By Dan Ritzman OtherWords Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the world’s last intact ecosystems, but dangerous oil exploration could soon spoil it. I can still remember the first time I saw tracks left behind by seismic testing … Continue reading →

Highlighting some of humanity’s biggest construction achievements is the 10 of the Top Construction Projects in the World informational infographic from 53 Quantum.

Human societies have always looked to build the biggest and best monuments to their ingenuity, resources and craftsmanship. From the Empire State Building, to the Eiffel Tower, and the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Great Wall of China, we’ve always looked to build the biggest and best. Mind blowing historic building projects now litter travel-minded folks bucket lists everywhere, and they make up a huge part of the historic tapestry.

But it’s 2019 now. We need to talk about the Burj Khalifas and Libyan Irrigation projects of the world. For the first time in history, there are societies wealthy, powerful, and most importantly, cohesive enough to build spectacularly huge projects. By working together with our geographical neighbours, we’ve been able to give the world some truly unbelievable, innovative projects. The International Space Station leaps to mind as a collaboration between nations.

With so many stunning projects continually on the go around the planet, we at 53 Quantum thought it’d be an idea to put together a quick infographic of ten of the biggest and best. Of course, there’ll be examples we missed and things we left off, because how do you compare a massive railway restoration and modernisation with a super skyscraper project? Apples and oranges!

Nevertheless, here are ten of the world’s most impressive construction projects.

Although I like the infographic, this design falls short in a few areas.

• Where’s the Data Visualization? The biggest missed opportunity in this design is that the data isn’t visualized. You want readers to understand how big or how expensive these projects were, you need a visualization that puts that into context!

• Nice illustrations, but that isn’t enough. Most of the impact of the size and scale of these projects is lost because it’s buried in the text.

• A map of the locations would be nice.

• Is there any logic to the order of these projects in the infographic? Readers will look through the list from top-to-bottom in order. They’re not sorted by cost or on a timeline.

Thanks to David for submitting the link!

By Julia  Conley Common Dreams “Our message as scientists is simple: Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forest.” With a new statement rejecting the notion that drastically curbing emissions alone is enough to curb … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

Prizes: One overall winner receives the grand prize of $1000 and title of World Nature Photographer of the Year. Categories: Animals in their habitat Animal [...]

The post World Nature Photography Awards appeared first on Photocompete.

By Bianca Nogrady Ensia A growing number of initiatives are giving corporations the resources to help achieve global climate goals regardless of government support “We are still in.” On June 5, 2017, with these four words a group of U.S. … Continue reading →

Ryan Holiday is described by the New York Times as popularizing stoicism, a philosophy of personal ethics which has been practiced by Kings, presidents, artists, writers, and entrepreneurs. His career started at 19 when he dropped out of college at 19 to work with author Robert Greene. Today, he’s a NYT Bestselling author, with 9 books under his belt, including his latest book: Stillness Is the Key which hit #1 on its first week. In this episode: Stillness isn’t a monk-like existence only reserved for the enlightened. Stillness is the idea of being still in a chaotic world and where our best work will come from. Ryan’s personal habits and process during the creation process to find stillness and it doesn’t include meditation. How to say no and build a practice around managing your time. Enjoy! FOLLOW RYAN: instagram | twitter | website Listen to the Podcast Subscribe   Watch the Episode  This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world’s largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker, money/life and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top […]

The post Finding Stillness in a Fast Paced World with Ryan Holiday appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Recent single image unsupervised representation learning techniques show remarkable success on a variety of tasks. The basic principle in these works is instance discrimination: learning to differentiate between two augmented versions of the same image and a large batch of unrelated images. Networks learn to ignore the augmentation noise and extract semantically meaningful representations. Prior work uses artificial data augmentation techniques such as cropping, and color jitter which can only affect the image in superficial ways and are not aligned with how objects actually change e.g. occlusion, deformation, viewpoint change. In this paper, we argue that videos offer this natural augmentation for free. Videos can provide entirely new views of objects, show deformation, and even connect semantically similar but visually distinct concepts. We propose Video Noise Contrastive Estimation, a method for using unlabeled video to learn strong, transferable single image representations. We demonstrate improvements over recent unsupervised single image techniques, as well as over fully supervised ImageNet pretraining, across a variety of temporal and non-temporal tasks. Code and the Random Related Video Views dataset are available at https://www.github.com/danielgordon10/vince

Since late last year, a new coronavirus, now dubbed COVID-19, has been sweeping the globe, sickening more than 114,000 with flu- and cold-like symptoms and killing more than 4,000 so far.…

Put pictures of 1975-era Aerosmith and 1995-era Guided By Voices next to each other and you probably wouldn’t think the bands have anything in common.…

This is a scalable water cleansing system intended for very low technology primitive communities buildable for between $600 and $1,000 of parts. A gravity feed system is contemplated with one or more of an initial filtering stage(s), a settling stage, a UV treatment stage, and an ozonator stage. A stand-alone power system with solar power needing no infrastructure is contemplated to enhance purification. The system can improve the worst of water quality, including for small groups; and under some conditions to end up with clean water of a quality found in developed countries with mature water systems. For water to the site in communities with low precipitation, the water brought in would be emptied into the initial stage of the water cleansing system, and the person who brought the water would draw from the last stage most or all of the amount of water carried in.

