from Seth’s Blog The flawed theory is that A+ students become good leaders. There’s no reason to think that this should be true. Doing well on tests, paying attention to what’s being asked, being diligent in short-term error correction–these are three hallmarks of someone who is good at school. None of these are important once […]
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Living in Dark Mode
from NYTs THE LIGHTS IN MY ROOM ARE OFF, and the autumn air is trickling in through the window. It is my favorite season in Hong Kong, finally cool enough to get by without air-conditioning. I’m listening to meditation music a friend sent me to ease my persistent insomnia. My partner is staying up late, […]
Spot the Surveillance: A VR Experience for Keeping an Eye on Big Brother
from EFF Spot the Surveillance is a virtual reality (VR) experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies that police may deploy in communities. The user is placed in a 360-degree scene in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, where a young resident is in the middle of a police encounter. […]
Nothing Lasts Forever— Not Even On The Internet.
from NYTs Social media is broken. It has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process. Many of us just want to get away from it, but we can’t imagine a world without it. Though we talk about reforming and regulating it, “fixing” it, those of us who grew up […]
Google Fires Four Employees At Center Of Worker Organization Efforts
from ars technica Tensions between Google parent company Alphabet and its workers are again on the rise, as four employees at the forefront of an organization movement within Google have been fired. The firings came Monday in the wake of an employee rally at Google’s San Francisco office that took place last Friday. The rally […]
Meet the Leftish Economist With a New Story About Capitalism
from NYTs Mariana Mazzucato was freezing. Outside, it was a humid late-September day in Manhattan, but inside — in a Columbia University conference space full of scientists, academics and businesspeople advising the United Nations on sustainability — the air conditioning was on full blast. For a room full of experts discussing the world’s most urgent […]
How Hacking Works
from xkcd More here.
Researchers Want Guardrails to Help Prevent Bias in AI
from Wired Artificial intelligence has given us algorithms capable of recognizing faces, diagnosing disease, and of course, crushing computer games. But even the smartest algorithms can sometimes behave in unexpected and unwanted ways—for example, picking up gender bias from the text or images they are fed. A new framework for building AI programs suggests a […]
The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven by Hope
from The Atlantic For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests would end soon. They’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October […]
Building a World Where Data Privacy Exists Online
from NYTs Data is valuable — something that companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon realized far earlier than most consumers did. But computer scientists have been working on alternative models, even as the public has grown weary of having their data used and abused. Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and […]
The Google Tax
from Seth’s Blog Actually, there are two. The first is the tax we each pay so that companies can bid against each other to buy traffic from Google. Because their revenue model is (cleverly) built on both direct marketing and an auction, they are able to keep a significant portion of the margin from many […]
Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study Says Maybe Not
from Wired Here’s how you test your intracranial pressure in space. First, you collect baseline samples of your blood, saliva, and urine, and take ultrasound images of the vessels in your heart, neck, head, and eyes, lining up the scanning device on black dots tattooed on your body before you left Earth. Then, you clamber […]
China’s TikTok Blazes New Ground. That Could Doom It.
from NYTs American leaders have effectively thrown Huawei and a handful of Chinese surveillance technology companies out of the country, warning darkly of the national security and privacy threats of installing Made-in-China products into sensitive parts of the nation’s electronic infrastructure. Now they have cast their fearful gaze on a new Chinese target: the dancing […]
Whatsapp ‘Hack’ Is Serious Rights Violation, Say Alleged Victims
from The Guardian More than a dozen pro-democracy activists, journalists and academics have spoken out after WhatsApp privately warned them they had allegedly been the victims of cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones. The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have […]
Canadian-Made ‘Invisibility Shield’ Could Hide People, Spacecraft
from CTV News It’s more likely to camouflage military troops than boy wizards, but a new Canadian prototype is perhaps the technology that comes closest to mimicking the fictional Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp’s invisibility shield, officially dubbed “Quantum Stealth,” is light-bending material that could be used to obscure objects of varying sizes. […]