Aggregator

An Indian family restaurant in Braintree has been shortlisted as a finalist for a national award.

A man has been awarded the highest honour a council can bestow for his dedication to his community.

There are several Essex RSPCA branches in the county, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, all with pets looking for homes.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang just had a win with his argument that the world needs China’s AI brains, now this

Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions. Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing. Historians who put the program through its paces said it transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying, a crucial step for setting the texts in context, and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts. [...] The Google team led by Yannis Assael worked with historians to create an AI tool that would aid the research process. The program is trained on an enormous database of nearly 200,000 known inscriptions, amounting to 16m characters. Aeneas takes text, and in some cases images, from the inscription being studied and draws on its training to build a list of related inscriptions from 7th century BC to 8th century BC. Rather than merely searching for similar words, the AI identifies and links inscriptions through deeper historical connections. Having trained on the rich collection of inscriptions, the AI can assign study texts to one of 62 Roman provinces and estimate when it was written to within 13 years. It also provides potential words to fill in any gaps, though this has only been tested on known inscriptions where text is blocked out. In a test run, researchers set Aeneas loose on a vast inscription carved into monuments around the Roman empire. The self-congratulatory Res Gestae Divi Augusti describes the life achievements of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Aeneas came up with two potential dates for the work, either the first decade BC or between 10 and 20AD. The hedging echoes the debate among scholars who argue over the same dates. In another test, Aeneas analysed inscriptions on a votive altar from Mogontiacum, now Mainz in Germany, and revealed through subtle linguistic similarities how it had been influenced by an older votive altar in the region. "Those were jaw-dropping moments for us," said [Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm]. Details are published in Nature and Aeneas is available to researchers online.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tulsi Gabbard unleashed a barrage of shocking charges against Hillary Clinton, claiming that she was on 'heavy tranquilizers' and was dealing with 'psycho emotional problems.'

Due to the nature of her role, Queen Elizabeth II was rarely surprised when it came to her birthday. Almost every year, the beloved monarch would head to the Ritz Hotel in London for supper.

The attorney general was scheduled to speak at CPAC's Summit Against Human Trafficking when a speaker at the event made the stunning announcement.

Some people just need killing. Bryan Kohberger is one of them. Instead, thanks to a controversial plea deal, Kohberger was sentenced on Wednesday to four consecutive life terms.

The United States will withdraw from UNESCO for the second time in eight years, with the departure taking effect December 31, 2026. The State Department announced the decision yesterday, ending the country's brief two-year return to the Paris-based United Nations science and cultural organization. The US previously withdrew from UNESCO in 2017, cutting off more than 22% of the agency's funding. The American contribution now represents 8% of UNESCO's current $900 million annual budget, making the financial impact less severe than the earlier withdrawal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is both affordable and stylish

President Donald Trump attended an artificial intelligence summit on Wednesday, even as he revealed to the audience of tech moguls he was not a fan of the name.

alternative_right shares a report from France 24: A suspected administrator of a top Russian-language cybercrime forum, XSS.is, has been arrested in Ukraine with the help of French police and Europol, French prosecutors said on Wednesday. Industry experts describe XSS.is as one of the longest-running dark web forums. "On Tuesday July 22, a person suspected of being the administrator of the Russian-language cybercrime forum XSS.is was arrested as part of a criminal investigation opened by the Paris public prosecutor's office," Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement. "Active since 2013, this forum was one of the main hubs for global cybercrime. The forum also operated an encrypted Jabber messaging server, facilitating anonymous exchanges between cybercriminals." "A judicial investigation was opened on November 9, 2021 on charges of complicity in attacks on an automated data processing system, organised extortion, and criminal conspiracy," Beccuau said. "The intercepted messages revealed numerous illicit activities related to cybercrime and ransomware, and established that they generated at least $7 million in profits."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palmer Luckey, known for founding Oculus and defense-tech firm Anduril, is now eyeing U.S.-manufactured laptops as his next venture. While past American laptops have largely relied on foreign components, Luckey is exploring the possibility of building a fully "Made in USA" device that meets strict FTC standards -- though doing so may cost a premium. Tom's Hardware reports: ["Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?" asked Luckey in a post on X.] Luckey previously asked the same question at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference whose website said it was devoted to "convening the brightest and most motivated minds at the intersection of technology and manufacturing," which shared a clip of Luckey discussing the subject, wherein he talks about the extensive research he has already done around building a PC in the U.S. Luckey wouldn't be the first to make a laptop in the U.S. (PCMag collected a list of domestic PCs, including laptops, in 2021.) But those products use components sourced from elsewhere; they're assembled in the U.S. rather than manufactured there. That distinction matters, according to the Made in USA Standard published by the Federal Trade Commission. To quote: "For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no -- or negligible -- foreign content." How much more would you be willing to pay for a laptop that was truly made in America?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samar Muhammad Abu Zamar, widow of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas military commander, allegedly escaped the war-torn enclave using a fake passport and carrying 'significant sums of cash'

While sacked MasterChef judges Gregg Wallace and John Torode are due to appear in a new series filmed last year, a colourful character is being lined up as a successor.

A former flight attendant has shared the very popular travel item he would never bring on a plane - and how to avoid the dreaded pre-holiday cold while in the sky.

The family of Kaylee Goncalves gave searing victim impact statements at Bryan Kohberger's sentencing hearing.

Mushroom mass murderer Erin Patterson may yet avoid a life-ending sentence off the back of a prison diagnosis made at the time of her arrest. 

Georgia Harry, 26, died a month after she slipped down a set of stairs on her way to the toilet with friend, Michael Pollard, at the Lost Bar in Liverpool, an inquest heard.