Group items tagged

"Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock"

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"Engineer who created Facebook 'like' button swears off social media apps"

"The models work by dividing maps into what Google calls "supersegments" "

"I do want us all to be non-binary in how we think about the big issues, however. It was deeply saddening to see the abuse Malala Yousafzai got on social media last week because she is mates with a Tory. On Facebook she had endorsed a young woman who is standing for president of the Oxford Student Conservative Association. She said her friend was talented and this was not a personal reflection of her own political views."

"Chess has enjoyed a huge boom in internet play this year as in-person events have moved online and people stuck at home have sought new hobbies. But with that has come a significant new problem: a rise in the use of powerful chess calculators to cheat on a scale reminiscent of the scandals that have dogged cycling and athletics. One leading 'chess detective' said that the pandemic was "without doubt creating a crisis"."

"The gulf between how well facial recognition performs in academic settings vs. real world applications is vast."

"Raji says her investigation into the data has made her gravely concerned about deep-learning-based facial recognition. "It's so much more dangerous," she says. "The data requirement forces you to collect incredibly sensitive information about, at minimum, tens of thousands of people. It forces you to violate their privacy. That in itself is a basis of harm. And then we're hoarding all this information that you can't control to build something that likely will function in ways you can't even predict. That's really the nature of where we're at.""

"y memory and recall are alarmingly good - borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I'd be describing something mid-sentence and I'd just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it. But my attention span - and my posture, eyes and sleep - are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline - 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens."

"But the movement to legally protect leisure time is gaining ground. The European parliament voted overwhelmingly last month in favour of a resolution calling on the European commission to propose a law allowing those who work digitally to disconnect outside their working hours."

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"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. "

"Robots have been slow to appear because each one requires a rare confluence of market, task, technology, and innovation. (And luck. I only described some of the things that nearly killed Roomba.) But as technology advances and costs decline, the toolbox for robot designers constantly expands. Thus, more types of robots will cross the threshold of economic viability. Still, we can expect one constant. Each new, successful robot will represent a minimum-the simplest, lowest-cost solution to a problem people want solved. The growing set of tools that let us attack ever more interesting problems make this an exciting time to practice robotics."

"Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what's-next-what's-next of this world through our peepers."

"The business, political and geopolitical mischief possible with manipulated data, audio or video is almost limitless; think manufactured video of Jeff Bezos-whose personal life has already apparently been the target of sophisticated adversaries and extortion plots-using a racial slur; grainy fake video or audio of Joe Biden admitting to assaulting Tara Reade; grainy video of Trump saying he plans to nuke Iran in one hour; or even Anthony Fauci saying that he's doctoring the Covid death tolls. "

"Life went on - with limited disruption, if not quite as normal. After all, I have enough space, equipment and internet connectivity to work comfortably from home. In some ways, life has become more efficient. Less jet lag. More sanity."

"Company emails that she provided to NPR show her employer believed the tracking software would improve the team's productivity and efficiency while everyone was working from home."

"While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.""