Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Three-Dimensional Computer Simulations Have Solved The Mystery Of Why Doomed Stars Explode"

"(And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster's five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster's ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That's exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that's why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn't be summarily dismissed. "

"That's why it was so important that the new 5G mobile protocol be designed to foil IMSI catchers, and why the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP (the body standardizing 5G) updated the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) to resist IMSI catching techniques."

"A natural alternative to symbolic AI came to prominence: Instead of modeling high-level reasoning processes, why not instead model the brain? After all, brains are the only things that we know for certain can produce intelligent behavior. why not start with them?"

"The greatest propaganda machine in history. Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.""

"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." "

"Universities don't merely face essays or assignments entirely generated by algorithms: they must also adjudicate a myriad of more subtle problems. For instance, AI-powered word processors habitually suggest alternatives to our ungrammatical phrases. But if software can algorithmically rewrite a student's sentence, why shouldn't it do the same with a paragraph - and if a paragraph, why not a page? At what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?"

"Tristan Harris presents on 1) why humans as a species are vulnerable to technology, 2) why it's so hard to solve the issues of social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and exponential tech, and 3) what it will take to come together to avoid these existential threats."

SAN FRANCISCO - New York State's top prosecutor is investigating why American cellphone carriers have yet to embrace antitheft software on Samsung smartphones, raising questions about possible coordination among the biggest carriers.

"This video is about stuff: light bulbs, printers, phones and why they aren't better"

"Censorship, or rather his stance against it, is a key reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn last year. His social media company's lawsuit against an anti-hate speech group refers to censorship, or variations on the word, eight times. But for critics of his complaint against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), it is Musk who is doing the censoring. "The intent is definitely to get the centre to shut up. That's the whole point of this suit, to prevent the centre from exercising any speech that Musk doesn't like," says Prof Brian Quinn from Boston College law school."

"Robot dogs have unnerved and angered the public. So why is this artist teaching them to paint?"

"'Right to be forgotten' laws, giving users - rather than services such as Facebook - control of personal data will save billions of euros and thickets of red tape. So why is Britain resisting?"

"Ellie may be a computer simulation, but she's incredibly perceptive. By reading the body language and vocal inflections of real live humans, she can engage in surprisingly meaningful exchanges, and even evoke emotional openness from her conversation partners. Her creators believe her receptivity to human emotional cues could revolutionize the field of mental health. Watching Ellie in action, it's not hard to see why."

"Why has Bitcoin become so popular? One possible explanation is that exploding interest in Bitcoin over the past several days is being driven by economic uncertainty in Europe. Fearful of an earlier proposed European Union plan to partially fund a Cypriot bailout by imposing new taxes on Cypriots' bank deposits, goes the theory, some Cypriots (and Spaniards, for similar reasons) flocked to Bitcoin to attempt an escape from the clutches of potential taxes."

"There's an increasingly popular solution to this problem: why not let an intelligent algorithm make hiring decisions for you? Surely, the thinking goes, a computer is more able to be impartial than a person, and can simply look at the relevant data vectors to select the most qualified people from a heap of applications, removing human bias and making the process more efficient to boot."