This Romanian graveyard has a surprisingly delightful sense of humor The Merry Cemetery’s incongruously colorful headstones and witty epitaphs smirk and wink in the face of death. See more photos at TheWeek.com .
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This Romanian graveyard has a surprisingly delightful sense of…
We’ve heard of many different uses for AI within the medical field , including for prediction of heart attacks and detection of Alzheimer’s . Now, it looks as though machine intelligence could be applied to early detection of cancer as well. A group of Japanese researchers has figured out a way to use AI to spot colorectal cancer tumors before they become malignant, according to Inverse . The team compiled a database of over 30, 000 images of pre-cancerous and cancerous cells in order to help the AI detect the difference between the two. After the machine learning process had taken place, they fed it an image of a colorectal polyp that had its magnification increased by a factor of 500. The program was able to determine within a second whether that specific polyp was cancerous. Dr. Yuichi Mora from Showa University made a presentation about these results this week at the United European Gastroenterology Conference in Barcelona. He cited the AI’s detection accuracy at 86 percent, which is impressive. This is specifically important for colorectal cancer; it’s highly treatable in early stages, but detection often comes very late, after the cancer cells have spread into the bloodstream. The cancer originates as benign polyps in the rectum and colon that turn into malignant tumors. This AI could help detect colorectal cancer early, ensuring that the cancer is treatable for more people. Source: Inverse , PubMed
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An AI detected colorectal cancer with 86 percent accuracy
Nintendo has announced it’s sold a further 2.93 million Switch consoles over the latest quarter, reaching just shy of 8 million units total. After another strong quarter, the company is now aiming to sell 14 million units by the time the Switch turns one year old — up from 10 million it aimed for previously. It’s also increased its forecast for the full year, from $6.59 billion to $8.44 billion. If Nintendo hits its targets, that would mean the Switch could best its predecessor, the Wii U, in a single year. The older console only reached 13.56 million sales over the entirety of its five-year lifetime — it wasn’t a hit for the games maker. Nintendo racked up $209 million in profit for the quarter, with revenues reaching $1.93 billion. The company managed to sell 22 million game titles in the last half year — a figure that doesn’t account for the recently launched Super Mario Odyssey , which is likely to sell consoles all by itself . According to a Reuters report , the company is now endeavoring to meet customer demand — it’s still not easy to buy a Switch in stores. “We’ve boosted Switch production in order to meet strong demand from our customers as it was difficult for customers to buy the consoles at retail stores, ” said Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima . While Nintendo doesn’t spin out mobile sales, it reported a revenue increases over 420 percent since last year, lead by Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes . It looks like the company has found a whale or two . The holy grail for in-app payment centric games, these players invest a lot of time and money into smartphone games. Animal Crossing will be the company’s next smartphone game property , and will also include in-app purchases to help deck out your digital campsite. Source: Nintendo
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Nintendo expects Switch will beat Wii U lifetime sales in a year
(video link) One of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world wasn’t contained in a nation or a city. It was a series of trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa, and dubbed the “Silk Road” by modern explorers. For centuries, these routes passed through wealthy cities whose vibrant cultures were hybrids of Eastern and Western culture, joined by the spirit of trade and knowledge exchange. The Silk Road civilization thrived because it had no borders. In this episode of Ancient People Did Stuff , we talk about some of the more unusual discoveries that archaeologists have made at excavation sites along the ancient Silk Roads. One of the great medieval cities of the Silk Road was Samarkand, located today in Uzbekistan. Its people were called Sogdians, and their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road during roughly the 4 th through the 8 th centuries. And yet one of the only remaining examples we have of written Sogdian is in an angry letter that an abandoned wife sent to her husband, which was lost in a mailbag and found over a millennium later. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads
It’s generally recognized that The Simpsons drifted from sharp comedy to cosy light entertainment as the years went by, and that a threshold was passed somewhere between seasons eight and eleven. Using data culled from IMDB and a contiguous cluster analysis, Nathan Cunn pinpoints the exact end of The Simpsons’ golden age to the half-hour: episode 11 of season 10 . This particular way of seeing things condemns no particular episode’s sins, merely putting a statistical dividing point between Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken and Sunday Cruddy Sunday . Compare to The Principal and the Pauper , the season 9 episode traditionally identified as the shark-jumper, which in this chart is a controversial blip on the road to all the disengaged meta to come. It’s remarkable that the show managed to go for over nine seasons, and over 200 episodes, with an average rating of 8.2. The latter seasons, in contrast, have an average rating of 6.9, with only three episodes in the latter 400+ episodes achieving a rating higher than the average golden age episode—those episodes being Trilogy of Error, Holidays of Futured Passed, and Barthood. Given that the ratings approximately follow a Gaussian distribution, we expect (and, indeed, observe) that roughly half of the golden age episodes exceeded this mean value. Although The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was, the decline in the show’s latter seasons is more testament to the impossibly high standards set by the earlier seasons than it is an indictment of what the show became. Nonetheless, the author also posits that further declines in standards may be masked after a certain point by survivorship bias : votes coming only from fans whose perception of quality won’t change so long as the quantity remains. On the other hand, internet ratings are not the be-all and end-all of America’s collective critical faculties, either.
