Google DeepMind has collaborated with classical scholars to create a new AI tool that uses deep neural networks to help historians decipher the text of damaged inscriptions from ancient Greece. The new system, dubbed Ithaca, builds on an earlier text restoration system called Pythia. Ithaca doesn’t just assist historians in restoring text—it can also identify a
Month: March 2022
The new course is meant, in part, to answer that question, speaking directly to rehabilitated techies like Read. It contains eight modules and is intended to take about eight hours total, plus additional time spent on worksheets, reflection exercises, and optional discussion groups over Zoom. Read, who “binged” the course, says he completed it in
René has nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine. The 34-year-old lives more than 1,000 km away in Nuremberg, Germany. He has no family there, and he’s never been to the country. But when Russia invaded, he wanted to help. So on the dating app Tinder, he changed his location to Moscow and started
Six syringes, a pot of cod liver oil, and seven glass vials have been neatly arranged on a blanket and photographed for a listing on the secondhand marketplace app Depop. Two blister packs of fertility supplements lie next to them, covering a third packet which has torn foil and capsules missing. “Womens Fertility Trying To
The Federal Reserve says it hasn’t decided whether to pursue a digital currency but notes that a CBDC “could provide households and businesses a convenient, electronic form of central bank money, with the safety and liquidity that would entail; give entrepreneurs a platform on which to create new financial products and services; support faster and
On March 1, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a short video on Telegram in which a cheery bearded soldier stood before a line of tanks clanking down a road under an overcast sky. In an accompanying post, Kadyrov assured Ukrainians that the Russian army doesn’t hurt civilians and that Vladimir Putin wants their country to
In 2012, Moti Shniberg sold his face recognition startup to Facebook and started looking for a new challenge. “We wanted to take our expertise and do something good,” he says. Then he met the head of a medical genetics center, who explained the difficulty of diagnosing rare genetic disorders in children. Specialists sometimes use the
The media descended on the story the next day. Right away, experts were quoted lambasting Arizona’s lax regulatory environment, calling for a national moratorium on testing, and saying that fatalities are inevitable when developing such a technology. Initially, Vasquez says, she was reassured by the police’s public stance. Tempe’s then police chief, Sylvia Moir, told
Last October a local couple from the small midwestern city of Greensburg, Indiana offered to be people’s grandparents on demand. The couple, Tami and Dan Wenning, volunteered to babysit children and accompany them to Grandparent’s Day at the local elementary school, in a bid to attract remote workers to their area. Not to be outshined,
After his arrest, Parks didn’t tell many people, in part because of his prior record. “When you’re trying to do the right thing and change and do things differently and then something like that happens, people look at you like ‘Did you really do it?’” he says. A small group of close family and friends
Quinn says the spread of facial recognition technology has led investigators to believe there will be suitable digital evidence in every case, similar to the way the TV show CSI led people to believe there would always be DNA or physical forensic evidence. In reality, security camera images can be grainy, low quality, from odd
Ukraine’s request to cut Russia off from core parts of the internet has been rejected by the nonprofit group that oversees the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). CEO Göran Marby of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the group must “maintain neutrality and act in support of the global internet.” “Our
Russia’s government announced on Friday that it has blocked Facebook. Within hours, Twitter appeared to have been blocked as well. The moves are a major escalation in a standoff between Big Tech and the Kremlin that has been brewing since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The announcement appeared to be retaliation for restrictions
“Artillery fire lights up the sky and breaks my heart. I hope my compatriots in Ukraine are taking care of themselves and their families,” said a user on Weibo, often called China’s Twitter, on February 27. The message was quickly blocked, according to Free Weibo, a service of Great Fire, which tracks Chinese censorship online.
The traffic jam stretched from the Russian city of Belgorod to the Ukrainian border. Google Maps marked the congestion with red and orange, just as it does in all countries where the app is used to track traffic. But the GPS satellites sending these vehicles’ positions to Google were not picking up an ordinary traffic
At the end of January, Hanna Kompaniets received an email from Upwork, a website where for seven years she has connected with online clients to work as a virtual assistant. The email, which was sent to Ukrainian workers on the platform, said the company was tracking escalating tensions in Eastern Europe. “First and most importantly,
Liz Giorgi expected she would raise more money for her startup, Soona, in April. But when she saw how much money was sloshing around the startup world, she decided to go for it sooner. Giorgi started meeting with venture capitalists in October, a full six months ahead of plan, while her startup still had enough
If the leaders of Big Tech platforms thought geopolitics would take the heat off their companies during Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address, they were mistaken. In a speech that covered plenty of ground, the president took time to scold social media companies for what he called “the national experiment they’re conducting on
Many businesses had to reinvent themselves almost overnight because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Business owners had two choices: take action to change the way they work, or close up shop. Companies that refused to take their company virtual or adapt either didn’t make it or at the very least suffered a loss. Innovation and a
TikTok’s algorithm feeds people videos it believes they are hungry to see. And there’s plenty of appetite for videos about war right now: In the eight days between February 20 and February 28, views on videos tagged with #ukraine jumped from 6.4 billion to 17.1 billion—a rate of 1.3 billion views a day, or 928,000