Bob Carr is in professor mode. Tall and trim with focused eyes above the obligatory mask, he walks over with three books: two of them earmarked with passages underlined, a third for me. Pen and paper are close to hand, but for more than two hours, it will be me taking notes as the journalist turned career politician ruminates on philosophy, history, literature and the varied attributes of today’s leaders.
After the awkward dance that first encounters bring in a post-handshake world, we settle into District Brasserie in central Sydney. Carr seems stiff as his left arm is only recently out of a sling after a rotator cuff injury, but it is an inconvenience rather than a pain. He warms quickly to conversation. He admits the previous night’s attempt at a podcast about James Joyce’s Ulysses had been abandoned because of iPad failure and approves of my choice of gnocchi before quizzing the waiter about the market fish
The professor is in: Bob Carr on life, the universe, everything
Warren Mundine: I was Carr-jacked by Labor - Kooriweb.org
Chris Minns had trip funded by exiled Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo
Labor leader Chris Minns took a five-day trip to Hong Kong and China that was funded by a Chinese billionaire exiled from Australia as an agent of Chinese influence.
Study – Social media echo chambers spread vaccine misinformation
Source: Bjarke Mønsted et al, Characterizing polarization in online vaccine discourse—A large-scale study, PLOS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263746 “Vaccine hesitancy is currently recognized by the WHO as a major threat to global health.
Recently, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in the role of social media in the propagation of false information and fringe narratives regarding vaccination. Using a sample of approximately 60 billion tweets, we conduct a large-scale analysis of the vaccine discourse on Twitter. We use methods from deep learning and transfer learning to estimate the vaccine sentiments expressed in tweets, then categorize individual-level user attitude towards vaccines.
Drawing on an interaction graph representing mutual interactions between users, we analyze the interplay between vaccine stances, interaction network, and the information sources shared by users in vaccine-related contexts. We find that strongly anti-vaccine users frequently share content from sources of a commercial nature; typically sources which sell alternative health products for profit. An interesting aspect of this finding is that concerns regarding commercial conflicts of interests are often cited as one of the major factors in vaccine hesitancy.
Further, we show that the debate is highly polarized, in the sense that users with similar stances on vaccination interact preferentially with one another. Extending this insight, we provide evidence of an epistemic echo chamber effect, where users are exposed to highly dissimilar sources of vaccine information, depending the vaccination stance of their contacts. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding and addressing vaccine mis- and dis-information in the context in which they are disseminated in social networks.”
Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it’s seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement
Washington Post via MSN: “The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,” according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.
Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor “gig economy” workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar.
The 55-page “pitch deck,” the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be.
The company said that its “index of faces” has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month…”
