Interesting
Reads – 2018-09-16
Contents
Articles
- A nostalgic journey through the evolution of web design
- Why we’re editing women scientists onto Wikipedia
- Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First
- The Best IoT eBooks Out There
- How Unpaywall is transforming open science
- Brazil museum fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year-old Rio institution gutted
- What I learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber
- Man’s Best (Robot) Friend: Robotic Pets Help Elders Reduce Pill Dependency And Lower Stress
- CES 2018: 14 Trends Shaping The Future According To The Largest Tech Show On Earth
- College is Dying, Design Your Own Education.
Events
/ Announcements
- ACM India Chennai Professional Chapter Turing Series Talk 12 on "Contributions of Tarjan and Hopcroft”
- ICACCP-2019: International Conference on Advanced Computational and Communication Paradigms -2019
========================================================
Articles
A
nostalgic journey through the evolution of web design
The
World Wide Web was invented almost 30 years ago by Tim Berners Lee to help
people easily share information around the world. Over the following decades,
it has changed significantly – both in terms of design and functionality, as
well its deeper role in modern society.
Just
as the architectural style of a building reflects the society from which it
emerges, so the evolution of web design reflects the changing fashions, beliefs
and technologies of the time.
Web
design styles have changed with remarkable speed compared with their bricks and
mortar cousins. The first website contained only text with hyperlinks
explaining what the web was, how to use it, and basic set-up instructions. From
those early days to the present, web design has taken a long and winding
journey.
Why
we’re editing women scientists onto Wikipedia
Wikipedia
is the fifth most popular website in the world and notches up more than 32
million views a day. But who edits Wikipedia — and the biases they carry with
them — matters
Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First
How rising seas will parch Miami: Miami sits on top
of a massive sponge-like aquifer. Its geography makes it uniquely vulnerable to
climate change: not only will rising seawater inundate the city above ground,
but it also threatens to contaminate the precious fresh water below the
surface. Salt water is already being pushed into the aquifer, forming a wall of
brine that’s creeping inland. This could be a lesson for other cities close to
the coastal areas.
The Best IoT eBooks Out There
The Internet of Things is complex, and there are
many moving parts to understand before venturing into your own IoT project. To
make the right decision for your product or company, you’ll likely need a total
deep dive into IoT and it’s technical components.
The author of the post has compiled some of the best
eBooks on IoT and related technologies, including real life use cases and
applications, to help you gain the foundational knowledge needed to build your
own IoT solutions.
How Unpaywall is transforming open science
The plucky non-profit transforming open science: Unpaywall,
the digital tool for quickly and legally finding open-access versions of
published papers, has become indispensable to many academics. Born out of an
all-nighter in a hotel hallway in 2011, the tool is now beingembraced by
established services such as Elsevier’s Scopus database. It's putting more
open-access content at researchers' fingertips and enabling scientists to
comprehensively study open-access publishing trends for the first time
Related
story: Half of papers searched for online are free to read
Related story: Need
a paper? Get a plug-in. A collection of web-browser plug-ins is making the
scholarly literature more discoverable.
Brazil
museum fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year-old Rio institution gutted
Brazil’s
oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by
fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been
destroyed. The Museu Nacional houses artefacts from Egypt, Greco-Roman art and
some of the first fossils found in Brazil
What I
learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber
One day inside a metabolic chamber: Science journalist Julia Belluz spent 23 hours eating, sleeping and exercising in a sealed room, with her every movement and mouthful being recorded. The result was a detailed map of how her body turns food into fuel: her metabolism. Belluz explores the mysteries of metabolism and its relationship to weight — and how metabolism myths are exploited by the diet industry
Man’s
Best (Robot) Friend: Robotic Pets Help Elders Reduce Pill Dependency And Lower
Stress
Lifelike
robotic pets can provide comfort and companionship in elder care. Robotic pets
with fluffy coats and lifelike eyes are finding a market as elder care
companions.
A
far cry from the hard-shelled mechanical pets of the early 2000s, these more
realistic “care bots” are providing companionship to nursing home residents — a
population known to experience loneliness and isolation.
The
benefits of robotic pets for elder care may extend far beyond comfort and
quality of life. One study found that therapy treatments with a robotic seal
led to reduced medication use, better sleep, and other health improvements in
patients with dementia — showing the potential for robotic pets to provide
long-term clinical value.
Related
report: Research Briefing: Mental Health &
Wellness Tech
CES
2018: 14 Trends Shaping The Future According To The Largest Tech Show On Earth
The
Consumer Electronics Show — better known as CES — is a massive 4-day affair,
with over 180K attendees ambling through 2.6M square feet (that’s 54 football
fields) of demo space in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This
year’s show featured technologies ranging from voice-operated autonomous cars
to smart toilets to ping-pong playing robots, and more.
To
be sure, CES had plenty in the way of “vaporware,” or gee-whiz demos that will
never actually see the light of day as products. But there were also hints of
true tech innovation and what the future will hold in categories including
consumer AI, the Internet of Things, and robotics, among many others.
College
is Dying, Design Your Own Education
College is dying.
I’m
not referring to the institutions — those will
probably survive for a few more decades.
I’m
referring to the paradigm.
A
paradigm where in order to acquire education you have to:
- Select a single field of study.
- Part with mobility and optionality + tens of thousands of dollars.
- Commit to a 4-year investment while having little clue how your chosen field works in the real world.
- Have a central planner dictate what’s worth learning within your field.
- Have teachers assigned to you with little room for choice.
- Focus on the theoretical over the practical, memorization over problem-solving.
- Learn from people without skin in the game.
- Rely on a document provided by an institution to prove that you learned something.
Events
/ Announcements
ACM
India Chennai Professional Chapter Turing Series Talk 12 on "Contributions
of Tarjan and Hopcroft”
As
part of the "50 Years of Turing Award" talk series, ACM Chennai
Chapter is organizing the 12th talk at IMSc on “Contributions of Robert Tarjan and
John Hopcroft (1986 Turing Award Winners)” by Prof. Venkatesh Raman, Institute
of Mathematical Sciences on 27th September 2018 at 5.00 p.m. at Ramanujan
Auditorium, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai
Registration is FREE. However, if
you intend to attend, please register through the following
link, to facilitate logistics:
ICACCP-2019:
International Conference on Advanced Computational and Communication Paradigms -2019
The Dept. of CSE, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim, India is organizing the Second edition of International Conference on Advanced Computational and Communication Paradigms -2019 (ICACCP-2019) during February 25-28, 2019. The event is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Kolkata Section, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Kolkata chapter, Computer Society of India and IEEE Communication Society, Kolkata Chapter. All accepted and presented papers will be submitted to IEEE Xplore.
Paper
Submission Deadline is 30th Sep 2018
More
details at the conf. website at http://www.icaccpa.in
or contact: The Convenor, ICACCP-2019, Department of CSE, Sikkim Manipal
Institute of Technology, Majitar, East Sikkim, Sikkim-737136, India E-mail: icaccp.cse@smit.smu.edu.in
Mobile:
+91-9821928536
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