Super 8 in Naples to become apartments for local workersEndangered Florida panther killed by vehicle on SR-29 SB in Collier County; 30th death in 2024
NAPLES Super 8 in Naples to become apartments for local workers A Super 8 Motel in Naples will soon look slightly different; it will become an apartment building with fully furnished units.
Endangered Florida panther killed by vehicle on SR-29 SB in Collier County; 30th death in 2024 The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has announced the 30th Florida Panther death of 2024.
FORT MYERS BEACH Efforts to restore Fort Myers Beach underway The Fort Myers Beach coastline continues to feel the impacts of the recent storms. Crews working on the sand renourishment beach project have more than six miles of “Critically eroded beach” to restore.
More water headed into Caloosahatchee: What it means for our estuary Southwest Florida cringes every time the mention of releases from Lake Okeechobee comes up. There are concerns about what’s in the water and whether it will dirty our shoreline or even fuel blue-green algae blooms.
NAPLES Transforming animal care: how a $1.5M donation is helping SNIP Collier We are seeing the first major changes from a donation from Tom Golisano.
FORT MYERS BEACH “We did what we had to do” Fort Myers Beach mayor takes blame for loss of FEMA discount FEMA sent the town of Fort Myers Beach a letter explaining why they lost their flood insurance discount. One reason was not removing temporary trailers and containers from flood zones. Now, the mayor says to blame him for it.
NORTH FORT MYERS Suncoast Estates fatal shooting leaves community on edge A fatal shooting took place on Saturday at the Suncoast Estates in North Fort Myers, on Heck Drive, that left one man dead and another seriously injured.
SANIBEL Gulfshore Life Men and Women of the Year award honoree: James Evans The environment and economy are nearly synonymous in Southwest Florida, and while many people work to protect both, one man stands out and has made the environment his life’s work.
NORTH FORT MYERS Where did the Shell Factory animals go? With the closure of The Shell Factory in September, people have been wondering where the animals went.
NAPLES Naples man arrested on multiple violent charges including kidnapping and sexual battery A Naples man has been arrested on multiple violent charges stemming from an alleged case of kidnapping involving guns, drugs and sexual battery.
MATLACHA CW Fudge Factory in Matlacha getting back to business after storms Getting back to business is giving one island the boost they need before the holidays.
southwest florida How much will a Christmas tree cost in Southwest Florida this year? With Thanksgiving this week and Christmas around the corner, we want to know how tree prices are stacking up across Southwest Florida.
NAPLES Spreading holiday cheer with Christmas tree lighting in Naples The Christmas spirit has awakened in Naples.
Early lung cancer detection According to a critical care pulmonologist with Lee Health, every day, two people in Lee County hear the news that they have lung cancer.
Bishop Verot seniors cheering in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade The Viking seniors get a once in a lifetime experience cheering with Spirit of America in the iconic holiday parade.
NAPLES Super 8 in Naples to become apartments for local workers A Super 8 Motel in Naples will soon look slightly different; it will become an apartment building with fully furnished units.
Endangered Florida panther killed by vehicle on SR-29 SB in Collier County; 30th death in 2024 The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has announced the 30th Florida Panther death of 2024.
FORT MYERS BEACH Efforts to restore Fort Myers Beach underway The Fort Myers Beach coastline continues to feel the impacts of the recent storms. Crews working on the sand renourishment beach project have more than six miles of “Critically eroded beach” to restore.
More water headed into Caloosahatchee: What it means for our estuary Southwest Florida cringes every time the mention of releases from Lake Okeechobee comes up. There are concerns about what’s in the water and whether it will dirty our shoreline or even fuel blue-green algae blooms.
NAPLES Transforming animal care: how a $1.5M donation is helping SNIP Collier We are seeing the first major changes from a donation from Tom Golisano.
