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"Participants used an app on their phones to record 30-second intervals of themselves reading a piece of text, describing a positive experience, then describing a negative experience. Doctors also took recordings from a control group of 25 patients who were either healthy or getting non-heart-related tests. The doctors found 13 different voice characteristics associated with coronary artery disease. Most notably, the biggest differences between heart patients and non-heart patients' voices occurred when they talked about a negative experience."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is "experimenting" with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now."

"Whereas most machine learning algorithms can't hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in "neuroplasticity." That is, as it goes about its work-say, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robot-it can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly."

"If true, this would be a big deal. But, said OpenAI, "due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.""

"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. "

"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."

""The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter," the social network said on Monday morning. A Facebook spokesperson said similarly: "No one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere, and we don't want it on Instagram." But the statements bore little relation to the experience of the company's users. On Instagram, where thousands left comments on the pages of Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, supportive users who tried to flag abuse to the platform were surprised by the response."

"The world's biggest social networks say racism isn't welcome on their platforms, but a combination of poor enforcement and weak rules have allowed hate to flourish."

"In Skinner's studies, lab rats were subjected alternately to electric shocks and treats to achieve a change in response. On social media, he says, we experience something similar. "I believe I see that people who are subject to operant conditioning online, meaning subjected to pleasant or unpleasant experiences." Approval, disapproval or being ignored, such techniques can be manipulated online as part of what is euphemistically called "engagement" and the creation of addictive patterns for individuals and then - by proxy - eventually whole societies."

""We may not take action on and cannot respond to each report in the experiment, but your input will help us identify trends so that we can improve the speed and scale of our broader misinformation work." "

"As smart as they are, doctors can't compete with the volume of knowledge that a robot can retain. In an effort to join the best of both worlds - human experience with robotic data - a number of companies are developing telemedicine robots that not only allow doctors to reach out to patients miles or continents away, but can offer immediate information and advice that draws from volumes of medical research and case studies. In January the FDA approved the telepresence platform RP-Vita, developed by iRobot and InTouch Health. Now seven hospitals across North America have enlisted the services of RP-Vita, bringing us one step closer to robotics-augmented healthcare."

"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."

"When people connected to the hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to sign up to included a "Herod clause" promising free Wi-Fi but only if "the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity". Six people signed up. F-Secure, the security firm that sponsored the experiment, has confirmed that it won't be enforcing the clause."

"Schools in the UK have experimented with fingerprinting pupils then using that data for tasks including library books and lunch payments. However, the European Commission has questioned the practice, including whether schools can make it compulsory and whether parents can challenge it in court."

"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."

"Last month, Parsley presented Depict, a crowd-sourced image description tool that could change the experience of the browsing the web for the blind and visually impaired. The tool works in two parts-a browser extension for blind users that provides user-created descriptions of images around the Internet, and a website for sighted users to provide those requested descriptions."

"The initial project will pursue a new, open royalty-free video codec specification and open-source implementation based on the contributions of members, along with binding specifications for media format, content encryption and adaptive streaming, thereby creating opportunities for next-generation media experiences."