Overcrowding problem on China’s #ArtificialIslands in the #SouthChinaSea could be solved with tunnels, according to a #Chinese#ocean#engineering project team that says it has developed an excavation method to overcome the limitations of the soft coral sand.
After a rapid expansion of its presence in the contested #Spratly#reef chain that began about a decade ago, #China eased back on construction in recent years in a bid to soothe the nerves of neighbouring countries
Why Boeing needs to be run by engineers and not bean counters
Really insightful video about what has gone wrong.
Among the points Casey makes is that Boeing imported Jack Welch's GE management culture.
This has included a focus on short-term profits over engineering, and practises such as stack ranking.
Boeing, as a major defence contractor and (direct and indirect) employer, is too big to fail.
And Casey argues that either the Board or, if they're unwilling, the US government, needs to clear out the senior management and introduce an engineer-led management team:
So…the “Slack will now train AI using your data” thing is not as much of a five alarm fire as I’d first assumed:
“We do not develop LLMs or other generative models using customer data.” ← GOOD.
“Data will not leak across workspaces.” ← Or so they say. They •are• training across workspaces, but sounds like recommender systems and not generative models, so…we’ll see. Seems fraught. Still, that public commitment does mean something — legal exposure, at least.
The bad news: platform owners don’t have a vision and are out of ideas for how to innovate their #ecosystems, all in the name of #efficiency.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s character from Jurassic Park: The most brilliant minds of #engineering are optimized to execute and have not bothered to consider whether they should.
The good news: “real” #innovation will happen from the experienced middle, not the top.
Although companies have created detectors to help spot #deepfakes, studies have found that biases in the data used to train these tools can lead to certain demographic groups being unfairly targeted.
A team of researchers discovered new methods that improve both the fairness and the accuracy of these detection algorithms by teaching them about human diversity
"In the mid-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network.
[...]
It is for this work on packet communication technologies—as part of the project that became the ARPANET and in the foundations of the Internet—that Kahn is being awarded the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor."
1/2 I still struggle getting used to the fact that the smallest mirrors of the Extremely Large Telescope are similar in size to the primary mirrors of many current telescopes!
The M5 – the fifth mirror in the optical path – has reached a key milestone: its blank, the piece that will be later polished, has been finalised.
Wow 300 images captured by Curiosity to build a panoramic survey at her Sol 4175 location, ten days ago. This video show them at a rate of 10/second. It took about 50 minutes for the rover to complete this scan with her left mast camera.
New video coming tonight, continuing the history of the Galloway Hydro Scheme.
It will cover the building of Clatteringshaws dam and the Glenlee Tunnel, which was the most expensive and dangerous part of the entire construction.
The last video covered the conditions the workforce endured, during the Great Depression, to construct the scheme, and here's a link to it to catch you up!
Researchers use reflectors underneath solar panels to boost solar power by 4.5%
"The University of Ottawa in collaboration with National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed an add-on to solar panels that increases their energy output by 4.5%"
This image perfectly conveys just how huge the 100-m dish of the Green Bank Telescope is. I had the chance to visit it a few years ago, back when I lived in the US, and the view from the receiver room is stunning. Although I must admit that looking down through the mesh floor was... "an experience" 😵💫 😅