Leap Seconds Confuse Computers

 Unknown to me ....

Leap seconds cause chaos for computers — so Meta wants to get rid of them

Facebook’s parent company wants new ways to calculate time

By James Vincent  Jul 26, 2022  in TheVerge

Since 1972 there have been 27 leap seconds: additional seconds added to the world’s common clock — Coordinated Universal Time or UTC — to account for changes in the Earth’s rate of rotation. Historically, our concept of time is defined as a fraction of the length of the solar day, but as the Earth’s rate of spin is somewhat irregular (slowing and speeding based on various factors) it means solar time and universal time tend to drift apart. So, in order to compensate, we add leap seconds. And this really confuses computers. .... '  

Encoding Time for Machine Learning

Time encoding from NVIDIA.  Time is the most valuable component for any model, even if you only gather time that you gathered from data.  

Three Approaches to Encoding Time Information as Features for ML Models

By Eryk Lewinson  from NVIDIA

Imagine you have just started a new data science project. The goal is to build a model predicting Y, the target variable. You have already received some data from the stakeholders/data engineers, did a thorough EDA, and selected some variables you believe are relevant for the problem at hand. Then you finally built your first model. The score is acceptable, but you believe you can do much better. What do you do?

There are many ways in which you could follow up. One possibility would be to increase the complexity of the machine-learning model you have used. Alternatively, you can try to come up with some more meaningful features and continue to use the current model (at least for the time being).

For many projects, both enterprise data scientists and participants of data science competitions like Kaggle agree that it is the latter – identifying more meaningful features from the data – that can often make the most improvement to model accuracy for the least amount of effort.

You are effectively shifting the complexity from the model to the features. The features do not have to be very complex. But, ideally, we find features that have a strong yet simple relationship with the target variable.

Many data science projects contain some information about the passage of time. And this is not restricted to time series forecasting problems. For example, you can often find such features in traditional regression or classification tasks. This article investigates how to create meaningful features using date-related information. We present three approaches, but we need some preparation first.

Setup and data

For this article, we mostly use very well-known Python packages as well as relying on a relatively unknown one, scikit-lego, which is a library containing numerous useful functionalities that are expanding scikit-learn’s capabilities. We import the required libraries as follows:   (useful intro above, more at the link)  ... ' 

Combine Robots and Drones for Data and Compliance

Makes much sense.   Have recently been following the usage of how drones and directed robotics are opening up data availability in the time and space dimensions.   And here also in the dimension of compliance.

Insurers Increase Investments in Drones, Robots  By The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2021

International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts that the insurance industry will spend approximately $602 million globally on robotic systems, including drones, this year, rising to $1.7 billion in 2025.

IDC's Patrick Van Brussel said, "All these technologies are about augmenting the capacities of the so-called knowledge workers." Travelers Cos., United States Automobile Association, and Farmers Insurance Group are among the big insurers that used drones to inspect property damage from Hurricane Ida.

Farmers also plans to roll out a robotic dog, Boston Dynamic's Spot, to inspect catastrophe damage.

Said Farmers' Samantha Santiago, "Spot gives us the ability on the ground to see what's ahead of us. Things that may be difficult for an adjuster to see."

Travelers' Jim Wucherpfennig  said drones make it possible to write damage estimates and pay claims faster.

From The Wall Street Journal  

Arrows of Time

Fascinating report on how we think about time and its implication for culture and science.   Time measurements are part of any analytics.  Does this apply to our domain?  Have often seen it not considered, for example how do our results vary over time?

Arrows of Time
A project by Quanta Magazine. Text by Dan Falk. Design and illustrations by Eleanor Lutz and Olena Shmahalo.

The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe. This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.  .... "

Harnessing Micro Moments for Learning

Always thought there was value to using all that wasted time.  But how to do it well?  A sort of crowd sourcing of our leftover time for value.  Can we assemble small time segments to produce value?   And assign the time to many tasks we can use to solve problems?   Want to see where this goes.   We worked with CSAIL long ago.

Learn a language while you wait for WiFi
CSAIL tool integrates with email and web browsers to harness micro-moments
By Rachel Gordon | CSAIL 

Hyper-connectivity has changed the way we communicate, wait, and productively use our time. Even in a world of 5G wireless and “instant” messaging, there are countless moments throughout the day when we’re waiting for messages, texts, and Snapchats to refresh. But our frustrations with waiting a few extra seconds for our emails to push through doesn’t mean we have to simply stand by.
To help us make the most of these “micro-moments,” researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a series of apps called “WaitSuite” that test you on vocabulary words during idle moments, like when you’re waiting for an instant message or for your phone to connect to WiFi. .... " 

Time Measurement Productivity Tools

Had not heard of many of these tools.  Rarely is time measured this carefully.

8 Productivity Tools Illustrate You Have Way More Time Than You Think

The scarcity of time is an illusion that most entrepreneurs struggle to overcome. The first step is to measure what you (and your team) do day in and day out. What gets measured gets managed.

By Bill Carmody, Founder and CEO, Trepoint  @BillCarmody  in Inc.

History of Measuring Time

In Gizmag, a remarkable illustrated look at the history of the stopwatch,  A very favorite topic, the history and process of measurement.  One of my earliest jobs was to wander a factory with a stopwatch to look for opportunities.