Items of Interest

First American Financial Corp. Data Breach

Insurance compay First American Financial Corp. were found to have made millions of financial reports and records available publicly online. Any of the documents could be accessed by incrementing the number in the querystring of the URL! You can read more about the breach and the lack of obfuscation on Krebs On Security.

Business

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Pomodoro Technique

#161

Ever having trouble being productive? Constantly fightinf procrastination? Yeah, me neither :-p The Pomodoro technique is an excellent framework to trick yourself into being productivw without the pain of having to go through the denial and eventual acceptance :-) Check out Chris Winfield's post on The Pomodoro Technique on Buffer here.

Motivation

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Unlimited Drive Storage

#160

Stewart McGown over on Github has published code to break up encode files as Base64 binary data and store them across multiple Google Docs, which aren't counted towards your Google Drive storage quota.

Innovation

Tech

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The Loudest Underwater Sound

#160

Scientists at he SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created the loudest possible underwater sound at 270dB, by zapping micro-jets of water with n X-ray laser.

Audio

Science

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Preventing Account Takeover

#160

Google teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to conduct a year long study into the effectiveness of account recovery techniques against attacks. They found that adding a recovery phone number to your Google account blocks 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks and 66% of targeted attacks.

Tech

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Flying Car Drone

#160

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have created a drone that can seemlessly transition from flying to driving. The FStar drone uses the same 4 motors to power the flight propellors as well as the wheels, and it can also adjust the height at which it drives.

Innovation

Tech

Video

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Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

#160

Wolfram have launched their Wolfram Engine as a free package for developers. Described by Stephen Wolfram himself on his blog, the Wolfram engine implements the Wolfram Language, which in turn offers a huge range of computational intelligence and algorithmic processing, access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase as well as over 5000 abstracted functions like machine learning, visualisation and image computation.

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AI at Ford

#160

Forbes have published a piece about how Ford Motor Company have been using AI for 15 years in their manufacturing and quality assurance processes. More recently, Ford use AI to manage inventory, to simulate their motorsport vehicles before track testing and of course, in their fleet of cars to manage their all-wheel drive system among other things. They expect to launch their self-driving car fleet in 2021.

AI & ML

Innovation

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NAWR #36 - Siwan Rhys & Tim Parkinson, Viridian, CoDI@NAWR

#159

Last Friday, Siwan Rhys and Tim Parkinson performed Mwy na digon..., a specially commissioned piece by composer Angharad Davies and NAWR #36. We also had a fantastic perfomance by Bristol based ensemble Viridian, followed by a CoDI Interact composer panel discussion. Check out the photos from the event here.

Music

Photo

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TV Review: The Best of Enemies

#159

This week I watched the Netlix documentary Best of Enemies. During the 1968 American Presidential campaign, the tradition among the TV networks was wall to wall coverage of both democratic and republican national conventions, where the party presidential candidates are decided. The ABC network was far behind NBC and CBS in market share, popularity and financial resources. As a result, they downgraded their coverage to nightly summaries, but need something else to attract viewers.

Review

Video

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