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"If you've been job hunting recently, chances are you've interacted with a resume robot, a nickname for an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. In its most basic form, an ATS acts like an online assistant, helping hiring managers write job descriptions, scan resumes and schedule interviews. As artificial intelligence advances, employers are increasingly relying on a combination of predictive analytics, machine learning and complex algorithms to sort through candidates, evaluate their skills and estimate their performance. Today, it's not uncommon for applicants to be rejected by a robot before they're connected with an actual human in human resources. The job market is ripe for the explosion of AI recruitment tools. Hiring managers are coping with deflated HR budgets while confronting growing pools of applicants, a result of both the economic downturn and the post-pandemic expansion of remote work. As automated software makes pivotal decisions about our employment, usually without any oversight, it's posing fundamental questions about privacy, accountability and transparency."

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

"In a way, this is a powerful rhetorical move. Insisting that the conversation focus on the details is an insistence that people who dismiss client-side scanning on principle are wrong to do so: if you believe that privacy of private communications is and should be an inviolable right, then Levy and Robinson are effectively arguing that you be cut out of the conversation in favour of more moderate people who are willing to discuss trade-offs."

"Can AI bring personalized tutors to every student? The AI education tools being piloted today are mind-blowing because they are tailored to each individual learner. Some of them-like Khanmigo and MATHia-are already remarkable, and they'll only get better in the years ahead. One of the things that excites me the most about this type of technology is the possibility of localizing it to every student, no matter where they live. For example, a team in Nairobi is working on Somanasi, an AI-based tutor that aligns with the curriculum in Kenya. The name means "learn together" in Swahili, and the tutor has been designed with the cultural context in mind so it feels familiar to the students who use it."

"Next, was two months of probation where we moderated on practice queues that consisted of hundreds of thousands of videos that had already been moderated. The policies we applied to these practice videos were compared with what had previously been applied to them by a more experienced moderator in order to find areas we needed to improve in. Everyone passed their probation. One trend that is particularly hated by moderators are the "recaps". These consist of a 15- to 60-second barrage of pictures, sometimes hundreds, shown as a super fast slideshow often with three to four pictures a second. We have to view every one of these photos for infractions. If a video is 60 seconds long then the system will allocate us around 48 seconds to do this. We also have to check the video description, account bio and hashtags. Around the end of the school year or New Year's Eve, when these sort of videos are popular, it becomes incredibly draining and also affects our stats. "

"I have been working with generative AI and, even though I have been warning that these tools are improving rapidly, I did not expect them to really be improving that rapidly. On every dimension, Bing's AI, which does not actually represent a technological leap over ChatGPT, far outpaces the earlier AI - which is less than three months old! There are many larger, more capable models on their way in the coming months, and we are not really ready."

"Google adverts direct pregnant women to services run by UK anti-abortion groups The tech giant is carrying adverts styled to look like real internet search results for women seeking pregnancy advice Shanti Das Sat 25 Feb 2023 13.00 GMT Last modified on Sat 25 Feb 2023 20.15 GMT Women seeking online advice about abortions are being directed to pregnancy counselling services run by anti-abortion campaigners, an Observer investigation has found. Google adverts that are styled to look like real search results and appear above genuine listings are routinely being shown to people searching key terms relating to pregnancy and abortion."

"Why do some people get so upset, especially in an age where many people are taking digital detoxes for mental-health breaks, and others are busy juggling life tasks? People still communicate in different ways; some are constantly attached to their phones, while others want to disengage from them for chunks of time. But tensions over reply times may also come down to social norms - or the lack thereof. New developments in digital technology have outpaced the formulation of mutually agreed new communication paradigms, so when a text is sent, we're not all responding according to the same 'rules'."

"Wooldridge says copyright is a "coming storm" for AI companies. LLMs are likely to have accessed copyrighted material, such as news articles. Indeed the GPT-4-assisted chatbot attached to Microsoft's Bing search engine cites news sites in its answers. "I didn't give explicit permission for my works to be used as training data, but they almost certainly were, and now they contribute to what these models know," he says. "Many artists are gravely concerned that their livelihoods are at risk from generative AI. Expect to see legal battles," he adds."

"Countries around the world are deploying technologies-like digital IDs, facial recognition systems, GPS devices, and spyware-that are meant to improve governance and reduce crime. But there has been little evidence to back these claims, all while introducing a high risk of exclusion, bias, misidentification, and privacy violations. It's important to note that these impacts are not equal. They fall disproportionately on religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, migrants and refugees, as well as human rights activists and political dissidents."

"When individuals migrate, their data migrates with them. When people leave their countries to travel and live in different places whether as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, they are not only seeking physical safety, they also need to be sure that their digital identity and information will be safe. However, if they are not careful or protected, their data could unwittingly leave a trail of their movements, potentially exposing them to various threats. Whether they are fleeing war, authoritarian regimes, or other adversaries, this data could inadvertently connect their identities to their pursuers."

"The tools - which aim to cut the time and cost of filtering mountains of job applications and drive workplace efficiency - are enticing to employers. But Schellmann concludes they are doing more harm than good. Not only are many of the hiring tools based on troubling pseudoscience (for example, the idea that the intonation of our voice can predict how successful we will be in a job doesn't stand up, says Schellmann), they can also discriminate."

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

"The internet, including social media, was not made with children and young people in mind. This is why online experiences are not always good for children and sometimes even exploitative, risky, and deeply problematic. No wonder parents are worried, educators are at a loss and the government feels compelled to act. But banning children from social media is not the answer."

"The first social media babies are adults now. Some are pushing for laws to protect kids from their parents' oversharing"

"What do people really ask chatbots? It's a lot of sex and homework. AI chatbots are taking the world by storm. We analyzed thousands of conversations to see what people are really asking them and what topics are most discussed."

"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."

"In a follow-up article published this week titled "No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn," Nicas wrote that the aggregations of his article showed in part that the internet truly is a dark place, in part because of the way the story spread: "The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times's article." In this article, Nicas blames the people who aggregated him for sensationalizing his article. That may be true, but Nicas's article is also sensationalist.  While the article does explore the history of Marubo people getting access to motor boats and radios and notes "(Some Marubo already had phones, often bought with government welfare checks, to take photographs and communicate when in a city)," it does not explain that many Marubo people have been using the internet for quite some time, and implies that the problems they are now grappling with are things that the Marubo people hadn't thought about before."

"When "I can has cheezburger?" became one of the first internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone worried about how much energy it would use up. But research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family - from "All your base are belong to us", through Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl", to Tim Walz with a piglet - are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK's total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis. Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."