ETHICS & TECHNOLOGY

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web. RECOMMENDED READING The Truth Seekers Are Coming KAITLYN TIFFANY America's Health Will Soon Be in the Hands of Very Minor Internet Celebrities KAITLYN TIFFANY How the Pandemic Stoked a Backlash to Multilevel Marketing KAITLYN TIFFANY Plenty of people are working to archive the internet as quickly as it slips away. The constantly crawling bots of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and the efforts of amateur archivists and hackers are all part of an ongoing battle against what is often referred to as "digital rot." But something is missing from these troves of data. Anyone, for instance, can download all their personal information from Facebook-a feature added in 2018 to give users a greater sense of control over their online life. But data alone can tell a future historian only so much, says Megan Ankerson, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in internet history. "The whole experience of what Facebook is or what it feels like to use it would not be able to be reconstructed in the archive," she told me."

"The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers. Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft's long-term business plans. Only in a world where more profitable opportunities for investment are sorely lacking can such wild bets on far-flung futuristic technologies become massive multinational companies. Corporations and wealthy individuals have accumulated huge sums of money and cannot figure out where to put it because returns on investments are extremely low. The flip side of falling rates of business investment is a slackening pace of economic growth, which economists have termed "secular stagnation." It's this decades-long slowdown that has generated the insecure labour force on which Uber and Lyft rely."

"The natural response of most companies, which seek to maximize profits by operating in the world's two largest national markets simultaneously, is to straddle this divide. Think of this approach as "one company, two systems." I saw this well-intentioned strategy up close, through my brief exposure to Project Dragonfly, a since-shuttered effort to make a version of Google's search engine available behind China's so-called Great Firewall by conforming search results to CCP standards. The experience left me deeply convinced that the "one company, two systems" model does not work. Tailoring one's principles to make them compatible with the CCP's dictates makes them systemically incompatible with American values."

What do you do when a sudden break from past trends profoundly reorders the way the world works? If you're a business, one thing you probably can't do is turn to existing artificial intelligence. To carry out one of its primary applications, predictive analytics, today's AI requires vast quantities of relevant data. When things change this quickly, there's no time to gather enough. Many pre-pandemic models for many business functions are no longer useful; some might even point businesses in the wrong direction.

"It turns out that images matter, but so does power. Bentham's panopticon works because the warden of the prison has the power to punish you if he witnesses your misbehavior. But Bentham's other hope for the panopticon-that the behavior of the warden would be transparent and evaluated by all who saw him-has never come to pass. Over 10 years, from 2005 to 2014, only 48 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for use of lethal force, though more than 1,000 people a year are killed by police in the United States."

"Who are "the peers" of a sociologist who likes to bullshit about evolutionary psychology but who doesn't know much about the statistics of sex ratios? Other sociologists who like to bullshit about evolutionary psychology but who don't know much about the statistics of sex ratios. Who are "the peers" of a couple of psychologists who like to imagine that hormonal changes will induce huge, previously undetected changes in political attitudes, and who think this can be detected using a between-person study of a small and nonrepresentative sample? That's right, another couple of psychologists who like to imagine that hormonal changes will induce huge, previously undetected changes in political attitudes, and who think this can be detected using a between-person study of a small and nonrepresentative sample. Who are "the peers" of a contrarian economist who likes to make bold pronouncements based on almost no data, and whose conclusions don't change even when people keep pointing out errors in his data? That's right, other economists who like to make bold pronouncements based on almost no data, and whose conclusions don't change even when people keep pointing out errors in their data. Who are "the peers" of a wacky business-school professor who cares more about cool experiments than data management and who doesn't seem to mind if the numbers in his tables don't add up? Yup, it's other business-school professors who care more about cool experiments than data management and who don't seem to mind if the numbers in their tables don't add up? Who are "the peers" of fake authors of postmodern gibberish? Actual authors of postmodern gibberish, of course. I think you get the idea. Peer review is fine for what it is-it tells you that a paper is up to standard in its subfield. Peer reviewers can catch missing references in the literature review. That can be helpful! But if peer review catches anything that the original authors didn'

"In this paper, we examine whether CNNs are capable of learning the semantics of training data. To this end, we evaluate CNNs on negative images, since they share the same structure and semantics as regular images and humans can classify them correctly. Our experimental results indicate that when training on regular images and testing on negative images, the model accuracy is significantly lower than when it is tested on regular images. This leads us to the conjecture that current training methods do not effectively train models to generalize the concepts. "

"This week IBM, Microsoft and Amazon announced that they would suspend the sale of their facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. It's yet another sign of the dramatic impact of the protests for social justice. "

"In the first case, Justice Ang Cheng Hock had found that the burden should fall on the Government to prove a statement is false, because in issuing correction directions, it is curtailing the right to free speech which is protected by the Constitution, among other things. Disagreeing, Justice Belinda Ang said a correction direction under Pofma does not constrain free speech as it does not require the removal of the original statement. In fact, she said, it is "one mode of tackling the unique difficulties associated with refuting false factual claims on the Internet". She added that a person's only obligation under such a direction is to put up the Government's take alongside his statement, so that viewers can compare the competing accounts of facts and make their own decisions. Also, she said, Article 14 of the Constitution protects the right to communicate information and not misinformation. As such, falsehoods are not one of the categories of protected speech."

