All Ears: Always-On Listening Devices Could Soon Be Everywhere
July 13th, 2018Via: Wall Street Journal:
If every tree falling in every forest might soon be heard by an internet-connected microphone, what hope is there for our privacy?
Already when you’re sitting in a room with an iPhone, an Apple Watch and a smart assistant like Amazon Echo or Google Home, you’re surrounded by a dozen microphones. (Newer iPhones have four and the Echo has seven, while the smartwatch has just one, for now.)
Add in the latest smart wireless headphones—Apple’s expected next-generation AirPods or competing ones from Bose or Shure—along with talking microwave ovens and TVs from Samsung, LG and others, and anyone at home or in an open-plan office could soon be within earshot of hundreds of microphones. Most of them will be listening for a wake word like “Alexa,” “Hey Siri,” or “OK Google,” just as our phones and smart assistants do now.
Walmart Patents Surveillance Tool That Can Eavesdrop on Workers and Customers
July 12th, 2018Via: Engadget:
The audio surveillance system Walmart designed is composed of several sensors that can collect all kinds of audio data, including beeps and the rustling of paper bags. Any data it gathers can be used to assess an employee’s performance — for instance, the sounds items make when they’re placed inside a bag can tell the company how efficient someone is at bagging purchases. Customers’ voices can also indicate how long a line is and how quickly a cashier can get through all of them.
As BuzzFeed News points, though, the most invasive feature is the system’s ability to understand conversations and use them to judge an employee’s performance: “If however the performance metric is based on the content of the conversation (e.g., was a specific greeting used or script followed), the system can process the audio detected by the sound sensors 102 (e.g., using speech recognition) to determine the performance metric.” It could get chattier cashiers in trouble even if they’re customer favorites for being helpful and friendly.
Trash Piles Up in U.S. as China Closes Door to Recycling
July 12th, 2018Via: AFP:
Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.
But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can, or even its recycle bin.
For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5 percent — a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle.
US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020 — an impossibly short deadline.
“There is no single and frankly, probably not even a group of countries, that can take in the volume that China used to take,” warns Adina Renee Adler of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.
AI Startups and the ‘Wizard of Oz Technique’
July 11th, 2018Via: Guardian:
It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans.
“Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn’t scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on,” said Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadMe, who says he has come across a lot of “pseudo-AIs”.
“It’s essentially prototyping the AI with human beings,” he said.
This practice was brought to the fore this week in a Wall Street Journal article highlighting the hundreds of third-party app developers that Google allows to access people’s inboxes.
In the case of the San Jose-based company Edison Software, artificial intelligence engineers went through the personal email messages of hundreds of users – with their identities redacted – to improve a “smart replies” feature. The company did not mention that humans would view users’ emails in its privacy policy.
The third parties highlighted in the WSJ article are far from the first ones to do it. In 2008, Spinvox, a company that converted voicemails into text messages, was accused of using humans in overseas call centres rather than machines to do its work.
In 2016, Bloomberg highlighted the plight of the humans spending 12 hours a day pretending to be chatbots for calendar scheduling services such as X.ai and Clara. The job was so mind-numbing that human employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots.
Hear Stanley Kubrick Explain The 2001: A Space Odyssey Ending In A Rare, Unearthed Video
July 11th, 2018Via: Esquire:
I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try.
The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment.
Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.
YouTube Is Fighting Conspiracy Theories with ‘Authoritative’ Context and Outside Links
July 11th, 2018More than ever: https://duckduckgo.com/
Via: The Verge:
YouTube is adding “authoritative” context to search results about conspiracy-prone topics like the Moon landing and the Oklahoma City Bombing, as well as putting $25 million toward news outlets producing videos. Today, the company announced a new step in its Google News Initiative, a program it launched in March. The update is focused on reducing misinformation on YouTube, including the conspiracy theories that have flourished after events like the Parkland shooting.
This update includes new features for breaking news updates and long-standing conspiracy theories. YouTube is implementing a change it announced in March, annotating conspiracy-related pages with text from “trusted sources like Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.” And in the hours after a major news event, YouTube will supplement search results with links to news articles, reasoning that rigorous outlets often publish text before producing video. “It’s very easy to quickly produce and upload low-quality videos spreading misinformation around a developing news event,” said YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan, but harder to make an authoritative video about a developing story.
YouTube is also funding a number of partnerships. It’s establishing a working group that will provide input on how it handles news, and it’s providing money for “sustainable” video operations across 20 markets across the world, in addition to expanding an internal support team for publishers. (Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, is a member of the working group.) It’s previously invested money in digital literacy programs for teenagers, recruiting prominent YouTube creators to promote the cause.
U.S. Is Set to Become World’s Top Oil Producer, Government Says
July 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. government sees oil production further climbing next year even amid transportation logjams in the country’s most prolific shale play.
The Energy Information Administration sees U.S. crude output averaging 11.8 million barrels a day in 2019, up from its 11.76 million barrel a day estimate in the June outlook.
“In 2019, EIA forecasts that the United States will average nearly 12 million barrels of crude oil production per day,” said Linda Capuano, Administrator of the EIA. “If the forecast holds, that would make the U.S. the world’s leading producer of crude.”
Tesla Will Build Gigafactory in Shanghai to Serve Chinese Market
July 10th, 2018Via: Electrek:
Tesla has now confirmed the reports that came out of China this morning about a deal to allow the start of Gigafactory 3 construction in Shanghai.
The automaker confirmed the deal and said that it plans to start construction “in the near future” for the first cars to roll off the line in “2 years.”
Related: BMW Agrees to $4.7 Billion Contract with China’s CATL for Battery Cells
San Francisco: Where a Six-Figure Salary Is ‘Low Income’
July 9th, 2018Via: BBC:
A family getting by on $117,400 (£87,970) in San Francisco can now be considered ‘low income’, according to US government figures. How can that be the case?
That workers with six-figure salaries could be considered “poor” is something that might surprise many people.
Yet a recent report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development suggests that is the reality in three areas – San Francisco and nearby San Mateo and Marin Counties – where families like these may be eligible for housing assistance.
It set the figures after looking at salaries and housing costs in the area and while $117,400 for a family of four was “low income”, $73,300 (£54,900) was “very low income” – the highest figures anywhere in the US.
Two Children Died in Samoa After Receiving MMR Vaccinations
July 9th, 2018Via: New Zealand Herald:
Samoan health authorities have stopped all children’s vaccinations in the island nation after the deaths of two toddlers.
A full inquiry into the circumstances of the deaths has also been launched at the request of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi.
The situation comes after two children, both aged 1, died minutes after receiving an MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination at Safotu Hospital, in Savaii, on Friday.
…
Families of the youngsters told TV1 Samoa they had made formal complaints with local police and were calling for investigations into their children’s deaths.
The mother of one child told the station she asked that her son not get the vaccination after learning about the death of the little girl, which had occurred about two hours earlier at the same hospital.
It is alleged the nurse insisted that the vaccination go ahead and was given without consent.
University of Auckland vaccinologist Dr Helen Petousis-Harris said one death, let alone two, was extremely rare, and there had never been a death associated with the MMR vaccine in New Zealand.
