Items of Interest

Podcast Of The Week: Addressing Bias In NASA Submissions

#302
This NPR Shortwave episode describes how scientists at NASA analysed the submissions for use of the new James Webb telescope, as well as Hubble and found a huge amount of unconscious bias was leading to the majority of approvals going to submissions from male scientists. They ran some experiments with the submission procedures and found blind submissions as well as more fact based reviewing procedures removed a lot of the biases from the process.
Life
Podcast
Space

Podcast Of The Week: Pablo Escobar's Hippos on NPR Shortwave

#301
Did you know that Pablo Escobar brought 4 hippos into his estate in Colombia? After he died in 1993, the hippos were left run wild. Fast forward almost 30 years and there are now 400 of them ravaging the ecosystem of the Colombian landscape near the estate. This great episode of shortwave debates the different conservation options that the Colombians are investigating to manage the hippo population, which could reach 500 by 2030 if left unchecked.
History
Podcast
Science

Automatic Plane Photos

#300
Luke Berndt created a system to automatically photograph planes that fly over his house in Washington D.C. The skybot system uses the transponder of the aircraft to info the camera where in the sky to point at to take the photo. The camera moves and photographs until the plane is out of range or a new plane is in range. A machine learning custom vision cloud function then confirms that a plane is present in each photo and posts the best one to the Skybot website along with its identification detail from the FAA database..
Innovation
Photo
Tech

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