Swansea Bay Clouds

Image: Swansea Bay Clouds, this photo is available to licence on PicFair.

#133

Friday, November 16, 2018

In This Edition:
Online courses, source code tools, AI gone awry, Brexit graph, new galaxy, Blindboy with Will St Leger & Tonie Walsh, AI comedy and puzzle montage!

It is a bit surreal still having 10+ degree weather in mid November with all the shops in full Christmas mode. On the plus side, we still have blue skies.

600 Free Online Courses

Image: Quartz

Quartz have put together a list of the 600 courses recently released online by 190 universities. The courses cover programming, engineering, computer science, social studies, science, art & design, mathematics, humanities, business, health & medicine, data science, education & teaching and personal development.

 

 

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Source Code Tools

Image: Medium, Learning Dollars

Learning Dollars have put together a great list of 15 source code tools that can be used to help developers make sense of professional code bases, ranging from Chrome Developer Tools up to research projects to illustrate runtime events based on questions asked by the user.

AI Gone Awry

Image: Victoria Krakovna

Victoria Krakovna has a fantastic list of examples of AI systems that have misbehaved and subverted their way to meeting their incentive goals by sometime hilarious means! Some game systems evolved to clap body parts together to exploit a collision detection bug and generate free game enerrgy. Others decided that killing the characters at level 1 as the best way not to fail at completing level 2. Self driving car systems decided that spinning in circles was the most consistent way to go fast, and a skin lesion detection system decided that images with lesions photographed next to a ruler were more likely to be cancerous. Check out the other hilarious examples in the list here. The paper clip maximizer theory doesn't seem that far fetched anymore!

Brexit Visualisation

Image: Information Is Beautiful

Another great visualisation from Information Is Beautiful. This can be considered "a living document" given the amount of flux in the Brexit position at the moment! :-p

New Galaxy Discovered

Image: University of Cambridge

A team of astronomers have discovered a new galaxy called ANT 2 while working through data captured by the European Space Agency's GAIA satellite. The new galaxy previously went undetected because of its low density and position behind the shroud of the Milky Way's disc.

Podcast Of The Week: The Blindboy Podcast Live with Will St Leger & Tonie Walsh

Image: ACast, Blindboy

I'm busy playing catchup with the latest Blindboy podcast episodes and this week I listened to the live podcast with Will St Leger and Tonie Walsh, and it was amazing! If you haven't listened to The Blindboy Podcast yet, the mainstay episodes are Blindboy giving us a podcast hug in his studio speaking straight about wide ranging topics from the historical significance of lapis luzuli to Carl Jung's collective self consciousness, with plenty of hot takes in between. In parallel to the regular episodes, Blindboy embarks on series of live episodes around Ireland with special guests, which records and then puts out on the podcast every now and then.

This particlar live episode with Will St Leger & Tonie Walsh in my view is as much a societal service as a piece of entertainment. Both Will and Tonie are gay rights activists and describe the history of gay rights in Ireland as well as shining a light on the current state of sexual education and sexual health services in Ireland. The episode is funny but also so informative, and challenges a lot of sterotypical views of gay rights in Ireland.

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AI Comedy

Image: Twitter, Keaton Patti

Keaton Patti fed an AI bot 1,000 hours of stand up comedy and used it to generate a stand up routine, and it is glorious!

Cool Thing Of The Week: Puzzle Montage

Image: Tim Klein

Canadian artist Tim Klein creates montages from multiple jigsaw puzzles! It turns out jigsaws are made using the same templates, allowing pieces to be interchanged between scenes.

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About Found This Week

Found This Week is a curated blog of interesting posts, articles, links and stories in the world of technology, science and life in general.
Each edition is curated by Daryl Feehely every Friday and highlights cool stuff found each week.
The first 104 editions were published on Medium before this site was created, check out the archive here.

Daryl Feehely

I’m a web consultant, contract web developer, technical project manager & photographer originally from Cork, now based in London. I offer my clients strategy, planning & technical delivery services, remotely & in person. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com

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