The last time J Balvin was at Oracle arena was back on Feb. 15, 2015 when he was the opening act for Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias' joint tour. I was at that show with my mom as my date, and vividly remember her saying, “one day he’s going to headline his own tour here.” I brushed off her comment, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe that he was talented.…

FORMER Hampshire star Glenn Maxwell blasted 88 off only 39 balls as Australia romped to the highest team total in cricket World Cup history.

Former Hampshire star Glenn Maxwell hit the second-fastest century in Cricket World Cup history as Australia beat Sri Lanka by 64 runs to book a quarter-final place.

Former Hampshire all-rounder Glenn Maxwell's World Cup heroics were not enough to earn him a place in Australia's Test squad for the Ashes series against England or a preceding tour of the West Indies.

A HAMPSHIRE Cricket League match will start at 8.30am on Saturday so players can watch England’s World Cup quarter-final against Sweden.

IT is the biggest game that England have played in years.

New Liverpool signing Adam Lallana believes England's World Cup failure will make him mentally tougher.

HE has found the purr-fect home thanks to some help from the Daily Echo.

TWO Second World War veterans living in the same Southampton care home will be among those marking the 75th anniversary of VE Day today.

A SOUTHAMPTON orchestra is going virtual - and global.

HAMPSHIRE round the world star Dee Caffari will put five young sailors through their paces next week as part of an innovative project to support Britain's most promising solo yachting talent.

A yacht race that takes in sights around the world will this year miss out Southampton.

VENUES showing the upcoming Rugby World Cup Semi Final between England and New Zealand taking place on Saturday October 26 at 9am.

Sir Ben Ainslie has taken a major step towards winning the America's Cup.

The colourful, cutesy aesthetics are enough to make a gamer vomit, whilst the complexity of the combat system could keep the most hardcore of role-players happily entertained for dozens of hours.

IT was a personal journey for each and every one of them.

THE continued success of the Allied forces was being acknowledged on the pages of the Daily Echo 100 years ago this week following the latest communications from the various theatres of conflict across Europe.

AS the war in Europe continued apace, the daily reports of the Allies’ progress on the battlefronts were being forced to share the column inches of the newspaper with the reports and portraits of lost sons, whose lives had been claimed by the fighting, and were appearing with painful regularity.

ROMSEY’S £86,000 tribute to horses that died in the Great War has been give royal approval.

SEVEN war memorials in Hampshire are among hundreds to be listed in a bid to protect thousands of memorials by next year - marking the centenary of the end of the First World War.

On some occasions, we earn revenue from content. This commercial content is compiled via expert opinion. Clicking in certain hyperlinks within this article will redirect you to a 3rd party.

The band played, the flags waved, and the beef was served. It was all very British.

Eleanor Spicer Rice spent her childhood fascinated by ants, flies, maggots, bones and other natural curiosities. Her family encouraged that inquisitiveness — her father would take her on walks in the swamps near their Goldsboro home, and her parents never told her the bugs that enchanted her were gross.

As the weeks of social distancing and stay-at-home orders drag on, some people are desperate for a break from where they have been for the past couple months. Films can offer an escape and transport the viewer to faraway lands or lush landscapes.

Get ready to dive in to the crazy world of Circus Master’s Revenge for iOS.

In this podcast, Tunmi takes us through the game basics and reviews what you can expect when and if you dare to take the plunge.

This is an epic non-graphic binaural battle of circus freaks, which you will never forget & which will need you to have tremendous courage in order to defend yourself. Beware, the circus master is definitely not very friendly. Like most antagonists, he tries to hurt your feelings as often as possible to throw you off your game. Hopefully, his insults will enforce you to focus on the enemy. Good luck to anyone who is up to the challenge. Hope, you enjoy it.

Circus Master's Revenge on the App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/circus-masters-revenge/id1374289562

The last letter known to be written on the ill-fated Titanic sold for a world record at auction yesterday.

A BISCUIT that survived the sinking of the Titanic and has been described as the most expensive in the world has sold for £15,000 at auction.

'Top voice stars' of the 'Trolls' sequel were reportedly not told beforehand that the animated movie would be skipping theaters and premiering straight on VOD.

When speaking to Kelly Clarkson, the 'Harry Potter' star admits he picked up Lego after vowing to stay away from video games since the coronavirus lockdown began.

DWARFED by the huge size of one of Queen Mary’s three funnels, a team of workmen repaint the smokestack as part of the ship’s refit more than 70 years ago.

Finance boost to threatened landmark.

Top vet gains international honours as he seeks world title.

A Solihull woman celebrated her 50th birthday with a world record breaking marathon row in aid of national organisation The Brain Tumour Charity.

Superstar Osaka to play Nature Valley Classic.

Karolina Pliskova joins star-studded Edgbaston line-up.

New Nature Valley Classic champion crowned world women's tennis number one.

Stephen Pennell talks to two of grime's finest.