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Drowning cow saved by ‘mermaid’ on 200-mile swim

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 Lindsey Cole is swimming part of the River Thames to raise awareness of single-use plastic

A drowning cow was rescued from a river by a passing “mermaid” on a 200-mile swim of the Thames.

Lindsey Cole splashed into the river in a wetsuit, tail and hat at Lechlade, Gloucestershire, on Friday. She is raising awareness of the environmental effects of single-use plastic.

As she passed through Oxfordshire on Sunday, she spotted the stricken cow.

Delightful. The “urban mermaid” Lindsey Cole has been swimming along the Thames as a mermaid in order to raise awareness of plastic pollution. She spotted what she thought was a big white plastic sack and swam on, indicating to her support boat to pick it up… but when they caught up they realised that it was a drowning cow! Some while later, they arranged for its successful rescue.

Shadows Out of Time

You may recall that on Halloween I mentioned that the Bodleian had released a mini choose-your-own-adventure-like adventure game book, available freely online. I decided that this didn’t go quite far enough and I’ve adapted it into a hypertext game, below. (This was also an excuse for me to play with Chapbook, Chris Klimas‘s new under-development story format for Twine.

Shadows Out of Time: A Bodleian Choose Your Own Destiny Story

If the thing you were waiting for before you experienced Shadows Out of Time was it to be playable in your browser, wait no longer: click here to play the game…

Further reading: IFDB entry.

Hands on with neural-network toolkit LIME: Come now, you sourpuss. You’ve got some explaining to do

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How well does the algorithm perform? Setting it up to work in LIME can be a bit of a pain, depending on your environment. The examples on Tulio Ribeiro’s Github repo are in Python and have been optimised for Jupyter notebooks. I decided to get the code for a basic image analyser running in a Docker container, which involved much head-scratching and the installation of numerous Python libraries and packages along with a bunch of pre-trained models. As ever, the code needed a bit of massaging to get it to run in my environment, but once that was done, it worked well.

Below are three output images showing the explanation for the top three classifications of the red car above:

Thre sports cars, photo by Andy Cobley

In these images, the green area are positive for the image and the red areas negative. What’s interesting here (and this is just my explanation) is that the plus and minuses for convertible and sports car are quite different, although to our minds convertible and sports car are probably similar.

A fascinating look at how an neural-net powered AI picture classifier can be reverse-engineered to explain the features of the pictures it saw and how they influenced its decisions. The existence of tools that can perform this kind of work has important implications for the explicability of the output of automated decision-making systems, which becomes ever-more relevant as neural nets are used to drive cars, assess loan applications, and so on.

Remember all the funny examples of neural nets which could identify wolves fine so long as they had snowy backgrounds, because of bias in their training set? The same thing happens with real-world applications, too, resulting in AIs that take on the worst of the biases of the world around them, making them racist, sexist, etc. We need audibility so we can understand and retrain AIs.

Dan Q performed maintenance for GC7Q96B Oxford’s Long-Lost Zoo

This checkin to GC7Q96B Oxford's Long-Lost Zoo reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Checked-in following recent report of “broken hinge”. Hinge is fine, but this kind of container is designed so that the hinge can be easily detached and the lid removed completely – so long as you come at it from the right angle it’s pretty easy to put it back together again. All is well at GZ; cache is particularly easy to find now it’s a little more wintery but I don’t think there’s any increased risk of muggling. Happy hunting!

Why the pencil is perfect

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I love to discover people who are hugely and deeply passionate about things that seem inconsequential to the rest of the world. Especially when they’re especially able to express that passion and how exciting their special-thing is, to them. This video (and to a lesser extent the others in the Small Thing Big Idea series) really embodies that; man, this woman really likes pencils.

Dan Q found GC2ZPK9 Fining Wood

This checkin to GC2ZPK9 Fining Wood reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A challenging find this morning, and not in the good way! After an extended search the cache was eventually found on the other side of some fallen (spiky) bushes from the published coordinates. From the logs it looks like it was moved some time ago but the coordinates were never updated? Cache contents very damp and log baggie holed – log still usable, but not for long. Contents need maintenence ASAP, container might survive either year or two if frost doesn’t crack the seal. SL, TFTC.

Dan Q found GC7Q7FN Church Micro 11881…Lane End

This checkin to GC7Q7FN Church Micro 11881...Lane End reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Staying at the conference centre down the road I got up early this morning to come out and find this cache before breakfast. After a little while struggling to make out the letters on the gravestone in the dim November morning light I was eventually able to find the cache. Don’t understand the checksum, though! SL, TFTC.

The International Flag of Planet Earth

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Flag of Planet Earth

Inspirational, well thought-out proposal for a flag for unified, “for Earth” projects. The website is terrible, but the artwork’s great, and it’s always nice to see an artist focus on the idea of “uniting humanity” in spite of our politically-fractured world.

The CSS Working Group At TPAC: What’s New In CSS?

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Last week, I attended W3C TPAC as well as the CSS Working Group meeting there. Various changes were made to specifications, and discussions had which I feel are of interest to web designers and developers. In this article, I’ll explain a little bit about what happens at TPAC, and show some examples and demos of the things we discussed at TPAC for CSS in particular.

This article describes proposals for the future of CSS, some of which are really interesting. It includes mention of:

  • CSS scrollbars – defining the look and feel of scrollbars. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not actually new: Internet Explorer 5.5 (and contemporaneous version of Opera) supported a proprietary CSS extension that did the same thing back in 2000!
  • Aspect ratio units – this long-needed feature would make it possible to e.g. state that a box is square (or 4:3, or whatever), which has huge value for CSS grid layouts: I’m excited by this one.
  • :where() – although I’ll be steering clear until they decide whether the related :matches() becomes :is(), I can see a million uses for this (and its widespread existence would dramatically reduce the amount that I feel the need to use a preprocessor!).

How Do You Move A Bookstore? With A Human Chain, Book By Book

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Human chain moving books

When October Books, a small radical bookshop in Southampton, England, was moving to a new location down the street, it faced a problem. How could it move its entire stock to the new spot, without spending a lot of money or closing down for long?

The shop came up with a clever solution: They put out a call for volunteers to act as a human conveyor belt.

Delightful application of volunteer effort.

Stranger Danger: Still the right message for children?

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Stranger Danger ad

Many parents remember the “Stranger Danger” message given to children during the 1970s and 80s. Government videos warned children not to talk to people they didn’t know. But a new message is being trialled in the UK, which its creators think is better at keeping children safe.

“I tried to get the [old] Stranger Danger message across to my son a few years ago and it backfired badly,” says Suzie Morgan, a primary school teacher who lives in Fareham, Hampshire.

He got frightened and confused, couldn’t sleep at night and was worried somebody was breaking into the house.

Like any parent she wanted to keep her child safe.

But she felt the Stranger Danger message she was teaching – which she herself had grown up with – was unhealthy for her six-year-old son, making him too afraid of the world.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says.

So she was hopeful when her son’s school piloted a new safety message. It’s called Clever Never Goes and was devised by the charity Action Against Abduction.

It aims to make children less afraid of the world, by giving them the confidence to make decisions about their own personal safety.

Morgan says it has given her son more freedom and independence.