Google's Coral embedded AI devices are out of beta and are released to the public. The devices run tensorflow AI onboard, allowing AI solutions to be deployed in the field, such as in hospitals and water treatment plants.
McDonalds have started using AI to control digital drive through displays to suggest menu options based on time of day, weather and product popularity. Some McDonalds restaurants are trialling number plate recognition to add a customer's previous orders into the recommendation system.
Last week I went to see Alasdair Roberts and his band in the Blue Arrow in Glasgow, supported by Hank Tree and Quinie (who sang some amazing acapela folk songs in Scots!). Check out some photos of the concert here.
This week, Joe Rogen published his monster interview with Edward Snowden. Poor Joe got about 6 sentences in during the almost three hour interview. In saying that, the account given by Snowden is fascinating because of the passion that he conveys when talking about what he discovered and why he decided to become a whistleblower. The conversation towards the end moves on to more up to date topics such as bulk data collection and Snowden's life in Russia.
Darknet Diaries is a great podcast about shady things in the tech world. This week while going through the back catalog I listened to episode 10 which featured an interview with a Nation State Actor, aka a government hacker! The fascinating story describes how the unnamed agency hacked into the network of an unnamed agency of another country, only to be foiled by a windows update!
Drone photographer Conor Corbett (aka Éirespace) travelled the coasts of Ireland to capture drone photos of any of the remaining Éire markings from Workd War II. The 82 markings were created by volunteers of the Coastal Watch Service to help aircraft distinguish neutral Ireland from Northern Ireland.
In 2010, a compilation of music from Saharan mobile phones was complied on tape. The oftentimes unlabelled tracks included were a collection of popular music doing the rounds on memory cards of mobile phones and shared via bluetooth. In 2011, the artists were tracked down and the collection was released commercially 50% going directly to the artists. The album is also available on Spotify.
Microsoft have open-sourced their SandDance data visualisation tool. The Microsoft Research tool allows data to be presented as unit visualisations for datasets up to 500k rows, instead of traditional data aggregation visualisation. The tool has been re-written from as an embeddable component in javascript stacks. It is also available as a Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio extension.
Overview is a photography project that uses satellite and aerial imagery to demonstrate how human activity and natural forces hape our Earth. Check out their great work on their website, where you can filter by topics such as cities, design, transport, waste and nature. An example in the waste category is the above pictured cattle feedlot in Texas where cattle weighing 250kg are stored and fattened until they weight 450kg+ to be sent to slaughter.
Impressionist actor Jim Meskimen teamed up with deepfake video creator sham00k to create a deep fake video showing Jim performing impressions of famous actors while his face is changed to match those actors.
