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"Bitcoin mining - the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms - is a deeply energy-intensive process. "Mining" bitcoin involves solving complex math problems in order to create new bitcoins. Miners are rewarded in bitcoin. Earlier in bitcoin's relatively short history - the currency was created in 2009 - one could mine bitcoin on an average computer. But the way bitcoin mining has been set up by its creator (or creators - no one really knows for sure who created it) is that there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined: 21m. The more bitcoin that is mined, the harder the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin become."

""I consider 'bias' a euphemism," says Brandeis Marshall, PhD, data scientist and CEO of DataedX, an edtech and data science firm. "The words that are used are varied: There's fairness, there's responsibility, there's algorithmic bias, there's a number of terms… but really, it's dancing around the real topic… A dataset is inherently entrenched in systemic racism and sexism.""

"Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube's recommendation system, the feature that promotes videos for you to watch on the homepage or in the "Up Next" column to the right of whatever you're watching. "We were recommended constantly," he tells me. YouTube's algorithms, he says, figured out that "people getting into flat earth apparently go down this rabbit hole, and so we're just gonna keep recommending.""

"To what extent do the decisions of these types of algorithms reflect the conscious or unconscious biases of their creators?"

"Universities don't merely face essays or assignments entirely generated by algorithms: they must also adjudicate a myriad of more subtle problems. For instance, AI-powered word processors habitually suggest alternatives to our ungrammatical phrases. But if software can algorithmically rewrite a student's sentence, why shouldn't it do the same with a paragraph - and if a paragraph, why not a page? At what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?"

"WHEN 14-YEAR-OLD MOLLY Russell died in 2017, her cell phone contained graphic images of self-harm, an email roundup of "depression pins you might like," and advice on concealing mental illness from loved ones. Investigators initially ruled the British teen's death a suicide. But almost five years later, a British coroner's court has reversed the findings. Now, they claim that Russell died "from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content"-and the algorithms themselves are on notice."

"To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm - a set of mathematical rules - to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge. For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money. One of the algorithm's developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had "too much empathy" compared to computer generated pricing."

"computer programs can accelerate discovery in the sciences faster than scientists can, if the computer is trained to behave like one"

"For now, however, Hammond tries to reassure journalists that he's not trying to kick them when they're down. He tells a story about a party he attended with his wife, who's the marketing director at Chicago's fabled Second City improv club. He found himself in conversation with a well-known local theater critic, who asked about Hammond's business. As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you're going to replace writers with robots? "I just looked at him," Hammond recalls, "and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That's the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.""

"Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."

The ensuing controversy has sparked renewed debates about the ways in which algorithms can perpetuate biases, yielding unintended and often offensive results.

"Amazon's algorithms encourage customers pay more than they need to for popular products and appear to give more prominence to items that benefit the retail giant, according to an investigation by ProPublica. The investigation looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were chosen to appear in the highly-prized "buy box" that pops up first as a suggested purchase. "

"How can you sort the books quickly? Chand John shows how, shedding light on how algorithms help librarians and search engines speedily sort information."

"This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions."

"Not everything is so straightforward in Google land, as Google's chat protocols Hangouts and Talk, suffered a privacy issue on the 26 September that saw instant messages routed to unintended recipients."

"Having a site that is friendly to mobile browsers on smartphones and tablets will be key from Tuesday as Google rolls out a new mobile-focused algorithm. The update to the way Google ranks search results will take into account how mobile-friendly a website is. This means companies without a good mobile website will suffer, as searchers on mobile will see sites with good mobile experiences ranked higher than those with no mobile or poor mobile sites."

"What you may not realize, though, is that machine learning is already all around you, and it can exert a surprising degree of influence over your life. Don't believe me? You might be surprised."

"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"With all the information together, they created a prediction model which can guess with 80% accuracy whether or not that user will go on to be banned from just their first five posts. "