In 165 countries, China's Beidou eclipses American GPS (Nikkei)
Capital cities for 165 of 195 major countries are observed more frequently by Beidou satellites than by GPS.
I should have loved biology - essay by James Somers
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail: "For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell."
I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate -- and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows "up" from "down"; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells. How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn't talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo -- DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA -- was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined? [...]
Self-replicating fungi converts gamma radiation into chemical energy.
"been found to thrive in ... Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant" and " been found to populate the exteriors of spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO)".
1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland (the guardian)
Researchers warn land inequality is rising with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies.
Microsoft 365 has employee surveillance and analytics built in (wolfie christl)
"Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it's built into MS 365. A new feature to calculate 'productivity scores' turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool"
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Fitness Industry During COVID-19
The fitness industry is undergoing a major transformation through a massive deployment of IoT applications and innovative artificial intelligence (AI) product offerings. The research firm Reports and Data predicts that the annual revenues for the fitness app market will reach $14.64 billion by 2027 with around 100.2 mln of fitness app users by 2024. AI-powered applications in the health, nutritional, and fitness sectors are finding exceptional consumer demand. Hiring an AI engineer, startup owners are creating smarter products, leveraging the latest innovations in machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision.
Challenges of Human Pose Estimation in AI-Powered Fitness Apps
Human pose estimation is a popular solution that AI has to offer; it is used to determine the position and orientation of the human body given an image containing a person. Some examples of applying pose estimation in fitness are Kaia, VAI Fitness Coach, Ally apps, or the Millie Fit device. Powered by computer vision and natural language processing algorithms, the technologies lead end-users through a number of workouts and give real-time feedback.
3D Human Pose Estimation in AI Fitness Coach Apps
“Is it possible for a technology solution to replace fitness coaches? Well, someone still has to motivate you saying “Come On, even my grandma can do better!” But from a technology point of view, this high-level requirement led us to 3D human pose estimation technology. In this article, I will describe our own experience of how 3D human pose estimation can be developed and implemented for the AI fitness coach solution.
Zenia: AI Guided Yoga & Fitness
"Zenia is the most advanced motion-tracking fitness app with real-time feedback and detailed analytics."
Apple is working on a new iPhone app with workout videos, code-named ‘Seymour’
Apple is working on an app with fitness videos, codenamed Project Seymour. Elite fitness instructor Jay Blahnik is running the project internally, according to a person familiar. The guided workouts range from cycling to yoga.
On-device, Real-time Body Pose Tracking with MediaPipe BlazePose (Google Research)
Today we are announcing the release of a new approach to human body pose perception, BlazePose, which we presented at the CV4ARVR workshop at CVPR 2020. If one leverages GPU inference, BlazePose achieves super-real-time performance, enabling it to run subsequent ML models, like face or hand tracking.
Kaia Health gets $26M to show it can do more with digital therapeutics
Kaia Health, a digital therapeutics startup which uses computer vision technology for real-time posture tracking via the smartphone camera to deliver human-hands-free physiotherapy, has closed a $26 million Series B funding round.
According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger's concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired – although Heidegger remained silent on this – by Okakura Kakuzō's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea (PDF) to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's professor Ito Kichinosuke had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed private lessons with him the year before:
‘Ito Kichinosuke, one of my teachers at university, studied in Germany in 1918 immediately after the First World War and hired Heidegger as a private tutor. Before moving back to Japan at the end of his studies, Professor Ito handed Heidegger a copy of Das Buch vom Tee, the German translation of Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, as a token of his appreciation. That was in 1919. Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927 and made Heidegger famous. Mr. Ito was surprised and indignant that Heidegger used Zhuangzi’s concept without giving him credit. Years later in 1945, Professor Ito reminisced with me and, speaking in his Shonai dialect, said, ‘Heidegger did a lot for me, but I should’ve laid into him for stealing’. There are other indications that Heidegger was inspired by Eastern writings, but let’s leave this topic here. I have heard many stories of this kind from Professor Ito and checked their veracity. I recounted this story at a reception held after a series of lectures I gave in 1968 at the University of Heidelberg at the invitation of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Japanese exchange students attended these lectures, and I explained that there were many other elements of classical Eastern thought in Heidegger’s philosophy and gave some examples. I must have said too much and may even have said that Heidegger was a plagiarist (Plagiator). Gadamer was Heidegger’s favorite student, and we ended up not speaking to each other for 4 or 5 years because he was so angry with me’ (Imamichi 2004, pp. 123–124).[3][4]
Martin Heidegger Interview with a Monk (English Subtitles)
"Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we're going, but we will l know we want to be there." - Bruce Mau in ‘Incomplete Manifesto for Growth’ (1998)
Does the human brain resemble the Universe?
An astrophysicist of the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon of the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies… and surprising similarities emerged. The study was published in Frontiers of Physics: "The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web”.
KFC starts selling fried chicken in China with self-driving "5G" unmanned food trucks
#Comment: Clearly this is the perfect use-case for artificial intelligence, besides killer robots..
14,600,000 bolivars, the amount of money you need to buy a 5 pound chicken in Venezuela