Science & Technology News – Page 320

Botnet, Hot Issues, Intelligence, Internet, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

Are bots entitled to free speech?

May 27, 2018

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT BOTS. How will the courts address free-expression rights for artificially intelligent communicators? This conversation is coming, and it may push the Supreme Court to do something it has avoided: define who is and is not a journalist.

For nearly half a century, the US legal system has lived a double life. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has held that journalists do not have greater or lesser rights than other citizens (see Branzburg v. Hayes). On the other, the lower courts have generally ignored or let stand numerous laws or privileges that provide journalists special protections. These include the qualified First Amendment–based reporter’s privilege in some federal jurisdictions and fee waivers in FOI statutes.

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Architecture, China, City Planning, Science & Technology News, Tiny House

Pipe dreams: can ‘nano apartments’ solve Hong Kong’s housing crisis?

May 27, 2018

The city with the world’s tiniest and costliest living spaces may soon convert drainpipes into homes. The aim is to get young people on the property ladder – but how small is too small?

“Both indoors and out, life in Hong Kong can feel pretty suffocating at times,” says 39-year-old finance worker Wai Li, who rents a 200 sq ft (19 sq m) “nano flat” by herself in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighbourhood. Li’s living area is little more than the size of two standard Hong Kong parking spaces.

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Automation, Big Problems, Business, City Planning, Employment, Science & Technology News

The coming jobs apocalypse

May 27, 2018

Congress and the Trump administration have yet to create a coherent policy response to a widely forecast social and economic tsunami resulting from automation, including the potential for decades of flat wages and joblessness. But cities and regions are starting to act on their own.

What’s happening: In Indianapolis, about 338,000 people are at high risk of automation taking their jobs, according to a new report. In Phoenix, the number is 650,000. In both cases, that’s 35% of the workforce. In northeastern Ohio, about 40,000 workers are at high risk.

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Analysis, Culture, Human Behavior, Life Skills, Science & Technology News

These professions attract the highest number of psychopaths

May 23, 2018

Psychopaths are difficult to spot most of the time. They’re not the “Jack the Ripper” caricatures you see in films or read about in books. Often, psychopaths appear normal, which makes them hard to identify.

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, someone with a psychopathic personality type is defined as having an inflated, grandiose sense of themself, and a knack for manipulating other people. But a diagnosis is rarely simple.

One thing psychopaths tend to have in common is the careers they go for. For example, you’re likely to find a lot of them in leadership positions because of their ruthlessness, charisma, and fearlessness. They’re very good at making snap decisions, but not so good at the empathetic professions like nursing or therapy.

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Big Data, Economy, Employment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

This is America’s hottest job

May 20, 2018

Uber, Airbnb managers say ‘I’m hiring’ on LinkedIn profiles.

Job postings up 75 percent in past three years on Indeed.com.

Murray Webb had been a lackluster student more interested in sports than schoolwork while attending a small Virginia college. Then he transferred to Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in applied statistics and landed four job offers upon graduation. Webb, 33, now earns $160,000 a year targeting health-care customers for hospitals and says he is approached weekly by companies and recruiters seeking data scientists.

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Business, Economy, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News, Startup

America’s disappearing IPOs

May 9, 2018

What happened to all the IPOs?

It wasn’t so long ago that the market for initial public offerings — in which a promising and often young private company first allows public investors to buy its stock, often as a way to raise money and invest in the future — was booming. In the two decades before 2000, America was averaging some 300 IPOs a year. In fact, volume was considerably higher than that from 1990 to 2000, reaching 706 in 1996, for example.

Then they fell off a cliff. Last year, there were a mere 147. What happened?

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Amazon.com, China, Google, Home Technology, Science & Technology News

SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant

May 8, 2018

As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.

While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.

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Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Economy, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

The economics of artificial intelligence

May 6, 2018

Rotman School of Management professor Ajay Agrawal explains how AI changes the cost of prediction and what this means for business.

With so many perspectives on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) flooding the business press, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find one that’s truly original. So when strategy professor Ajay Agrawal shared his brilliantly simple view on AI, we stood up and took notice. Agrawal, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and works with AI start-ups at the Creative Destruction Lab (which he founded), posits that AI serves a single, but potentially transformative, economic purpose: it significantly lowers the cost of prediction.

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Amazon.com, Children, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Amazon made an Echo Dot for kids, and it costs $30 more than the original

May 3, 2018

Those with an Amazon Echo device in their homes have likely already exposed their children to Alexa. Now, Amazon wants to give kids the opportunity to turn Alexa into their friend with the new Echo Dot Kids Edition. The hockey puck-like smart speaker doesn’t look too different from the original Dot, but it comes with new “Amazon FreeTime” content that gives kids new ways to interact with Alexa and parents more control over those interactions.

New parental controls and FreeTime Unlimited subscription coming soon, too.

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Bill Gates, Biotech, Genes, Genetics, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Gene editing for good

May 1, 2018

How CRISPR could transform global development.

Today, more people are living healthy, productive lives than ever before. This good news may come as a surprise, but there is plenty of evidence for it. Since the early 1990s, global child mortality has been cut in half. There have been massive reductions in cases of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. The incidence of polio has decreased by 99 percent, bringing the world to the verge of eradicating a major infectious disease, a feat humanity has accomplished only once before, with smallpox. The proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day, has fallen from 35 percent to about 11 percent.

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government, Human Behavior, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

How the world’s first loneliness minister will tackle the sad reality of modern life

April 30, 2018

A woman holds the report of the Jo Cox Commission on December 15, 2017 in Batley, England. The report has highlighted that the UK should appoint a “minister for loneliness.”

Tracey Crouch knows what it’s like to feel frighteningly alone. After giving birth to her first child, Freddie, in 2016, the British lawmaker says that despite having a “network of friends, family and a wonderful partner,” she began feeling cut off from the world. It wasn’t a new sensation; Crouch says she also suffered from depression six years earlier, when she first became a member of parliament. It felt like she was “in a very dark place, a very lonely place” she recalls.

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Big Problems, Future, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

The next great workplace challenge: 100-year careers

April 30, 2018

Scientists expect people to live routinely to 100 in the coming decades, and as long as 150. Which also suggests a much longer working life lasting well into the 70s, 80s, and even 100, according to researchers with Pearson and Oxford University.

Quick take: Thinkers of various types are absorbed in navigating the age of automation and flat wages, but their challenge will be complicated by something few have considered — a much-extended bulge of older workers.

Continue reading… “The next great workplace challenge: 100-year careers”