Telepresence at workplaces ... How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life Intercept (Brian C). I saw a startup in this area some years back with bleeding-edge tech. It made me really leery. Just the way they conceptualized the problem struck me as too easy to generate false positives (as in the way they look for points on the face to anchor measurements could be distorted by lighting. That’s confirmed more recently by the way mere makeup can defeat facial recognition systems)
Let the fun begin ... Google Blog: “Over the last several years, fact checking has come into its own. Led by organizations like the International Fact-Checking Network, rigorous fact checks are now conducted by more than 100 active sites, according to the Duke University Reporter’s Lab. They collectively produce many thousands of fact-checks a year, examining claims around urban legends, politics, health, and the media itself. In the seven years since we started labeling types of articles in Google News (e.g., In-Depth, Opinion, Wikipedia), we’ve heard that many readers enjoy having easy access to a diverse range of content
types. Earlier this year, we added a “Local Source” Tag to highlight local coverage of major stories. Today, we’re adding another new tag, “Fact check,” to help readers find fact
checking in large news stories. You’ll see the tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather iOS and Android apps, starting with the U.S. and the U.K…”
"One of the ironies, I think, of the
Internet has been the degree to which it's bringing us unprecedented knowledge,
but everything on the Internet looks like it might be true. And so in this
political season, we’ve seen just — you just say stuff. And so everything
suddenly becomes contested. That I do not think is good for our
democracy." — President Barack Obama at the White House
Frontiers Conference
The most underreported conflict in the world right now ...
In Jerome K. Jerome's novel Three Men on the Bummel
,
which I recommend quite highly as a classic of Victorian humor by the
way, the narrator explains why so many people find journalism an
attractive profession:Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children, and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. We play it when babies, we play it when boys and girls, we play it when men and women, we play it as, lean and slippered, we totter towards the grave. It never palls upon, it never wearies us. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of the other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and the cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep. He instructs and improves them.
Ian Hislop: satirist the British establishment loves to hate Financial Times
#RIPJournalism: Trust falls, Gallup 32%, Pew 18%, Facebook 12%, press group 6% Washington Examiner (Phil U). Of course, it’s Trump’s fault.
Naked Capitalism: Getting Through the Stupids to the Important
How Naked Capitalism is the antidote to media short-termism that otherwise allows powerful interests to control information flows.
George Orwell never dreamed of advertising as invasive as Yahoo’s proposal ars technica (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/yahoo-wants-to-patent-billboards-that-spy-on-the-public-for-targeted-ads/)
AI’s blind spot: garbage in, garbage out Boing Boing
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan says some Australians have serious questions to answer as a result of the leaked Panama papers Panama papers raised serious questions
Wells Fargo’s new CEO previously denied that the bank’s sales culture had any problems Boing
Boing
Panama hires PR firm amid ongoing Panama papers fallout ...
Boing
Panama hires PR firm amid ongoing Panama papers fallout ...
Tax commissioner Chris Jordan says some Australians have serious questions to answer as a result of the leaked Panama papers Panama papers raised serious questions
Millennials Are Not Lazier Than Boomers RealClearScience (Phil U). S don’t see how anyone can think that. One, young people are always more energetic than older people. Two, everything is massively more time compressed than 30 years ago. Three, people are expected to work all the time unless they are in a blue collar job. Four, juggling multiple jobs is extra work even if it doesn’t show up in pay and way many more young people have to do that than older people did (except in chronically marginal economies like Maine).What a Pizza Delivery Driver Sees Atlantic (resilc). One of our former tech people was a top Pizza Hut delivery person and got a scholarship. Her nickname was Krash. Derived from the opening sequence in Snow Crash, I assume.
British Banks Keep Cyber Attacks Under Wraps to Protect Image
