What I read online #13
Fitness Wearables, Airports in Antarctica, Workplace 2020 report, Section 230 & online speech, Artificial Intelligence, Podcast Discoverability, Face-swapping Virtual FX, TPUs & Machine Learning.
Gatorade’s new Gx Sweat Patch tests your sweat for smarter hydration.
A new fitness wearable from Gatorade tests your sweat to let you know how and when to best rehydrate. Check what people think about it. At a cost of $25 for a package of two patches, would you buy it?
Troll Research Station: how to operate an airport in Antarctica
Norwegian Polar Institute’s Troll Research Station is located at Jutulsessen, approximately 235 kilometres (146 mi) from Antarctica’s northern coast. It takes about a 5-hours flight from Cape Town, South Africa to get there but for a plane to land, the team first had to overcome the challenges of building and operating an airport in the extreme conditions of Antarctica.
Anatomy of Work 2022 Report: Overcoming disruption in a distributed world.
Asana surveyed more than 10,000 people and have published their report on how teams stayed in sync, hit deadlines, and reached their goals during COVID-19 last year. They found that 71% of workers experienced burnout in 2020, tool overload as employees switch between 10 apps 25 times per day is hurting team alignment and many other interesting insights. Read their full report here.
Section 230: Warnings from the queer history of modern Internet regulation
For those not familiar with it, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a piece of Internet legislation in the United States. It protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal - with exceptions - however, it is increasingly controversial and frequently misinterpreted. A look back in queer history reminds us that categorical content bans often come at the expense of marginalized groups.
What is AI? The Human's Handbook to Computers that Think.
There are tons of great content on Artificial Intelligence out there - I feature lots of it in this newsletter as well. What I really like about Morning Brew’s What is AI? The Human Handbook to Computers that Think is that it explains the history of AI, provides insight into what academia and the business are focussing on and it explains Artificial Intelligence in a language most non-technologists and normal people will understand.
The web is full of information trapped in unsearchable audio. Podz has a fix.
Speaking about AI - there are more than 1.5 million podcasts and more than 43 million podcast episodes out there today. Meet Podz, the company which wants to solve the problem of podcast discoverability and unlock the world’s audio archives in a similar way Google unlocked the web search - here is how they planning to solve this problem.
How the Welcome to Chechnya documentary found security in face-swapping Visual FX
Shortlisted for the 93rd Academy Awards® in two categories, Documentary Feature and Visual Effects, Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film about a group of activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ persecution in the repressive and closed Russian republic of Chechnya. For the first time in film ever, digital face-replacement, machine-learning software and a group of actors and activists who let their own faces, were combined as digital stand-ins for some of the individuals in the film.
What is a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and how does it work?
CPUs (Central Processing Units) are a core component of what defines a computing device and are widely credited for enabling digital transformation today. GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) are more efficient for algorithms that process large blocks of data in parallel - this is also why they make games run more efficiently and makes them look better with higher resolution graphics and improved framerates on a device. Enter TPUs (Tenson Processing Units) which are over 20x times faster than state-of-art GPUs - but what is a TPU exactly and how does it work?
Do you enjoy What I read online?
Follow @WhatIReadOnline on Twitter, visit the archive or subscribe below.