endangered landscapes and an open-source collection of LiDAR scans accessible to scientists around the world. We won’t live long enough to see the full impact of the Earth Archive. Neither will you. But that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.  The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humankind. A bet that together, collectively, as people & as scientists, that we will face the climate crisis. And that we’ll choose to do right thing. Not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us, and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy…”

See alsoThese Maps Reveal Earth’s Unspoiled Places – A revolution in archaeology is happening just when we need it most.

Fear and loathing on Facebook?

First Monday – Fear and loathing on Facebook? Tracking the rise of populism and platformization in viral political Facebook posts, Anders Olof Larsso – “Adopting a longitudinal ‘demand’ perspective to the study of online political campaigning, the present study details developments in supporter engagement on party Facebook Pages during three Swedish elections — 2010, 2014… Continue Reading

2020 The State of Auto Insurance

The Zebra – Car insurance rates across the U.S. are higher than ever. “The Zebra reveals the latest data, trends impacting rates, and which drivers pay the most, based on an analysis of 73 million rates…Since 2011, rates have skyrocketed 29.6% nationally, though the impacts differ across the U.S. Seven states have seen small rate… Continue Reading

New web service can notify companies when employees get phished

ZDNet – “Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished. The service is named “I Got Phished” and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just… Continue Reading

Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world

MIT Technology Review – Google has released a neural-network-powered chatbot called Meena that it claims is better than any other chatbot out there. Data slurp: Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes of public social-media chatter—8.5 times as much data as OpenAI’s GPT-2. Google says Meena can talk about pretty much anything, and can… Continue Reading

Apple delivers new redesigned Maps for all users in US

Apple news release – New Apple Maps Designed with Better Road Coverage and Pedestrian Data, More Precise Addresses, and Detailed Land Cover: “Apple today announced that all users in the United States can now experience a redesigned Maps with faster and more accurate navigation and comprehensive views of roads, buildings, parks, airports, malls and more,… Continue Reading

You’ve got snail mail

Washington Post: “Targeted online ads are now literally following you home Marketers are using the same technology and data as online advertising companies to decide who gets what flier, postcard or envelope…As people become numb to targeted digital ads that follow them across social media and into their email inboxes, some high-tech marketers are turning… Continue Reading