by physicsworld.com —A research collaboration headed up at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully employed machine learning to investigate the cellular architecture of the human brain. The approach uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to automatically estimate brain parameters, enabling neuroscientists to infer the cellular properties of different brain regions without having to surgically […]

middleeastmonitor.com —Congratulations are in order for Nadine Labaki. It’s been announced that the Lebanese director’s Capharnaüm is up for another prestigious award. The politically-charged film, which already took home the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, has just been nominated for the Best Film Not in the English Language at the 2019 BAFTA Awards, set to […]

by Donna-Abu-Nasr — bloomberg –– Lebanon’s caretaker economy minister said there are no plans to restructure debt after the finance minister was quoted as saying the move was being studied. “There’s definitely no restructuring for debt,” Raed Khoury said Thursday in a phone interview. “Bondholders and depositors are extremely safe.” Lebanese dollar bonds due 2028 plummeted after […]

by aawsat.com — Lebanese parliament Speaker Nabih Berri proposed on Wednesday the postponement of the upcoming Arab League economic summit in Beirut later this month because of Lebanon’s ongoing failure to form a new government. Berri also asserted “again the necessity of having Syria participate in such a summit”, lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc quoted […]

However, economic problems are also linked with the country’s electricity quality, for Lebanon stands as the “world’s fourth-worst quality of electricity”, as a fellow associate from the “Chatham House”, Nadim Shehadi, said: “Electricity in Lebanon is just more expensive, but everyone has 24-hour electricity if they can afford it”. “If you measure electricity supply by state provision then it’s the worst in the world, but if you measure it by what’s available to people, it’s not so bad. There are sometimes indicators that have to take into account the fact that Lebanon is a mixture of private sector, illegal activity and government sector, and sometimes illegal activity compensates for the government sector.”

by Terence Mills,  forbes.com — The singularity is near, or maybe we’re already in it. Whatever the case is, machine learning and big data will have a tremendous influence on our society. The machine minds are coming online, and you had better learn to adapt if you want to succeed. But what are big data and machine learning? Keep reading to find out.

Big Data And Machine Learning

Computers have certain capacities. They have a memory to store information. They have computational power, with some machines performing more “flops” per second than others. What happens when these machines face such a large amount of data that traditional techniques of analysis start to fail? That’s the world of big data, and it’s a world we’re living in now.

The Last Polymath

Thomas Young was a physicist who lived from 1773-1829 in London. According to Andrew Robinson in his book The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Young was the world’s last true polymath. You might be a smart person, but we know in our modern world that you have to be a specialist to survive. No one is a jack-of-all-trades anymore.The world has become too complex for humans to even try to know everything. That’s what big data is: It’s the realization that there exist piles of data where traditional human methods of analysis fail. The world is too complicated for the human mind to make sense of every part of it. This presents a serious challenge and a tremendous opportunity for enterprising people who can apply automate techniques to help solve problems. A simple example is the stock market. You can look at all sorts of information about the stock market, and once in a while you might come up with a good trade, but you can’t possibly keep up with computerized trading platforms that execute thousands of trades per second. It’s just too much information for your mind to process. You need a computerized solution to take in all the information that is relevant to the problem.

Why Is Machine Learning Important?

by emirateswoman.com —American President, Donald Trump’s youngest daughter Tiffany Trump, just made her relationship with billionaire Michael Boulos Instagram official. The first daughter posted a throwback picture of her and her boyfriend in the Red Room at the White house. Michael’s family is originally Lebanese, but he was born in Lagos, Nigeria and attended an […]

Denver, Colo., (CNA).– In a 25-year film career, Scarlett Johansson has portrayed a cartoon mermaid princess, a comic book superhero, an Indian python, and a punk-rock porcupine. She has not portrayed a porn star. Nevertheless, her image has been digitally-generated in dozens of “deepfake” pornographic videos, which have been viewed more than 1 million times. The actress said recently there is no way to fight back, and that online pornographers prey on the vulnerable for profit. “The Internet is just another place where sex sells and vulnerable people are preyed upon,” Johansson told the Washington Post Dec. 30. “Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired.” Johansson has been the victim of digital technology that digitally replaces the faces of pornographic actors with those of celebrities, creating synthetic but convincing videos in which the digitally imposed person appears to be engaging in pornographic sexual acts. One program, FakeApp, is freely available to download and does not require programming skills; it can be used by anyone with the kind of computer capable of running detailed video games.

A 278kg (612lbs) bluefin tuna sold Saturday for more than $3 million in an auction at Japan’s most famous fish market. The winning bidder, Kiyoshi Kimura, who owns a chain of sushi restaurants known as Sushi Zanmai, admitted that he paid five times more than he expected for the high-quality fish. The bluefin tuna is […]

by thenational.ae —A Lebanese executive for a regional shipbuilding company has been arrested in New York over a $2 billion fraud linked to state-funded maritime projects in Mozambique, US prosecutors said. Jean Boustani, the lead salesman for Privinvest, was arrested on Wednesday at New York’s John F Kennedy airport. He is accused of paying kickbacks […]