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It’s used to describe someone who’s euphoric. Nobody’s actually perching on a wad of candyfloss-colored cumulus. Starting your first company feels like riding the pink cloud. Anticipation, mixed with fear, loaded with excitement and possibility. According to Techleap’s Thinking Bigger report, Dutch people place more value on starting a company than successfully growing one. The Netherlands is the only country where we see this trend – places like Germany, Switzerland, and the UK rank growing a business above starting one, which might explain their thriving scale-up ecosystems....

Now, another big player is joining the game: Pirelli has announced its own special EV tire, the P Zero All Season Plus Elect. But why do EVs need special tires at all? First off, it’s about the weight. Because of the battery, EVs generally weigh more than traditional gas guzzlers. Then comes another characteristic EV drivers know and love: instant torque and acceleration. The combination of these elements wears tires down much faster, which in turn increases rolling resistance and reduces efficiency, as well as range....

Indeed, it is a scary time to be a professional writer. Earlier in 2020, Microsoft laid off journalists to replace them with a writing AI. And as AI language models get increasingly better, researchers are claiming that soon, AI-generated text will be indistinguishable from that written by a person. Our research team at the University of British Columbia investigated what the rise of AI means to human writers. Specifically, we tried to understand what human writers expect from AI, and where the boundaries lie when it comes to writing work....

One of the more confusing aspects of owning an electric vehicle (EV) is knowing how to charge it. Unfortunately, there are a few different standards used in the industry, connectors vary from vehicle to vehicle. As a result, it’s not quite as simple as just knowing whether you need to fill up with diesel or petrol. Once you’re passed the new terminology though, it’s actually all quite straightforward. In its simplest form, there are two things you need to know about EV charging: connectors and power ratings (measured in kilowatts, Kw)....

Just like in fashion, you can see long-forgotten productivity fads return every few years, and even though it’s been around for a while, you’ve probably recently come across the hot new contender: the Pomodoro Technique. There’s just one problem with this latest productivity hack — my editor doesn’t quite get it, and appears to be too stubborn to read up on it to understand it. So let me answer a few of his ‘poignant’ questions and give you a low-down of this great productivity method....

Barring dramatic advancements in battery technology, this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But there’s another way to deal with this problem: every ebike should let you latch on an extra battery. Too few do. I test a lot of ebikes for TNW, and I love going on long rides on whatever ebike I happen to be reviewing a given month. I go on 15-40 mile routes regularly, and because ebikes take the edge off of long trips, my average distance increases every month....

A plethora of events have escalated the invasion into the digital world, with cyberattacks, cybercriminals taking sides, and even an IT army of civilians being mobilized by Ukraine. The sanctions imposed on Russia have not only directly hit its economy (and by extension the global economy), but are now also threatening Russian citizens’ access to the internet. It’s expected the nation will limit its reliance on the global internet very soon....

Based on the status of the Phase 3 trials currently underway, it is unlikely that the results of these trials will be available before November. But it is likely that not just one but several of the competing COVID-19 vaccines will be shown to be safe and effective by the end of 2020. I am a scientist and infectious diseases specialist at the University of Virginia, where I care for patients with COVID-19 and conduct research on the pandemic....

The government wants researchers to use it to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help scientists answer key questions about the origins, transmissions and potential treatment of COVID-19: These questions have been published on Kaggle, a machine learning community owned by Google. They include: What is known about transmission, incubation, and environmental stability? What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors? What do we know about virus genetics, origin, and evolution?...

In case you missed it, OpenAI posted an article on its blog last week titled “Solving Rubik’s Cube With a Robot Hand.” Based on this title, you’d be forgiven if you thought the research discussed in said article was about solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand. It is not. Don’t get me wrong, OpenAI created a software and machine learning pipeline by which a robot hand can physically manipulate a Rubik’s Cube from an ‘unsolved’ state to a solved one....

But, no matter what you plan to do with machine learning models, there is one thing you cannot ignore. Data is the fundamental unit of a ML model, and there’s nothing that it can do without it. Machine learning works by learning a set of features and implementing them to produce new instances of information. However, the process is more difficult than it sounds. ML needs large amounts of datasets to learn any particular thing....

The iPhone 12 had vertically stacked lenses. On the iPhone 13, these are now diagonal. So, here’s the question we’re going to answer today: why? In my mind, there are two key reasons Apple has changed the iPhone 13 lens placement — and you can split these into technical and marketing. The technical reason for the diagonal camera layout on the iPhone 13 I’m beginning with this because I believe it’s the biggest reason for the design change....

But what if alien life uses somewhat different chemistry to ours? A new study, published in Nature Astronomy, argues that our best chances of using atmospheres to find evidence of life is to broaden our search from focusing on planets like our own to include those with a hydrogen atmosphere. We can probe the atmosphere of an exoplanet when it passes in front of its star. When such a transit happens, the star’s light has to pass through the planet’s atmosphere to reach us and some of it is absorbed as it goes....

Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, has welcomed competitors saying it’s good for business because “competition grows the industry.” But the reality is that most people won’t subscribe to every single streaming service. Research from Kantar found that the majority of streamers (44 percent) pay for at least two streaming services, and less than a fifth (18 percent) pay for at least three. The problem streaming platforms will be addressing in 2020 is how they help viewers find what they want to watch....

The idea of the algorithm is simple: it uses image cloaking to modify a few pixels in your existing photo to ‘fool’ facial recognition systems. To the naked eye, these changes are generally hard to catch. That’s why if you see some of the photos below, you might not see any difference between normal and cloaked photos. The tool might not work perfectly every time. As a report from the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill notes, she found very noticeable anomalies in a few photos she processed through Fawkes....

Silicon Valley has been the startup capital of the world for a generation – but that doesn’t guarantee it will retain that title in future. As the Silicon Valley playbook is uploaded to the cloud, other startup cities are taking advantage, but we have the opportunity to update our thinking as well. When we talk about “the next Silicon Valley”, what we really want to know is: Where will the next set of game-changing ideas come from?...

Icons used in website design or app development tell their own instantly relatable stories as well. And while it’s easy to be paralyzed with indecision about which ones to choose to tell your own story, the selection of options in the Flat Icons Bundle ($29.99, over 90 percent off from TNW Deals) offer a much-needed headstart. This package from Flat Icons runs the gamut, including over 22,000 unique icons, available in a host of file formats including AI, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG and more....

You might have noticed skincare companies claiming their products can protect you from the effects of blue light. If you hadn’t thought about blue light before, you’d be forgiven for worrying about whether you should be concerned. First, you need to understand what blue light is. Visible light accounts for 50% of the sunlight spectrum and, as the name suggests, it’s the only part of light that can be detected by the human eye....

Luckily, this build seems to be a fair bit more fleshed out than the sluggish, incomplete leak that made its way to the web prior to the official announcement. Here are some of the most notable updates available in the first public preview of the OS — there’s quite a lot: The sleek new design with a centered Taskbar, new animation, and rounded corners. The new start menu with pinned apps and a ‘recommended’ section of files and software Microsoft thinks you want to open....

In a statement provided to Reuters, YouTube said “we are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default,” or 480P. The company clarified this includes Britain despite Brexit, and that the slowdown will be for 30 days initially. Luckily, it seems users still have the option to switch to a higher resolution if they’re concerned about the missing pixels. Apple has so far not issued an official statement on the matter, but multiple sources have reported a blatant reduction in image quality....