August 2020 – Explorit

China’s green plan displaces villagers, forces inequity

August 31, 2020September 11, 2020 GeorgeChina, villagers0 comment

By Blaine Friedlander | August 31, 2020 As China creates more green space around its giant cities, the country’s modernization plan – which includes relocating 250 million rural villagers into urban centers by 2025 – appears to have a dark side: socioeconomic inequity. While many studies have lauded China’s new environmental goals, much of this research has focused on the technical ways to make urban infrastructure sustainable and reduce emissions. However, new research suggests a relationship between urbanism and social inequity. There are no national standards for land valuation and…

World

Revised tree ring data confirms ancient Mediterranean dates

August 26, 2020September 11, 2020 GeorgeAncient Mediterranean0 comment

By Kate Blackwood | August 26, 2020 Sturt Manning is leading investigations into the timelines of ancient events, using tree ring data to refine the widely used radiocarbon dating method. In research published Aug. 17 in Scientific Reports, Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences, fine-tunes date ranges for ancient events in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Anatolia, and a controversial volcanic eruption on ancient Thera. He and collaborators, including Brita Lorentzen, research associate in the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory, used IntCal20, an international…

Information Technology

Tool transforms world landmark photos into 4D experiences

August 25, 2020September 10, 2020 GeorgeCornell University, Plenoptic Function

By Melanie Lefkowitz | Cornell University Using publicly available tourist photos of world landmarks such as the Trevi Fountain in Rome or Top of the Rock in New York City, Cornell researchers have developed a method to create maneuverable 3D images that show changes in appearance over time. The method, which employs deep learning to ingest and synthesize tens of thousands of mostly untagged and undated photos, solves a problem that has eluded experts in computer vision for six decades. “It’s a new way of modeling scenes that not only…

Tech World

Destroyed Ancient Temple Now Open for Virtual Exploration

August 20, 2020September 8, 2020 GeorgePalmyra, Temple, Virtual Exploration0 comment

UC San Diego Library digitally reconstructs world-famous Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria Five years after its destruction, the ancient Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria has been digitally reconstructed by the UC San Diego Library’s Digital Media Lab using cutting-edge 3D methods and artificial intelligence applications. Inspired by a past collaboration between the Library and UC San Diego’s Levantine Archaeology Laboratory, this project has resulted in the digital preservation of more than a dozen lost reliefs, sculptures, frescos and paintings, all made publicly available on the Library’s Digital Collections…

Information Technology

Teamwork Can Make the 5G Dream Work

August 20, 2020September 3, 2020 George5G Networks, DGIST0 comment

A Collaborative System Architecture for 5G Networks Scientists explain how collaboration between cloud and network service providers could enable advanced or “killer” 5G applications A research team led by Prof Jeongho Kwak from Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) has designed a novel system architecture where collaboration between cloud service providers and mobile network operators plays a central role. Such a collaborative architecture would allow for optimizing the use of network, computing, and storage resources, thereby unlocking the potential of various novel services and applications. That many novel…

Information Technology

A New Approach to Database Management in Solid-State Drives

August 11, 2020September 3, 2020 GeorgeDatabase Management, Solid-State Drives0 comment

The ever-increasing workload of data centers calls for new ways to store and access data. Researchers from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, have developed a new approach to manage databases in solid state drives, providing marked performance improvements in read/write delays and offloading database computation tasks from CPUs to increase efficiency and reduce power consumption. As Web services, cloud storage, and big-data services continue expanding and finding their way into our lives, the gigantic hardware infrastructures they rely on—known as data centers—need to be improved to…