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"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

"The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives."

"A new artificial intelligence (AI) program recreated the periodic table of elements in just a few hours. It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form."

"FROM THE BOING BOING SHOP   FOLLOW US Twitter / Facebook / RSS Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong."

"The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story. There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms."

"The algorithm behind what3words took six months to write. Sheldrick worked on it with two friends he had grown up with. Mohan Ganesalingham, a maths fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Jack Waley-Cohen, a full-time quiz obsessive and question-setter for Only Connect. After the initial mapping was complete, they incorporated an error-correction algorithm, which places similar-sounding combinations a very long way apart."

"Anouk van Maris, a robot cognition specialist who is researching ethical human-robot interaction, has found that comfort levels with robots vary greatly depending on location and culture. "It depends on what you expect from it. Some people love it, others want to run away as soon as it starts moving," she says. "The advantage of a robot that looks human-like is that people feel more comfortable with it being close to them, and it is easier to communicate with it. The big disadvantage is that you expect it to be able to do human things and it often can't.""

"The groundbreaking artificial intelligence system, developed by the AI-outfit DeepMind with Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust and University College London, was capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists."

"But, for a growing number of users - and mental health experts - the very positivity of Instagram is precisely the problem. The site encourages its users to present an upbeat, attractive image that others may find at best misleading and at worse harmful. If Facebook demonstrates that everyone is boring and Twitter proves that everyone is awful, Instagram makes you worry that everyone is perfect - except you."

"Customers will be able to use a "Smile to Pay" facial recognition system at the tech-heavy, health-focused concept store, part of a drive by Yum China Holdings Inc to lure a younger generation of consumers. "

"Based on data from over 17,000 teenagers, the study "casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.""

"Following backlash, the company said it removed the alarm function from the smartwatch, but reports maintain the employees are still being required to wear the device so their location can be tracked."

"According to tests performed by Wang Yue at Zhihu, the Huawei P30 Pro isn't just enhancing the image information the user captures but actually placing pre-existing imagery of the moon into the photo."

""While surveillance technology may threaten the privacy of us all, surveillance efforts have historically been used to intimidate and oppress certain communities and groups more than others, including those that are defined by a common race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, income level, sexual orientation, or political perspective.""

"showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera systems. They theorize that the could just print the patch on a t-shirt and get the same result."

"Such service workers are, according to Hochschild, practising emotional labour. We have long embraced the classist trope "the customer is always right", an ethos that belittles the agency, esteem and principles of many."

""The problem," Leveson wrote in a book, "is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.""

"Everything around us will be altered by autonomous vehicles-our roads, our warehouses and even our definition of what a car can be. Say goodbye to four wheels and a running board; the cars of the future will barely resemble the vehicles choking our cities today."

"Robots, artificial intelligence and smart speakers will ease the burden on doctors and give them more time with patients, according to an NHS report on the pending technological "revolution" in healthcare. Developments in the ability to sequence individuals' genomes - the entirety of their genetic data - will also spur on advances, according to the review published on Monday."