FORT MYERS BEACH “We did what we had to do” Fort Myers Beach mayor takes blame for loss of FEMA discount FEMA sent the town of Fort Myers Beach a letter explaining why they lost their flood insurance discount. One reason was not removing temporary trailers and containers from flood zones. Now, the mayor says to blame him for it.
NORTH FORT MYERS Suncoast Estates fatal shooting leaves community on edge A fatal shooting took place on Saturday at the Suncoast Estates in North Fort Myers, on Heck Drive, that left one man dead and another seriously injured.
SANIBEL Gulfshore Life Men and Women of the Year award honoree: James Evans The environment and economy are nearly synonymous in Southwest Florida, and while many people work to protect both, one man stands out and has made the environment his life’s work.
NORTH FORT MYERS Where did the Shell Factory animals go? With the closure of The Shell Factory in September, people have been wondering where the animals went.
NAPLES Naples man arrested on multiple violent charges including kidnapping and sexual battery A Naples man has been arrested on multiple violent charges stemming from an alleged case of kidnapping involving guns, drugs and sexual battery.
MATLACHA CW Fudge Factory in Matlacha getting back to business after storms Getting back to business is giving one island the boost they need before the holidays.
southwest florida How much will a Christmas tree cost in Southwest Florida this year? With Thanksgiving this week and Christmas around the corner, we want to know how tree prices are stacking up across Southwest Florida.
NAPLES Spreading holiday cheer with Christmas tree lighting in Naples The Christmas spirit has awakened in Naples.
Early lung cancer detection According to a critical care pulmonologist with Lee Health, every day, two people in Lee County hear the news that they have lung cancer.
Bishop Verot seniors cheering in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade The Viking seniors get a once in a lifetime experience cheering with Spirit of America in the iconic holiday parade.
Google is rolling out new technology to improve the results it serves up when you type in a search query, though you might not even notice. Google is rolling out new technology to improve the results it serves up when you type in a search query, though you might not even notice. On Friday, the company announced that it is starting to use an artificial intelligence system developed in its research labs, known as BERT (which stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”), to help answer conversational English-language queries, initially from US users. The changes are meant to improve how the technology that underpins the world’s largest search engine understands the ways language and context work together — and give users better responses to their searches, from “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” to “parking on a hill with no curb.” Those two queries in particular included the kind of written language that tripped up Google’s search engine previously, and which BERT is more adept at handling, company executives said during a small press event on Thursday. If you typed in the prescription query, Google would typically offer a result about filling your own prescription; with BERT, however, the search engine will realize not to ignore the “for someone” part of the search. Similarly, typing in “parking on a hill with no curb” was the kind of phrase in which Google would typically have figured the word “curb” was important but not “no” — which would mean you may get a result about parking on a hill that actually had a curb. BERT should be more adept at understanding the key word “no,” and give a result that reflects that. Google’s older search technology would treat queries as a “bag of words,” search vice president Pandu Nayak said on Thursday. That is, it discarded lots of information about the sequence of words and considered just what words it figured were important (such as “pharmacy” or “medicine”). This doesn’t always work well, though, he said, because sequence information is often important. BERT, which Google introduced in 2018 and made open source so other developers can use it, is quite different, as it can look at lots of text in parallel and consider how each word relates to others in a sentence, whether those other words are in front of it or behind it. As Jeff Dean, Google’s senior vice president of AI, explained, BERT essentially teaches itself about language by playing a game: Google engineers trained the AI model by feeding it various paragraphs in which 10% to 15% of words were randomly deleted, and making it guess what needed to be filled in — kind of like an AI version of Mad Libs. Nayak noted that Google still has work to do when it comes to understanding what we want when we search for things, though: For instance, with its new search technology, if you type “what state is south of Nebraska,” Google may suggest a Wikipedia page for South Nebraska. As you may have guessed, this is not a state; it’s actually a town in Florida. (The real answer you’d be looking for is Kansas.) The search engine will have plenty of opportunities to practice. Google fields billions of queries per day, 15% of which its AI has never encountered.