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Cluster analysis shows that the golden age of The Simpsons ended in Season 10
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month’s release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox… The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. “Sometimes, it’s better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development, ” Odvarko said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Samsung is starting a new “Upcycling” initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new. Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative. Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer’s conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them. The people at Samsung’s C-Lab — an engineering team dedicated to creative projects — showed off old Galaxy phones and assorted tablets stripped of Android software and repurposed into a variety of different objects. The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5’s together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl. Samsung declined to answer specific questions about the bitcoin mining rig, but an information sheet at the developer’s conference noted that eight galaxy S5 devices can mine at a greater power efficiency than a standard desktop computer (not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s
Orome1 shares a report from Help Net Security: IOActive security consultant Mario Ballano has discovered two critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities affecting Stratos Global’s AmosConnect communication shipboard platform. The platform works in conjunction with the ships’ satellite equipment, and integrates vessel and shore-based office applications, as well as provides services like Internet access for the crew, email, IM, position reporting, etc. The first vulnerability is a blind SQL injection in a login form. Attackers that successfully exploit it can retrieve credentials to log into the service and access sensitive information stored in it. The second one is a built-in backdoor account with full system privileges. “Among other things, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute commands with SYSTEM privileges on the remote system by abusing AmosConnect Task Manager, ” Bellano shared. The found flaws can be exploited only by an attacker that has access to the ship’s IT systems network, he noted, but on some ships the various networks might not be segmented, or AmosConnect might be exposed to one or more of them. The vulnerabilities were found in AmosConnect 8.4.0, and Stratos Global was notified a year ago. But Inmarsat won’t fix them, and has discontinued the 8.0 version of the platform in June 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Critical Flaws In Maritime Communications System Could Endanger Entire Ships
Libraries and museums will most likely have more time to preserve old games before they disappear completely. The US Copyright Office has announced that it plans to recommend the renewal of a DMCA exemption giving museums and libraries the right to preserve old games, so long as they require sever support that’s no longer working. They can even hack consoles to keep those games running if needed. This exemption has been in place since 2015, but it needs to be renewed every three years. The Office says that after reviewing the public’s comments, it didn’t “find any meaningful opposition to renewal.” It has even received petitions from people running archival efforts to renew the exemption. In addition, as Gamasutra notes, the agency is now seeking comments about an expansion being pushed by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. MADE wants the exemption to cover multiplayer and massively multiplayer games, which were left out in the original rule. The Electronic Software Association blocked their addition the first time due to concerns about privacy, but their inclusion gets approved, then your kids might get to play your old favorite games someday. Via: Gamasutra Source: US Copyright Office
Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba planned to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti last spring. They ran into engine trouble in late May, and were eventually rescued by the Nav y on October 25, 900 miles southeast of Japan. (more…)
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Two sailors and two dogs rescued at sea, months after distress call