"an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 30 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to single out infected individuals or maintain quarantines. Many of these efforts, in turn, undermine personal privacy."
"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%."
"Creating an algorithm that discriminates or shows bias isn't as hard as it might seem, however. As a first-year graduate student, my advisor asked me to create a machine-learning algorithm to analyze a survey sent to United States physics instructors about teaching computer programming in their courses."
"Two years after admitting under political pressure that Facebook must do more to prevent disinformation campaigns on its platform, founder Mark Zuckerberg told Fox News on Thursday that the company should step away from regulating online speech."
"That's where the real disruption comes in. If you thought globalization was fun for manufacturing, buckle up. Remote work is about to globalize a bunch of service jobs as well."
"Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company's artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix."
"Facebook plans to flag any attempt by the Trump campaign to declare a premature victory in the presidential race on the platform, the company announced on Thursday."
"This can make the technology easier to use for seniors who aren't comfortable with other forms of electronic payment, since they wouldn't have to lift a finger. As for the rest of us, this also means an end to standing in line to get off the bus while someone - often me - fumbles around for exact change."
"Recent studies concluded that the smoothness of a tablet screen leads to an alteration of handwriting features, whereby the impact on graphomotor execution varies according to the level of the writer's handwriting skills"
"As part of her undergraduate research, Alice Xue studied whether a machine could pass a Visual Turing Test by producing images that people cannot tell were made by a machine. Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time."
"Soon, Reddit will be overrun by bots. There are many of them here already, but it's nothing like what we are about to see. Reddit is about to become a battleground. A test site for a new age of social media. Perhaps even civilization. Things are going to get weird."
"Facebook will ban any groups, pages or Instagram accounts that "represent" QAnon, the company announced Tuesday, in a sharp escalation of its attempt to crack down on the antisemitic conspiracy movement that has thrived on its platform."
"Welcome, real human
A troll is a fake social media account, often created to spread misleading information.
Each of the following 8 profiles include a brief selection of posts from a single social media account. You decide if each is an authentic account or a professional troll. After each profile, you'll review the signs that can help you determine if it's a troll or not."
"Some ideas include building mechanisms into devices or platforms that cause them to shut down automatically after two hours, or nudges that make it more difficult to keep spending money in an app. The problem is that tech companies are ruled by a profit model built on capturing more of our attention to sell to advertisers. Designing platforms so they limit the amount of time we spend on social media runs counter to this model."
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