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Europe's Oldest Human-Made 'Megastructure' Discovered under Baltic Sea

Archaeologists have discovered what may be Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure, submerged below the Baltic Sea and dubbed the Blinkerwall

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

More on the Blinkerwall from Scientific American and Dr Steph Piper @MesoPip

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Research Programme 2024-2033 - IOW

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

Some random reading about the "Blinkerwall" led me to the research program of Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW).

  The Blinkerwall is a submerged Stone Age structure discovered in the Bay of Mecklenburg, off Germany's Baltic coast. Stretching approximately 971 meters (3,182 feet) along the seafloor, it comprises around 1,600 stones, including about 300 larger boulders. Researchers estimate that early hunter-gatherers constructed the wall over 10,000 years ago, likely to channel and trap reindeer herds for hunting purposes.

  IOW played a pivotal role in this discovery. In 2021, geophysicist Jacob Geersen from IOW led a student training exercise that utilized multibeam sonar to map the seafloor, leading to the identification of the #Blinkerwall.

  https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/could-this-submerged-stone-age-wall-be-europes-oldest-megastructure/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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Nikki Giovanni, revolutionary poet and voice of Black resilience, dies at 81

Nikki Giovanni, revolutionary poet, Virginia Tech professor, and voice of Black resilience, dies at 81 after multiple cancer battles.

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

Nikki Giovanni, born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1943, was a distinguished American poet, writer, educator, and activist. She passed away on December 9, 2024, at the age of 81.

  Giovanni emerged as a prominent voice during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, using her poetry to address themes of race, social justice, and personal identity. Her early works, such as "Black Feeling, Black Talk" (1968) and "Black Judgement" (1968), captured the spirit of the era and resonated with readers seeking change.

  Throughout her career, Giovanni authored over 25 books, including poetry collections, essays, and children's literature. Her poem "Nikki-Rosa" (1968) is particularly celebrated for its poignant reflection on Black childhood and family life, challenging prevailing narratives and emphasizing the richness of Black love.

  As an educator, Giovanni served as a professor at Virginia Tech for 35 years, where she was honored with the title of University Distinguished Professor Emerita upon her retirement in 2022.

  Her influence extended beyond the classroom; she was a sought-after speaker and public voice, contributing to significant cultural and social dialogues.

Giovanni's contributions were recognized with numerous accolades, including multiple NAACP Image Awards and over 20 honorary degrees. Her impact on literature and American culture is profound, as she used her voice to advocate for equality, celebrate Black heritage, and inspire future generations.

Her legacy endures through her writings and the countless individuals she influenced, reminding us of the power of words in the pursuit of justice and understanding.   More at In memoriam: Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet, activist, and Virginia Tech legend | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

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Australia tipped for worst bushfire season on record | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site

Parts of Australia are facing a dangerous bushfire season, and the devastating 2019-2020 Black Summer fires are predicted to become the new norm by 2040.

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

Aid Arena is a great tool and resource for the Australian bushfire season.  For those preparing and reacting to the bushfires, Aid Arena can help force-multiply by bringing together diverse organizations in a focused communication space, Aid Arena facilitates immediate action and effective response during emergencies. 

Recovery from bushfires is a long journey. This season, communities can lead their own recovery. ​ Every action counts. 

#BushfireRecovery #CommunitySupport

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World Olive Tree Day, 26 November

World Olive Tree Day was proclaimed at the 40th session of the UNESCO General Conference in 2019 and takes place on 26 November every year. The olive tree, specifically the olive branch, holds an important place in

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

Thanks Bing and UNESCO

  Today, we're not just offering you an olive branch—we've got the whole tree. November 26 is World Olive Tree Day, so we're taking some time to appreciate this amazing plant. Olive trees were first cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean around 8,000 years ago. From there, they were introduced to the Greek islands and mainland by the Phoenicians, then farther afield, reaching Spain and the western edge of the Mediterranean by around 1000 BCE. The olive branch has been a symbol of peace since ancient times, and olive trees have been grown for their oil, wood, and fruit for millennia. The southern region of Puglia in Italy, seen here, has an estimated 60 million olive trees and produces about 40% of the country's olive oil. The oldest olive tree in Puglia, and one of the oldest in Italy, is thought to be almost 4,000 years old and its olives are still used to make oil. The olive grove in today's image also has another link to the past: The structure between the trees is a trullo. These dwellings, made without mortar, are only found in Puglia. They show how deeply rooted the traditions of this region are.

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ADCC 2024: Industry Leaders Explore the Future of Data Center Construction

With AI consumption skyrocketing, the need for rapid innovation across data center equipment and facilities has never been greater. Ongoing power and water constraints, as well as labor shortages and long lead-times, means it is critical that data center construction stakeholders stay agile and pivot their strategies to meet the demand.

