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Humans process thoughts at just 10 bits per second, according to a recent paper published by Caltech researchers. In contrast, a human's sensory organs gather data at a billion bits per second. So, if you ever feel overwhelmed by what is going on around you, it's only natural. The research paper, dubbed 'The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?' ponders the human neural substrate which limits thoughts to such a slow pace, and proposes new research to look into this 'bottleneck' now that it has been quantified.

" respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm.The respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm. But a day later, it's back, and this time, without the killswitch. Security researchers running honeypots have seen new infections by versions of the worm that can spread even when the iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com domain is live."

AI and machine learning, combined with the science of turning data into insightful information (aka data science), have become more important than ever in the "new normal" to guide innovation based on new market trends and consumer preferences This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title "How artificial intelligence helps firms stay relevant amid pandemic - Opinion - The Jakarta Post". Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2020/09/21/how-artificial-intelligence-helps-firms-stay-relevant-amid-pandemic.html. Download The Jakarta Post app for easier and faster news access: Android: http://bit.ly/tjp-android iOS: http://bit.ly/tjp-ios

"Eventually, we will reach a point of full saturation, a period in our evolution in which digital bits will outnumber atoms on Earth, a world "mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code," according to an article published in AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing."

"In some sense, GPT is like a glorified version of cut and paste, where everything that is cut goes through a paraphrasing/synonymy process before it is paste but together-and a lot of important stuff is sometimes lost along the way. When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between.. At least for now, it still takes a human to know which plausible bits actually belong together."

A cool bit of tech that should help educated young brits on coding and other things to help them in jobs later in life although this could put the younger people at an advantage due to the inequality between older students and younger ones

"One of the most mind-bending far future predictions you'll hear from some futurists is this: Eventually, the technology will exist to copy your brain (every bit of data that makes you, you) onto a computer. Technical details and exact predictions aside (the concept is still firmly science fiction) mind uploading makes for a fascinating and disturbing thought experiment. If you had the power to upload yourself, would you?"

"But ISPs in the USA and Thailand have been caught sabotaging STARTTLS, interrupting the negotiation between mail-servers to prevent the encryption bit from being turned on, leaving millions of peoples' email liable to snooping by crooks, governments, spies and others. "

"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."

"The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to "anonymize" the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver's annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section."

""The email has good spelling and grammar and my exact home address...when I say exact I mean, not the way my address is written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way I write my address. "My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat." She quickly realised it was a scam and did not click on the link."

"One great way to tell the difference is to ask AI recruiting companies what they use artificial intelligence, machine learning and/or deep learning for. Hopefully the hiring firm can what it's using the new technology for and not just that it is. If not it's time to dig a bit deeper."

"The chatbots - BabyQ and the Microsoft-created XiaoBing - were yanked from Chinese messaging app QQ, according to the Financial Times, after they started providing answers that weren't satisfactory to the glorious party.  According to FT, BabyQ would answer the question, "Do you love the Communist Party?" with "No." XiaoBing's transgressions were a bit more direct, declaring for some users "My China dream is to go to America" and answering other patriotic questions with "I'm having my period, wanna take a rest.""

"For many, the surge in social media use in recent years has been an awful contradiction - rather than making people more friendly, it has tended to cut them off, cause division and fuel anger and resentment, not sociability. But as Europe adjusts to the reality of self-isolation, there are signs social media can bring out the best in people, not just the boastful or argumentative bits many decry."

"Plus, programming can teach valuable life lessons. However, in its storied past, coding wrought destruction as well. Instances of a little bit of bad code caused disaster on a major level. The following are 10 of the worst programming mistakes in history."

"It's fast getting to the point where it feels unreasonable to solely blame the famous and the industries that promote them. These days, people are going to plastic surgeons wanting to resemble their own modified avatars from selfies, rather than celebrities. If you like, the fiction of Hollywood perfection has been democratised. Indeed, it's interesting how, even as "improved" celebrities are mocked, or, as with Pike, call it out themselves, the modification of our own images continues unhindered, save for the occasional "#nofilter" humblebrag. It's gone beyond old-school catfishing (pretending to be someone else) to the point where people are essentially deep-faking themselves. And it's all just a bit of fun. Until it isn't. The desire to look better is all too human but are we inexorably moving towards the moment when we lose our grip on what we actually look like?"

"Will Knight wrote. "Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey… . The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. "Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions…. What if one day it did something unexpected-crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why." "

"This might be a bit disappointing for you. But if you think about it, what would be a satisfying answer to the meaning of life, in the simulation or out of it? It seems difficult to think of a fully satisfying answer to a question that has been put on the most ornate pedestal of all questions. 'To love or to live' sound like something you'd read in a cheap self-help book. The Epicureans thought that the meaning of life was to seek modest pleasures. To me at least, that does not sound very satisfying."

"Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can't express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we're just not doing it right."

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."