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Article: No green thumb required: Open-source robots can now grow a small farm for you

Food, Open Provisioning

No green thumb required: Open-source robots can now grow a small farm for you

If you’ve always wanted to grow your own fruits and veggies but could never quite make the time for it — technology is here to rescue you. At first glance, technology and farming don’t go hand in hand, but that’s old school thinking. In this day and age, technology and farming are a perfect match. With cheap sensors, simple phone apps, and available equipment, you can build your very own farming robot.

Give it power, water, and WiFi, and it will take care of the rest. FarmBot can plant, water, weed, and monitor the soil and plants with an array of sensors. All you need to do is harvest the produce once it’s done.

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Article: Zymo Research Releases Open-Source Bioinformatics Pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 Variant Detection in Wastewater

Open Decision-Support, Research

Zymo Research Releases Open-Source Bioinformatics Pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 Variant Detection in Wastewater

Zymo Research has released the VirSieve™ Bioinformatics Pipeline source code to the environmental microbiology community to promote global collaboration and support for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater.

VirSieve™ is an automated computational pipeline that analyzes sequencing reads from the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater samples to better understand viral variants present in monitored communities. By rating the confidence interval in observed viral mutations, the software has the potential to significantly increase the accuracy of analyzing any changes in the viral genetic material.

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Article: Tink announces European open banking partnership with American Express

Money, Open Governance

Tink announces European open banking partnership with American Express

Tink, powering the new world of finance has announced entering a European open banking partnership with American Express, to improve the onboarding process for new cardmembers.

Under the collaboration, American Express will integrate open banking technology into its application and risk analysis process to allow prospective card members to connect to their bank accounts seamlessly and instantly verify their identity, income and account information with American Express. This will eliminate the need for customers to manually enter their details or send additional documentation to Amex, saving time and improving the customer experience.

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Article: Google Woolaroo: How to use the indigenous language tool

Language, Open Data

Google Woolaroo: How to use the indigenous language tool

Google has launched a new tool called Woolaroo to compile and preserve indigenous languages.The company announced the tool on 5 May. It features indigenous languages from all over the world, including Yugambeh — the first Australian Aboriginal language to be featured on the app.

“Crucial to Indigenous communities is that Woolaroo puts the power to add, edit and delete entries completely in their hands,” Yugambeh Museum CEO, Rory O’Connor, said in a statement.

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Article: Finastra: Redefining finance for good with technology

Money, Open Governance

Finastra: Redefining finance for good with technology

If the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that fintech can truly be a force for societal good and an anchor that provides surety during even the most uncertain times. Although this assessment is no surprise to industry leader Finastra, the potential for positive change has, in its view, reached a pivotal moment.

Accelerated digital transformation around the world is widening the company’s scope to shape and be a part of the financial services industry’s new reality in every sense, from enabling broader financial inclusion to investing in the environment and developing its renowned FusionFabric.cloud platform.

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Article: Why AWS Could Own the Future of Quantum Computing

Hardware, Open Manufacturing

Why AWS Could Own the Future of Quantum Computing

We often talk about future leadership in quantum computing by way of hardware innovation but if (or when) the technology suddenly takes off, the real differentiator will be accessibility and service. That might take an approach that is multi-platform with a defined pricing, support, and security model and while quantum startups can handle physics, building global front-end services is a different ballgame.

Amazon Web Services already knows how this story goes from its experiences building a multi-platform mega-platform for machine learning and expects the same lessons could carry forward for early quantum computing.

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Article: Cyber Experts Set out Blueprint to Secure Smart Cities of the Future

Cities, Innovation, Open Space

Cyber Experts Set out Blueprint to Secure Smart Cities of the Future

Local and national authorities in the U.K. are being offered expert guidance to protect their citizens by making their connected places – often known as ‘smart cities’ – resilient to cyber attacks. A new set of security principles has been published by the National Cyber Security Centre – a part of GCHQ – to help all U.K. authorities secure smart cities and their underlying infrastructure.

Connected places – which include smart cities and connected rural environments – use networked technology like Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors to improve the efficiency of services and therefore the quality of citizens’ lives.

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Article: Your Essential Guide to Open Banking

Money, Open Governance

Your Essential Guide to Open Banking

According to Mastercard, open banking is helping fuel a revolution in financial services. It can provide people with more convenient ways to view and manage their money and simpler ways to access credit or personalized deals and rewards. Open banking can also power different kinds of payment services, such as payments in video games or using business accounting apps.

The practice is already helping to widen access to financial services for millions of people and build on the broader introduction of real-time payments and other emerging payment technologies.

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Article: Open-Source COVID-19 ML Datasets; Models; Tools for Data Scientists

Access, Document, Open Decision-Support, Open Health, Research

Open-Source COVID-19 ML Datasets; Models; Tools for Data Scientists

As Covid-19 has impacted almost all countries, data scientists and researchers have come up with different predictive models to predict the spread of disease so that it can help the respective governments to come up with suitable plans and policies to curb the spread.

In this context, it becomes essential for data scientists and analysts to know the most popular and useful models that have been proposed as an outcome of the research, as well as get familiar with different datasets available on the internet.

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Article: How the U.S. Government Can Learn to See the Future

Open Governance, Standards

How the U.S. Government Can Learn to See the Future

In 1973, then-Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger argued that policymaking could be reduced to a process of “making complicated bets about the future,” noting that it would be helpful if he could be supplied with “estimates of the relevant betting odds.”

Despite Kissinger’s plea for betting odds, forecasting efforts in the government today remain underdeveloped. The early failure to anticipate and prepare for the coronavirus, despite indicators that a pandemic was likely, has cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.

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