This is the scariest, most counterintuitive thing astronauts had to do in space - 0 views
Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable - IEEE Spectrum - 0 views
Navigating the New Abnormal - 0 views
Long Tails, Aggregators & Infrastructures - Stories of Platform Design - 0 views
Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views
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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Rediscovering Our Nature Instinct - 0 views
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humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.
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This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.
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Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”
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How To Achieve Historic Perspective - Circa Navigate - 0 views
What If Science & Philosophy Was A Blockchain? - Circa Navigate - 0 views
The Ability to Navigate the In-Between Spaces | Amit S. Mukherjee - 0 views
Design Thinking vs Systems Thinking - Circa Navigate - 0 views
Searching together: A lesson from rats - 0 views
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For decades, scientists have been using a classical experimental search task-which involves placing a single rat in a complex maze to search for a reward-to deepen understanding of navigation, memory, and learning. However, rats are highly social animals that build and live in complex burrow systems in nature. Yet very little is known about how they explore as a group. In the new study, researchers from institutes in Germany and Hungary turned the classical experimental search task into the first experimental study on rodent group search behavior in a confined maze.
Rebalancing act - Can Japan Inc navigate the rift between China and America? | Business... - 0 views
Applying AI for social good | McKinsey - 0 views
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help tackle some of the world’s most challenging social problems. To analyze potential applications for social good, we compiled a library of about 160 AI social-impact use cases. They suggest that existing capabilities could contribute to tackling cases across all 17 of the UN’s sustainable-development goals, potentially helping hundreds of millions of people in both advanced and emerging countries. Real-life examples of AI are already being applied in about one-third of these use cases, albeit in relatively small tests. They range from diagnosing cancer to helping blind people navigate their surroundings, identifying victims of online sexual exploitation, and aiding disaster-relief efforts (such as the flooding that followed Hurricane Harvey in 2017). AI is only part of a much broader tool kit of measures that can be used to tackle societal issues, however. For now, issues such as data accessibility and shortages of AI talent constrain its application for social good.
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The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are among the best-known and most frequently cited societal challenges, and our use cases map to all 17 of the goals, supporting some aspect of each one (Exhibit 3). Our use-case library does not rest on the taxonomy of the SDGs, because their goals, unlike ours, are not directly related to AI usage; about 20 cases in our library do not map to the SDGs at all. The chart should not be read as a comprehensive evaluation of AI’s potential for each SDG; if an SDG has a low number of cases, that reflects our library rather than AI’s applicability to that SDG.
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