Natural gas-fired power plants, which have crushed the economics of coal, are on the path to being undercut themselves by renewable power and big batteries, a study found.
By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.
The Super Bowl is TV’s most-watched annual event, but would any network executive bet on counting more people to watch in an age when viewers are moving to streaming video and mobile devices?
CBS will. The network believes it could see a 10% to 12% lift in total viewers – “if not more” – for its 2021 broadcast of Super Bowl LIII, says Radha Subramanyam, chief research and analytics officer for CBS Corp., in an interview.
Her optimism is buoyed by the fact that starting in the fall of next year, TV’s national Nielsen ratings – those measurements of audience used to set rates with advertisers – will include people viewing programs “out of home,” in places like restaurants, hotel rooms and at other people’s houses. At a time when TV ratings are eroding season after season as TV viewers latch on to new services like Netflix and Hulu, the move could send some ratings levels spiking upwards.
Is this the age of the great metropolitan exodus? In 2018, the New York City area lost more than 100,000 people to other cities and suburbs—that’s 277 people leaving every day. The Los Angeles and Chicago areas lost, respectively, 201 and 161 residents each day. It’s quite a change from the post–Great Recession period, when an urban renaissance was supposedly sweeping the country and all three metro areas were experiencing a population boomlet.
Almost by definition, technology companies are meant to create products that the public doesn’t realize it needed. It’s only after the device has entered our lives that we have this realization (as many of you have surely mused, What did we do before cell phones?). Google, of course, is no exception to this rule. And such is the case with its newest product launch: The Google Nest Hub Max.
As a fan of photography in general, and a believer in the inevitability of computational photography and its capabilities, today is indeed a red-letter day. Apple has truly delivered a great new camera, that happens to be a phone and a whole lot of other things. From great stills to slow-motion selfies to incredible video capabilities — it is hard to not wanting to upgrade your phone that is still an astonishing camera.
It was also an important day because finally Apple, which seemed to be falling behind in the smartphone camera race, can look you in the eye and say that they actually have the best camera, powered by the best silicon and the best experience. The three-lens camera system, backed up computational photographic capabilities enabled by a beefy A13 Bionic chip with ever more powerful neural engines and an even more powerful graphics processing engine, is impressive indeed. The camera system is a square-shaped module that stands out behind the phone.
A group of state officials, including the leaders of several agencies, representatives of Gov. Phil Scott’s administration and state representatives, have begun meeting with a goal of finding ways that federal funds can be used to reduce the state’s prison population and the rate at which offenders return to criminal activity.
The Justice Reinvestment II Working Group met Aug. 26 to get a report on the status of the trends in criminal activity and Vermont prisons. The goal is to use the data to determine what other information could be valuable and to make policy recommendations to the Legislature for their 2020 Legislative session.
The National Science Foundation has issued the first awards through its Convergence Accelerator pilot, leveraging multidisciplinary research teams and laying the groundwork for public-private partnerships with Fortune 500 companies to apply Big Data to science and engineering and create technologies that can enhance the lives of American workers. A total of 43 new awards totaling $39 million will support projects across the country. … “The Convergence Accelerator is a unique new experiment for NSF,” said Douglas Maughan, NSF’s Convergence Accelerator office head. “For decades, traditionally the private sector has not been able to justify investment in basic research due to a lack of obvious commercial applications. With the Convergence Accelerator, we’re challenging that notion, engaging with partners who can use their experience to help us support research that can change and enhance American society.
Machine learning is often touted as a way to replace human chemists in certain tasks in research. For instance, machine learning algorithms could predict new reagents likely to make desired materials, rather than a chemist searching the literature or using their intuition to find one. But humans still make and train these algorithms. A team of researchers have now shown that during those steps humans can smuggle in biases that infect machine learning and degrade its performance (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1540-5).
The team, consisting of Haverford College’s Sorelle A. Friedler, Alexander J. Norquist, Joshua Schrier, also of Fordham University, and a host of Haverford undergraduates, looked at how well machine learning algorithms could predict reactants and reaction conditions used to make amine-templated metal oxides. These compounds can form zeolites or metal-organic frameworks.
Mayo Clinic and Google are launching a partnership on cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence that is the latest example of how the nation’s technology giants are starting to play a bigger role in health care.
The agreement, announced Tuesday, is a key part of an ambitious plan by Mayo’s new CEO to position the Rochester-based health care system as a platform that connects seriously ill patients with the best treatments.
Financial terms were not disclosed. As part of the 10-year agreement, Google will store the clinic’s data and open an office in Rochester for research with Mayo on solving complex health care problems.
More than a million Americans have donated genetic information and medical data for research projects. But how that information gets used varies a lot, depending on the philosophy of the organizations that have gathered the data.
Some hold the data close, while others are working to make the data as widely available to as many researchers as possible — figuring science will progress faster that way. But scientific openness can be constrained b y both practical and commercial considerations.
Three major projects in the United States illustrate these differing philosophies.
Facial recognition has friends in Europe. Live trials of real-time face-tracking have taken place over the past year in countries such as the U.K. and France, by and large without falling foul of the continent’s sweeping but haphazardly-enforced data protection laws.
This should be a wake-up call for regulators to act. But the trials also offer a taste of the public-safety argument which will be trotted out to defend this intrusive, flawed technology, glamorized by TV shows like “24” to solve fictional terrorist plots.
Boston, MA October 22, starting at 9:30 a.m. “This year’s theme is “Digital Health Gets Real,” a nod to healthtech’s progress, driven by technological advances, federal policy changes, and demand from patients and other stakeholders.”
Atlanta, GA September 18, starting at 12:15 p.m. “The Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech invites you to a seminar by Chandrajit Bajaj from the University of Texas.” [free]
New York, NY September 15, starting at 10 a.m. “In this third of 4 articles previewing this year’s conference, we take a look at the panels, workshops, and presentations in the conference’s Planet Track.” [registration required]
New York, NY February 6-8. ” The third edition of this conference will be co-located with AAAI-20 on February 7-8, 2020 at the Hilton New York Midtown, New York, USA. The program of the conference will include peer-reviewed paper presentations, invited talks, panels, and working sessions.” Deadline for submissions is November 4.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning methods that are based on artificial neural networks. These are inspired by information processing and distributed communication nodes in biological systems such as the brain. In deep learning, each level learns to transform the input data into a slightly more abstract and composite representation. For instance, in a facial-recognition system, pixels might be one layer of the system, while edges might be another, eyes might be another, and the face might be another. The complexity of deep learning methods makes using existing packages popular in the programming community. TensorFlow and PyTorch in Python are popular, as is the Keras package in R. However, in the production of deep learning systems, performance and safety are two issues that drive companies to choose functional programming languages such as Clojure and Haskell instead.
Companies like to hand out USB drives like candy. At media functions, for example, these flash storage devices contain product photos, press information, and details about businesses that hope the journalists who receive them will cover their latest offering.
While convenient, there’s a lot that could go wrong. A public relations team member, for example, could have unknowingly transferred malware to the device when uploading its content.
Patterns, a new gold open access journal from Cell Press, promotes all types of research outputs and facilitates sharing and collaboration to solve key scientific problems and aid in the development of solutions for practice, policies, and management.