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"If you're a student and looking to establish yourself in a field of study that has a bright future in the world of high technology, then you'll need the mindset of a futurist. Understanding the direction of technology will help you decide how you want to position yourself to succeed, and figure out exactly what you need to study to get there."

"A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied mask. Masks both lowered the algorithms' accuracy rates and raised the number of failures to process. The more of the nose is covered by the mask the lower the algorithm's accuracy; however, error rates were generally lower with round masks; and the algorithms generally performed worse with black masks than with surgical blue ones. False positive remained stable or declined a small amount."

" AI has better 'bedside manner' than some doctors, study finds ChatGPT rated higher in quality and empathy of written advice, raising possibility of medical assistance role Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev Fri 28 Apr 2023 16.01 BST ChatGPT appears to have a better 'bedside manner' than some doctors - at least when their written advice is rated for quality and empathy, a study has shown. The findings highlight the potential for AI assistants to play a role in medicine, according to the authors of the work, who suggest such agents could help draft doctors' communications with patients. "The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive," said Dr John Ayers, of the University of California San Diego."

"ChatGPT will see you now. The artificial intelligence tool may be better than a doctor at following recognised treatment standards for depression, and without the gender or social class biases sometimes seen in the physician-patient relationship, a study suggests. The findings were published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the open access journal owned by British Medical Journal. The researchers said further work was needed to examine the risks and ethical issues arising from AI's use."

"The study found that when a person's gait-speed dropped by 5cm/second within a week, this was a sign that they were at increased risk of a fall - in fact, 86% had a fall within three weeks when such a drop in walking speed was observed. By contrast, the elderly residents who had no change in walking speed had a background probability of falling of 19.5%."

""The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. "Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.""

"This study therefore concludes that file sharing has not reduced the creation of new original music. It may have led to fewer works as a result of fewer new artists entering the field, but it was also associated with an increase in output by those artists who chose, despite the lower returns, to devote their talents to making music. Given that file sharing undeniably promotes the broad dissemination of existing works, this conclusion suggests that file sharing is both fully consonant with copyright's constitutionally-delimited purposes and welfare enhancing."

"This way of thinking about search results is wrong. Recent studies suggest that search engines, rather than providing a neutral way to find information, may actually play a major role in shaping public opinion on political issues and candidates. Some research has even argued that search results can affect the outcomes of close elections. In a study aptly titled In Google We Trust participants heavily prioritized the first page of search results, and the order of the results on that page, and continued to do so even when researchers reversed the order of the actual results."

"As with any habitual behavior, you might reasonably expect that abstaining would lead to an improved mood and an overall sense of wellbeing. A new study goes a long way toward suggesting the benefits of cutting Facebook out of our lives altogether."

"Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated - or may not exist at all."

""This study shows that if this algorithm were in place earlier, some materials could have conceivably been discovered years in advance," Jain said."

"People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model. Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for "iPhone slow" spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time."

"Anonymised Facebook data on people's travels could be used to identify the spread of Covid-19 in locations where health officials are not yet aware of it, a new Australian study has found. Published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface on Wednesday, University of Melbourne researchers analysed anonymised population mobility data provided by Facebook as part of its Data for Good program to determine whether it could be a useful predictor in determining the spread of Covid outbreaks based on where people were travelling."

"An online self-help programme that helps people sleep better is more effective than face-to-face psychological therapy, a study involving over 7,000 NHS patients has found. Sleepio, a six-week digital treatment for insomnia, helped 56% of users beat the condition, whereas the success rate in NHS Improving access to psychological therapy (Iapt) services is 50%."

"The streaming video company's recommendation algorithm can sometimes send you on an hours-long video binge so captivating that you never notice the time passing. But according to a study from software nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, trusting the algorithm means you're actually more likely to see videos featuring sexualized content and false claims than personalized interests."

"While it's still a popular choice to allege that technology is putting human beings out of work, a study by Deloitte based on 140 years of data seems to prove otherwise. Automation, robotics and the simple fact that IT is faster, better connected and capable of massive amounts of analytics and storage means technology has often been held responsible for replacing the roles of people, but census data stretching back to 1871 begs to differ."

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."

"The artificial intelligence (AI) industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027, a new study warns. Big tech firms have scrambled to add AI-powered services since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year. They use far more power than conventional applications, making going online much more energy-intensive. However, the study also said AI's environmental impact could be less than feared if its current growth slowed. Many experts, including the report author, say such research is speculative as tech firms do not disclose enough data for an accurate prediction to be made."

"But it's not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth. They're encouraged to compare themselves to others and seek approval for the way they look, while reinforcing beauty standards that favor thinness and whiteness. They feel pressured to promote themselves as objects. There have been many studies establishing all this over about the last 10 years, including Facebook's own research into girls and Instagram - research that the company suppressed until exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression," Facebook's study noted. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.""

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."