Populating paleoamerica – who’s to blame
Two recent studies – with non-convergent conclusions – about early human settlement in the americas.
nature’s “Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas” analyses genomic data pointing to genetic familiarity among some amazonian populations and Australasians. This is a more diverse genetic ogirin than presented in the other study,
Science’s “Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans” claiming evidence for a single migration wave from Siberia populated Americas.
reading list: Bill Gates
Below some of top recommendations. for a more complete view of the books, including reviews and comments, see his bookshelf by Bill Gates himself
“Tap Dancing to Work” by Carol Loomis
“Making the Modern World” by Vaclav Smil
“The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert
“Stress Test” by Timothy Geithner
“The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker
“The Man Who Fed the World” by Leon Hesser
“Business Adventures” by John Brooks
“The Bully Pulpit” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
“The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion
are there life jackets under our cities?
James Hansen, an early global warming whistleblower is publishing again. More bad news, folks: “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous”
Hansen and team of scientists studies indicates that:
“There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today.
Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings (…) ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration (…)
ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. (…) Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge. (…)
slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms.(…)
Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. (…) ”
Why Nasdaq Is Betting On Bitcoin’s Blockchain” by Mike Orcutt
“In its highest-profile application yet, Bitcoin’s public transaction record will help startups keep track of shares and shareholders .(…) It’s much too early to tell whether Bitcoin is the future of money, but a recently launched Nasdaq experiment will test whether it can be the future of financial record keeping.
The stock exchange announced recently that it has begun experimenting with the blockchain (…) Nasdaq will take advantage of a feature in Bitcoin’s design that allows additional data to be recorded on the blockchain along with information about a Bitcoin transaction (…) keeping while making it cheaper and more accurate. (…)
“There’s really no great system in place to ensure that this is done accurately along the way and is auditable to the beginning of time,” says Brad Peterson, Nasdaq’s chief information officer.
(…) The beauty of storing high-value information in the blockchain, says Chain’s founder Adam Ludwin, is that it does not require that people trust any single entity, like a company that may go out of business or change hands, with the task of accurately recording this information. The blockchain, he says, is an “immutable record that everyone can see and agree with.” read full article
how many words for a picture?
Researchers Andrej Karpathy and Li Fei-Fei presents in Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions a model for estimating natural language description of images.
They share part of the code on Github so people can train their neural network to describe images.
Visual information and its correspondent descriptions such as below:
“woman is holding bunch of bananas.”
“a young boy is holding a baseball bat.”
