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GetFact.

Short-form data-driven news derived from a network of trusted sources.

25/01/2023

Robots struggle with simple

Scientists and engineers at the UC Berkeley Robotics School designed the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks (Brett). Brett’s job was to pick up and fold a towel. After years of effort, Brett’s best time was 20 minutes. More recent improvements, involving deep learning algorithms, have achieved best times of 1.5 minutes. However, Brett still gets stumped routinely when the laundry is messy. Overall, humans of all ages and skills outperform Brett at folding towels in a matter of seconds.

Brett’s towel tribulations fall within the space of Moravec’s paradox: we can design algorithms that solve complex problems like winning at world-class chess or flying an aircraft but are unable to complete simple tasks like tying shoelaces or folding a crumpled towel. Simple tasks that involve irregularity, complexity, creativity, ethical judgements and emotional intelligence are often beyond the reach of robotics.

However, there is still much scope for artificial intelligence to automate previously human-performed tasks soon. Artificial intelligence has amazed us in recent history by solving complex problems that were once considered impossible for a robot.

Find more via the link in our bio.

24/01/2023

With all this talk of hospital spending, did you know the ‘sick tents’ at Dawes Point became the first ‘hospital’ of the First Fleet’s surgeon-general, John White, in 1788.

Governor Macquarie then established a new hospital on Macquarie Street, which opened in 1816. To fund the hospital, Macquarie gave licences to select people to import and distribute spirits, and they were taxed. The hospital became known as the ‘rum hospital’.

Today, New South Wales has 228 hospitals, with over 220,000 people working in them.

On a normal day these public hospitals see:
• 6,200 people admitted
• 18,000 spend the night there
• 66,000 meals served
• 1,200 surgeries
• 195 babies born

One heck of a day’s work. And these figures are from the 2016 Census, so do not include the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact. More coming on that shortly.

To read more on the past, present and future of our hospitals go to the link in our Instagram bio.

06/07/2022

Kosciusko or Kosiuszko?

Getting someone’s name wrong is always embarrassing. More so when you’re naming Australia’s highest peak.

Polish explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki – himself with a ‘z’ in his name – named the 2,228m summit after his freedom-fighting hero, General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, in 1840 but forgot the ‘z'. It was only corrected in 1997.

Kosciuszko National Park began in 1906 as the National Chase Snowy Mountains. It became a dedicated state park in 1944 and then a national park in 1967. It is the largest park in New South Wales, at 6,900 square kilometres.

Kakadu, in the Northern Territory, was Australia’s largest national park, at 19,816 square kilometres, but lost that honour late last year to a new park in South Australia.

The Munga-Thirri–Simpson Desert National Park at 36,000 square kilometres is now our big one. It includes the Simpson Desert's sand dunes, which stretch over hundreds of kilometres across the corners of 3 jurisdictions – South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.

It looks like the parks are getting bigger, but they still only cover less than 5% of the country.

22/06/2022

The ski season kicked off this week. Will future Olympians be on the slopes?

Australia’s record medal haul of 1 gold, 2 silver, and 1 bronze, at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing was great, given our history with them.

The Winter games began in 1924, in Chamonix, France, but Australia didn’t participate until the 1936 games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

The games were suspended during the Second World War and Australia did not send a team to the 1948 games in St Moritz, Switzerland.

We have participated ever since but only won our first medal in 1994 in the men's 5,000 metres short track relay speed skating event. Zali Steggall gained Australia's first individual medal in 1998, when she won bronze in the slalom.

Our first gold, won by Steven Bradbury in Salt Lake City, USA in 2002, in the 1000m short-track speed skating event was one of a kind. As his opponents collided and tumbled, Bradbury skated past to cross the finish line alone. His name has become synonymous with an accidental hero.

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