Items of Interest

Suprema Biometrics Data Breach

Suprema is a South Korean information securty company that supplies many companies and government agencies, such as the UK Metropolitan police, with their Biostar 2 web based biometrics lock system. The self proclaimed "Global Powerhouse in Biometric, Security and Identity Solutions" company have been found to have let fingerprint data, biometric and personal information of over 1 million people publicly accessible online.

UK Imports & Exports

The Guardian published a very informative interactive visualisation on UK exports and imports to and from Europe, with the hope of preparing people for changes in their post no-deal Brexit shop. The site highlights some top level items but also allows you to select any category of good to see that import and export flow. Turns out the UK exports £27m worth of potatoes to Ireland.

Latent Knowledge Identificaiton Using ML

Researchers used machine learning to analyse 3.3 million material science abstracts from 1922 to 2018. They found that the ML system captured fundamental knowledge within the field and also historically identified new materials and research to study before the new materials were discovered in real life. The research shows how machine learning can be used to identify latent knoweldge more quickly.

Podcast Of The Week: The Blindboy Podcast Live with Colm O'Gorman

I'm catching up with episodes of The Blindboy Podcast and this week I listened to Blindboy's thought and emotion provoking interview with Colm O'Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland and founder of One in Four, a support organisation for survivors of sexual violence and abuse. The interview is wide-ranging, from Colm's work and personal life to how Ireland is currently a beacon of light for supporting human rights in a lot of areas of policy and public opinion.

Codebases

Information Is Beautiful released a fascinating data-visualisation comparing the size of different codebases, such as the 40,000 lines of code in the space shuttle vs the 40,000,000 lines of code in Windows XP! Check out the full list here.

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