Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 23, 2020

Facebook's AI can navigate without a map; PinePhone: Linux-powered smart phone, begins shipping for $150; International journalist, Glenn Greenwald, charged with cybercrimes in Brazil; Researchers introduce metric for quantifying scientific rigor and transparency; and a Steem essay describing conservation efforts that make use of unmanned drones

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. Facebook has trained an AI to navigate without needing a map - In the post, Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for January 22, 2020 it was reported that Marvin Minsky had used reinforcement learning to teach a machine to solve a maze in 1951. Today we learn that Facebook has now accomplished the same thing in a far more generalized fashion. The firm announced that they have used reinforcement learning to accomplish almost perfect point-goal navigation and "achieve nearly 100 percent success in a variety of virtual environments, such as houses and office buildings." This will be useful for robots, especially in urban environments, because maps can be inaccurate or become outdated. By removing the slowest learners from the environment, Facebook was able to reduce training times from a month or more to a 3-day time period. During that time, the robots took 2.5 billion steps, the equivalent of an 80 year human experience.


2. The PinePhone starts shipping—a Linux-powered smartphone for $150 - According to an announcement, Pine64 has begun shipping their $150 linux smartphone. The initial batch of devices is named, "Braveheart" and is intended for developers. It doesn't come with a pre-installed operating system, and users are expected to build their own through the use of alpha distributions like Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS. The device comes with 2G of RAM, 16GB of storage, and 4 processors that run at 1.2 GHz. It also has a 5MP rear-facing camera and a 2MP front-facing camera and a 1440x720 IPS LCD display. The firm is also working on the PineTab, a linux tablet with a detachable keyboard.
   
   Here is a demo video:
   


3. Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil - Following a pattern that was established by the US with Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald has now been charged in Brazil with assisting in the hacking of embarrassing documents that he also published. Greenwald has not been detained and says he will continue his publishing activities. In a 95 page document, prosecutors claim that Greenwald went beyond just "receiving" the embarrassing cell phone messages, but that he also, "played a 'clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.'" Specific allegations include the claim that he encouraged the hackers to cover their tracks by deleting an archive of hacked documents. Six other individuals were also charged in the complaint. Greenwald moved from the US to Brazil in 2006 and became widely known for his work publishing documents that were obtained from Edward Snowden, beginning in 2013. In an interview, Greenwald said that he was meticulous in his contacts with these hackers, adding that "The one thing I could not do is give direction,” and, “That’s crossing a line. I was very careful.”". -h/t Bruce Schneier


4. Has reproducibility improved? Introducing the Transparency and Rigor Index - This article describes a new metric by Anita Bandrowski and her colleagues at the Research Resource Identifier (RRID) initiative to attempt to quantify the rigor, transparency, and reproducibility of scientific work. Bandrowski argues that successful scientific publishing should seek a combination of two dimensions, interesting and truthful, and that given the choice between interesting and truthful, truthful should be preferred. She notes, however, that a journal's "impact factor" is an attempt to quantify how interesting a study is, and there is no widely available metric for gauging it's level of rigor. As a result, her team has pre-published an AI tool that can make a quantified estimate of the level of rigor behind the study. The tool, called SciScore looks for as many as 30 things that should be included in a scientific paper such as statements of researcher bias or descriptions of reagents that match a catalog of known reagents. In addition to publishing the method, the team also compared SciScore results and impact factors for "the entire accessible biomedical literature". The findings showed some (apparent) improvement since the 1990s, but also a continued absence of many important factors. The work also revealed no correlation between a journal's impact factor and the level of rigor in its papers.


5. STEEM Drones Being Used in Dominican Republic to Track Manatees - In this post, @doitvoluntarily reports on conservation efforts that have been under way since 2017 in the Dominican Republic. According to the post, unmanned aerial vehicles are being used to photograph the local manatee population, and IBM's TensorFlow machine learning software is being used to recognize and identify the manatees. In addition to manatees, drones are also useful in conservation efforts of other species around the world including tigers, sharks, and koalas. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been linked to this post for @doitvoluntarily.)

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