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

Thank you, James Walker, for highlighting the data center boom driven by AI demands. This growth creates jobs and enhances digital services but strains energy and water resources, raising costs for communities. Sustainable cooling, renewable energy, and workforce development are vital to balance economic gains with environmental impacts. Collaboration among stakeholders is key to resilient, equitable growth.

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The Last Actions the Biden Administration Will Take

“Let’s make every day count," President Joe Biden said in an address to the nation last week.

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

While the press at large is focused on the POTUS-elect, Time Magazine captured some of the efforts of the current POTUS and administration in a race against the clock to make every day count. These include

  Urgency in Legacy Preservation

The Biden Administration is moving swiftly to cement key elements of its legacy before the transition. 

  Infrastructure and Environmental Investments

Significant resources are being allocated to infrastructure projects ($1 trillion law) and climate initiatives ($375 billion law), with goals to improve transportation systems, reduce environmental hazards, and accelerate clean energy development.

  Judicial Appointments Under Pressure

A concerted effort to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible.

  Accelerated Funding for Environmental and Energy Projects

The administration is expediting grant approvals and loans, including $3 billion for lead pipe removal and a $544 million clean energy loan.

  Defense and International Aid Priorities

Focused on obligating and spending allocated funds for Ukraine military aid ($7.1 billion).

  Educational Reforms and Student Loan Forgiveness

Efforts to implement student loan relief measures are being fast-tracked.

  Regulatory and Legislative Actions

The administration aims to finalize and safeguard regulatory changes in climate, health care, and education.

  Opposition from Incoming Administration

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“Hit Me with Your Sun Shot” Photo Contest Winners | Department of Energy

SETO announced the winners of the American-Made Solar Photo Competition: Hit Me with Your Sun Shot. Photographers submitted awe-inspiring photos showcasing solar energy technologies, infrastructure, and research and development activities.

Dr. Joe Boutte's insight:

The emerging world of sustainable energy in photos gives us a glimpse into a cleaner, brighter future. I recall traveling along I-10 in Louisiana and Texas, where oil derricks and refineries dot the landscape, emitting strong odors and pollution. These industrial sites, stark and uninviting, symbolize our past reliance on fossil fuels. While we still have a long journey ahead to harmonize energy production with environmental preservation, these photos are a hopeful sign of the progress we're making.

  These images inspire us to keep pushing for a future where energy and the environment can coexist harmoniously. Let's continue to work towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and embracing cleaner, sustainable alternatives.

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Impacts of the 2024 Presidential Election on the Economy

Goldman Sachs has said earlier that the broader economy would get the biggest boost in the next two years if Democrats win the White House and Congress.

Economic output would take a hit next year under a Republican administration, mostly from increased import tariffs and tighter immigration policies, it has previously said.

On Wednesday, Harris said Trump's plans would cut off federal programs that offer loans to small businesses, cut the corporate tax rate and push the U.S. deficit higher.

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What is prompt grounding? — A generative AI tutorial

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What is grounding? Grounding is what happens when you add your own data to a prompt to get better results from generative AI.

Joe Boutte's insight:

Great article by Ari Bendersky on AI grounding techniques and mitigating AI hallucinations.

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1,600+ Lawyers and Public Officials Sign Statement of Principles in Support of the Rule of Law

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Statement by the Society for the Rule of Law affirms America’s founding and constitutional principles; endorsed by leading figures and institutions from across the legal community. WASHINGTON – July 11, 2024 – More than 1,600 attorneys, law students, judges, concerned citizens, and former public officials signed a new Statement of Principles issued by the Society […]

Joe Boutte's insight:

The Society is a nationwide membership organization of legal conservatives and others of all political leanings who are alarmed at the current threats to American democracy. The “Statement of Principles to Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and American Democracy” affirms that all American citizens — especially public officials charged with enacting and enforcing America’s laws — have a constitutional duty to:

Accept the legitimacy, respect the authority, and abide by the decisions and judgments of the federal courts interpreting the Constitution and laws of the United States

Respect the rule of law by honoring the truth and speaking against untruths that undermine respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the courts 

Oppose efforts to undermine respect for the federal courts and the individual justices and judges who serve in the judiciary

Support and defend the fundamental American principle that no person is above, beneath, or beyond the law

Defend the constitutional rights of all Americans, respect the results of elections, and insist upon the peaceful transfer of power

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Gemini, a family of multimodal models demonstrating strong capabilities across image, audio, video, and text domains

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  Google has introduced a family of multimodal models, called Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that the most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. Thus, Google believes that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. In this article the authors discuss their approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

  Google has been rigorously testing all their Gemini models and evaluating their performance on a wide variety of tasks. From natural image, audio and video understanding to mathematical reasoning, Gemini Ultra’s performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development.

  With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities. This new benchmark approach to MMLU enables Gemini to use its reasoning capabilities to think more carefully before answering difficult questions, leading to significant improvements over just using its first impression.

