Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? "There's a window of opportunity to intervene," Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, said. "You don't want to let that go." In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment. Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to "the end of a row" she couldn't remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia. Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that.

The deal will make a range of Windward services available to MFA members. Bunker supplier industry group the Marine Fuels Alliance has signed a new deal with maritime AI firm Windward offering its services to the organisation's members. The partnership will see Windward providing educational sessions to MFA members and offering a bespoke package of AI-powered solutions, the MFA said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. Windward's services use machine learning and behavioural analytics models to help companies optimise business practices and navigate maritime risks in real time. "Upon launching the MFA in Oct 2021, we knew that the issue of sanctions was one of the biggest challenges facing bunker supply companies," Anthony Mollet, executive officer of the MFA, said in the statement.

On August 8th, 2021, Spanish police and customs agents intercepted the cargo ship NATALIA on suspicion of narcotics trafficking. The ship was en route from Lebanon via Iskenderun, Turkey, to Lagos, Nigeria, and hidden on board was nearly 20 tons of hashish worth $470 million. That may sound like the opening scene of an action flick, but it's the kind of occurrence that happens more frequently than you might expect on the high seas. Drug smuggling, illegal fishing, and piracy are constant threats. Following a number of recent piracy incidents in the Gulf of Aden, Iran, Russia, and China recently began naval and air drills seeking to counter maritime piracy.

Windward has announced the launch of the Windward Vessel Fuel Consumption API, an artificial intelligence-powered system providing fuel consumption assessments to allow maritime stakeholders to optimise chartering decisions and manage their carbon footprint. The service is based on a deep learning model that calculates and assesses the fuel consumption of any given tanker using multiple data sources, inputs, and behavioural features, including speed, meetings, port calls, weather conditions, hull fouling, engines, and fuel types, with more than 10 years of historical voyage data. The company says that the system can deliver assessments with up to 95% accuracy on average per voyage, provided with actionable insights to support further decision making. The datasets were built, tested and verified in collaboration with companies participating in Windward's Data for Decarbonisation Programme (D4D), a partnership aimed to increase transparency and foster collaboration within the maritime industry by leveraging the power of big data and AI to decrease carbon emissions. The service is seen as a supplementary digital source of fuel consumption data alongside noon reports, which typically involve the crew measuring and reporting data manually, making the report susceptible to human error and potential falsification.

Russian tankers carrying oil chemicals and oil products are increasingly concealing their movements, a phenomenon that some maritime experts warn could signal attempts to evade unprecedented sanctions prompted by the invasion of Ukraine. In the week ending March 25, there were at least 33 occurrences of so-called "dark activity" -- operating while onboard systems to transmit their locations are turned off -- by Russian tankers, said Windward Ltd., an Israeli consultancy that specializes in maritime risk using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery. That's more than double the weekly average of 14 in the past year. The dark operations occurred mainly in or around Russia's exclusive economic zone, according to Windward, which conducted the research at Bloomberg's request. The ships engaging in dark activity include vessels connected to big corporations and multinational shipping firms, as well as small businesses, according to Windward.

Windward, the pioneering maritime risk analytics startup that's fundamentally changing the marine insurance landscape, today announced it had raised $16.5m in Series C funding. It brings the total raised to date to $38.9m. The round was led by San Francisco-based insurtech fund, XL Innovate. Existing investors, Horizons Ventures and Aleph, also participated, as did a number of individuals, including Salesforce Chairman & CEO, Marc Benioff. As part of the fundraising, Tom Hutton, XL Innovate Managing Partner and former CEO of RMS, will become a board director.

Faster and safer deliveries, fewer out-of-stock items and better customer service--AI is set to revolutionize the supply chain. Christmas 2017 was a busy one for retailers. During peak season, Amazon reported records for holiday shipping as they handled deliveries to 185 countries. UPS, meanwhile, said it was breaking records on package returns, having processed more than a million daily in December. With a 23 percent global growth in the last year, e-commerce continues to post solid performances, but stress and confusion are routine for merchants, logistics companies and consumers.