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Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python

With Altair, you can spend more time understanding your data and its meaning. Altair’s API is simple, friendly and consistent and built on top of the powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. This elegant simplicity produces beautiful and effective visualizations with a minimal amount of code.

Airbnb Is Screwing Over New York’s Vulnerable Neighborhoods

Here in New York, where the city cracked down on short term rentals more than a hundred years ago, renting out your home for less than 30 days is illegal as of October 2016. But many landlords continue to rent out entire homes to tourists and visitors—today, 12,200 units are available on Airbnb in New York City in total—allowing them to reap in an income that’s higher than what they could make from renting those same units long term. That causes gaps in the housing market.

BBC – High Speed Networking: Open Sourcing Our Kernel Bypass Work

We Need Bug Bounties for Bad Algorithms

Algorithmic auditors are a growing discipline of researchers specializing in computer science and human-computer interaction. They employ a variety of methods to tinker with and uncover how algorithms work, and their research has already sparked public discussions and regulatory investigations into the most dominant and powerful algorithms of the Information Age. From Uber and Booking.com to Google and Facebook, to name a few, these friendly auditors already uncovered bias and deception in the algorithms that control our lives.

The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload

The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code

On the evening of Nov. 6, 2001, all of Hong Kong was talking about the biggest jackpot the city had ever seen: at least HK$100 million (then about $13 million) for the winner of a single bet called the Triple Trio. The wager is a little like a trifecta of trifectas; it requires players to predict the top three horses, in any order, in three different heats. More than 10 million combinations are possible.

Mobile phone cancer warning as malignant brain tumours double

Last night the group said the increasing rate of tumours in the frontal temporal lobe “raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas”. Professor Denis Henshawsaid: “Our findings illustrate the need to look more carefully at, and to try and explain the mechanisms behind, these cancer trends, instead of brushing the causal factors under the carpet and focusing only on cures.” In 2015 the European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks concluded that, overall, the epidemiologic studies on cell phone radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumors or of other cancers of the head and neck region.

Woman receives $5,751 ER bill—for an ice pack and a bandage

NASA completes full-power tests of small, portable nuclear reactor

Being able to generate power will be essential for long-term space travel. Powering a stay on Mars, for example, will require a lot of fuel, way more than we can pack onto a rocket. That’s why NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and a number of other groups have been working on a small, transportable nuclear reactor that can reliably generate power on the go.

Facebook Open Sources ELF OpenGo

Inspired by DeepMind’s work, we kicked off an effort earlier this year to reproduce their recent AlphaGoZero results using FAIR’s Extensible, Lightweight Framework (ELF) for reinforcement learning research. The goal was to create an open source implementation of a system that would teach itself how to play Go at the level of a professional human player or better. By releasing our code and models we hoped to inspire others to think about new applications and research directions for this technology.