  In summary, Gemini surpasses state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks including text and coding. Gemini Ultra also achieves a state-of-the-art score of 59.4% on the new MMMU benchmark, which consists of multimodal tasks spanning different domains requiring deliberate reasoning. With the image benchmarks we tested, Gemini Ultra outperformed previous state-of-the-art models, without assistance from optical character recognition (OCR) systems that extract text from images for further processing. These benchmarks highlight Gemini’s native multimodality and indicate early signs of Gemini's more complex reasoning abilities.

  See more details in Google's Gemini technical report.

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Discovery of atomic clock-like spin defects in simple oxides from first principles | Nature Communications

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Virtually noiseless due to the scarcity of spinful nuclei in the lattice, simple oxides hold promise as hosts of solid-state spin qubits. However, no suitable spin defect has yet been found in these systems. Using high-throughput first-principles calculations, we predict spin defects in calcium oxide with electronic properties remarkably similar to those of the NV center in diamond. These defects are charged complexes where a dopant atom — Sb, Bi, or I — occupies the volume vacated by adjacent cation and anion vacancies. The predicted zero phonon line shows that the Bi complex emits in the telecommunication range, and the computed many-body energy levels suggest a viable optical cycle required for qubit initialization. Notably, the high-spin nucleus of each dopant strongly couples to the electron spin, leading to many controllable quantum levels and the emergence of atomic clock-like transitions that are well protected from environmental noise. Specifically, the Hanh-echo coherence time increases beyond seconds at the clock-like transition in the defect with 209Bi. Our results pave the way to designing quantum states with long coherence times in simple oxides, making them attractive platforms for quantum technologies. Recently, long spin coherence times have been predicted for spin defects in simple oxides. Here, by using high-throughput first-principles calculations, the authors identify promising spin defects in CaO, with electronic properties similar to those of NV centers but with longer coherence times.

Joe Boutte's insight:

The discovery of atomic clock-like spin defects in calcium oxide represents a significant leap in the field of quantum technologies. These defects, analogous to NV centers in diamond, offer long coherence times and robust performance against environmental noise, crucial for quantum computing and communication. The prediction that these spin defects can operate in the telecommunication range opens new opportunities for integrating quantum information systems with existing optical fiber networks, potentially revolutionizing data transmission and processing. This work paves the way for developing scalable, high-performance quantum devices using abundant and easily processed materials.

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Perplexity AI Is the Best AI-Powered Google Search Tool You're Not Using

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Done with Google? Want to try something new and AI-powered? Perplexity could be just what you're looking for.

Joe Boutte's insight:

I love conversational searches as learning experiences that help me stay abreast of various topics and stretching my mind to think differently and critically.  Give perplexity a try.

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Creating the University of the Future: A Global View on Future Skills and Future Higher Education

This open access publication presents a global panorama of institutional strategies, academic programs, scholarly insights as well as teaching and learning practices taking stock of the Future Skills Turn taking place in higher education. Future Skills have evolved to be one of the most important priorities for the development of higher education institutions globally. Students and graduates learn how to acquire Future Skills for their lives and careers and for shaping societies towards more sustainable futures. Institutions, teachers and policy makers gain insights into strategies to shape the Future Skills Turn in higher education and create the University of the Future.

Joe Boutte's insight:

What will universities look like, do, or become in order support the workforce for a sustainable future?  This research provides some interest global perspectives on the skills and approaches evolving in higher education based on a paradigm shift known as "Future Skills Turn" .  This is a shift in education that emphasizes the development of skills needed for the future workforce, driven by rapid technological advancements, globalization, and evolving societal needs. This approach focuses on cultivating skills such as critical thinking, creativity, digital literacy, emotional intelligence, and lifelong learning, rather than solely on traditional academic knowledge.

The impacts on higher education include curriculum transformation, technology integration, industry collaboration, and lifelong learning.

This shift not only prepares students for successful careers but also empowers them to make meaningful contributions to a sustainable and equitable world. As we consider the value of current approaches to higher education, this is an important set of perspectives to consider as leaders.

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Small Business, Big Impact in 2024 – @zelda-larsson on

In the tapestry of economic resilience, small businesses emerge as the unsung heroes, weaving threads of innovation, adaptability, and community resilience.As the global economy charts a course thro…...

Joe Boutte's insight:

Small businesses exemplify good everyday leadership because they often foster close-knit, supportive environments where leaders can directly mentor and motivate their teams. The leaders in small businesses frequently demonstrate adaptability and resilience, navigating challenges with innovative solutions and a hands-on approach. Additionally, they cultivate strong relationships with customers and employees alike, emphasizing the importance of community and personalized service.  Kudos to all the small business leaders who are the incubators of innovation and good leadership! 

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Video Friday: SpaceHopper

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos...