Dying pelicans on the Menindee Lakes shores are a new worry for locals amid large releases of water downstream.The Murray Darling Basin Authority has stepped up its water releases from the Menindee Lakes system over summer, to meet demands of river users downstream.
Google is on a shopping spree, buying startup after startup to push its business into the future. But these companies don’t run web services or sell ads or build smartphone software or dabble in other things that Google is best known for. The web’s most powerful company is filling its shopping cart with artificial intelligence algorithms, robots, and smart gadgets for the home. It’s on a mission to build an enormous digital brain that operates as much like the human mind as possible — and, in many ways, even better.
via Google’s Grand Plan to Make Your Brain Irrelevant | Wired Business | Wired.com.
It’s fun to imagine what Michael Mapes’ studio must look like: You would assume that the New York-based artist’s workspace has to resemble the lab of a harebrained entomologist, with test tubes, specimen bags and pushpins strewn about.In reality, of course, to create the startlingly elaborate sculptural portraits Mapes is known for, he has to be much more organized than that. “It does take a fairly high degree of organization,” assures me. “But that’s not the hardest part.”
via Mind-Blowing Portraits Made of Test Tubes and Pushpins | Wired Design | Wired.com.
The 47 million people who rely on food stamps in the U.S. are facing their second threat in less than three months. In what critics dubbed the \”hunger cliff,\” automatic budget cuts meant the loss of $5 billion from the federal nutrition program in November—that’s $36 per month for a family of four. Now more cuts are on the way as lawmakers finalize a new farm bill that stalled in Congress last year.
Technology media outlet Delimiter has filed a Freedom of Information request for a report reviewing the Federal Government’s troubled Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records project begun under Labor, due to the fact that new Health Minister Peter Dutton has received but not yet released the sensitive document.The project was initially funded in the 2010 Federal Budget to the tune of $466.7 million after years of health industry and technology experts calling for development and national leadership in e-health and health identifier technology to better tie together patients’ records and achieve clinical outcomes. The project is overseen by the Department of Health in coalition with the National E-Health Transition Authority NEHTA.
via Delimiter files FoI request for PCEHR Review – Delimiter.
Each autumn as many birds begin epic journeys to warmer climates, there are always some species that stay put for the winter. These winter birds have a better chance of maintaining their territory year-round, and they avoid the hazards of migration. But in exchange they have to endure the cold.
Like us, birds are warm blooded, which means their bodies maintain a constant temperature, often around 106 degrees Fahrenheit. To make enough heat, and maintain it, they\’ve evolved many different strategies–some similar to our own.
This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of an ancient imperial pilgrimage called the Kumano Kodo. I took along a powerful camera, believing, as I always have, that it would be an indispensable creative tool. But I returned with the unshakeable feeling that I’m done with cameras, and that most of us are, if we weren’t already.