Nepal said on Tuesday (May 21) that it has banned popular Chinese digital wallets Alipay and WeChat to prevent the loss of foreign currency earnings from tens of thousands of Chinese tourists.

"Sir Tim outlined three specific areas of "dysfunction" that he said were harming the web today: malicious activity such as hacking and harassment problematic system design such as business models that reward clickbait unintended consequences, such as aggressive or polarised discussions These things could be dealt with, in part, through new laws and systems that limit bad behaviour online, he said. He cited the Contract for the Web project, which he helped to launch late last year. But initiatives like this would require all of society to contribute - from members of the public to business and political leaders."

Two legal doctrines are relevant here. The "utility" requirement of patent law requires that the invention work. And the "enablement" requirement means that the application has to describe the invention with enough detail to allow a person in the relevant field to build and use it. If the applicant herself can't build the invention with nearly unlimited time and money, it does not seem like the enablement requirement could possibly be satisfied. The USPTO generally does a terrible job of ensuring that applications meet the utility and enablement standards. In practice, unless an application claims an obviously impossible device (like a perpetual motion machine), the examiner will not question whether it works. To some extent, this is understandable. Examiners only have a few hours to review each application, and they can hardly be expected to run complex experiments to check the applicants' claims. But this practice can lead to serious errors. In early 2014, around the same time that Theranos was beginning to grow its profile, the USPTO was criticized for awarding a patent to a Korean researcher for work that was already known to be fraudulent. The applicant had even been convicted for falsifying the relevant results. A USPTO spokesperson told The New York Times that the agency "operates on an honor code and that patent examiners cannot independently verify claims." In response, Professor James Grimmelmann commented: "The USPTO is an armory handing out legal howitzers on the honor system. What could possibly go wrong?"

"Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth. They are dependent on companies coming into being and becoming big enough to hire them."

Researchers had previously thought that the decline in the popularity of such cultural objects followed a smooth, steep curve. But analysis of the new study data revealed that a better fit was a shape called a biexponential function, which has two phases. It shows that collective memory dropped quickly, but that the subsequent decline in attention slowed considerably, and went down a much gentler slope. Although the shape was the same for each feature studied, the actual length of each phase was different. Music showed the shortest and sharpest initial decline in attention (taking 6 years) and the online biographies of the sports stars the longest (20-30 years). How come? The researchers propose an explanation. The first, steep decline phase is dominated by the process of communicative memory, which is the direct word-of-mouth transfer of information. And the second, more enduring phase relies more on cultural memory, which is sustained by the physical recording of that same information.

The "mainstream media" is far better resourced and its ideals of informational quality are much closer to the ones that Google's machine rankings prefer. Mainstream media organizations have tens of thousands of skilled journalists. The organizations that Republicans compare the New York Times to are a fraction of the size, have far less training in the field, and oftentimes don't even aspire to journalistic norms. The right-wing media ecosystem has grown tremendously, but-with important exceptions-not through the kind of fact-based reporting that mainstream media has long valued.

"At the most basic level, an economy grows… whenever people take resources and rearrange them in a way that makes them more valuable," Romer wrote in a 2015 blog post that he resurfaced, after he won the Nobel Monday. It's a wrinkle of the productivity equation that many economists in the past (and even some present-day scholars) neglect to take into consideration, perhaps because it's much easier to count up things like physical capital and labor than the invaluable contributions of human minds to global progress. "I think part of why this question attracted me was because of my background in physics, and to a physicist, the whole notion of a production function sounds wrong," Romer said in a 2007 interview with Stanford economist Russell Roberts. "We don't really produce anything. Everything was already here, so all we can ever do is rearrange things. Think of conservation of mass. We've got the same amount of stuff we've always had, but the world is a nicer place to live in because we've rearranged it."

Al Jazeera is effective because of the range of discussion it allows and the quality of its reporting on the Middle East's issues. It helps that the state that sponsors it, Qatar, is tiny, so that while the station has problems reporting clearly on Qatari issues, it can cover many other subjects well. CGTN, like all mainland media, is subject to the massive and growing regime of domestic censorship. It's possible, if increasingly difficult, to carry out good coverage of real issues in China, like corruption and medical fraud, while steering clear of obviously off-limits topics like Xinjiang, Tibet, or the Communist Party leadership; the excellent site Sixth Tone has managed to pull this off by walking a very delicate line and publishing almost entirely in English, as do private media such as Caixin. That's impossible for an institution as high-profile as CGTN, though. Nor can it copy RT's success. RT, which launched in 2005, built its audience in the West by presenting itself as alternative media, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. It was happy to go to extremes of either left or right, bringing on everyone from Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to 9/11 conspiracy theorists to Alex Jones, and it gave its young journalists, often brought in from the world of activism, a relatively long leash. It's a product of Russia's own media regime, forged in the chaotic and open 1990s and still far less censorious-and more openly able to indulge in conspiracy theories-than China's. It also mirrors wider strategies: Moscow wants chaos it can exploit, while Beijing wants a stable world order-on its terms.

"A model for national collaboration has yet to be worked out. Algorithms are already widely shared by researchers and tech companies, but the data used to train machine-learning models tends to be jealously guarded."