Category: Uncategorized

Artificial intelligences continue to exhibit the same biases and prejudices as humans because they are trained on what we create, but there are ways we can improve the situation

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Klarna is in talks to raise fresh funds at a ~$15B valuation, down from its $45.6B valuation in June 2021; source: a deal could yield at least $500M  —  The SoftBank-backed, buy-now-pay-later startup is discussing raising cash at a valuation around $15 billion, down from 2021’s near $46 billion valuation

In Outerloop’s new game, the South Asian hero battles exes and cooks with her parents. It’s a big step toward creating more games for non-white audiences.

Democrats are pumping the brakes on an ambitious Senate bill over long-shot concerns about content moderation.

The hard times could be a harbinger for everyone else.

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Boston-based remote notarization startup Notarize has laid off 110 of ~440 employees, or 25% of its workforce; Notarize was valued at $760M in March 2021  —  Notarize, a startup that offers remote online notarization services, has let go of 110 people – or 25% of its workforce.

Reuters: Lyft reaches a $25M settlement to resolve shareholder claims that it concealed safety problems, including sexual assault by drivers, before its IPO in 2019  —  Lyft Inc (LYFT.O) has reached a $25 million settlement to resolve shareholder claims that the ride-hailing company concealed safety problems …

A new hack called Hertzbleed can read snippets of data from computer chips remotely and could leave cryptography algorithms vulnerable to attack

El Salvador has invested heavily in bitcoin and related infrastructure in a bold plan to build its economy around the cryptocurrency, but now its value has plummeted

In the popular board game “Puerto Rico,” players are placed in the role of colonial governors. Their task, while growing crops on plantations, is to earn points by shipping goods to Europe and owning buildings — the violent project of territorial expansion reduced to a tabletop game for three-to-five players. Such games, influenced by a […]

Sponsor content from EY-Parthenon.

The economic downturn of 2008-09 has often been described as a financial-sector crisis, featuring failing banks. But it was much more than that. Many people with stagnant or dropping incomes, having borrowed to sustain their standard of living, found themselves deep in debt when the economy sagged and joblessness increased. In turn, those economic problems […]

Many of us easily recognize emotions expressed in others’ faces. A smile may mean happiness, while a frown may indicate anger. Autistic people often have a more difficult time with this task. It’s unclear why. But new research, published June 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds light on the inner workings of the brain […]

Create a calculus that helps your team weigh and align on conflicting objectives.

Prioritize, build trust, simplify, and prepare.

Researchers say that the rising number of space launches around the world will warm parts of the atmosphere and thin the ozone layer.

Here’s how to cast correctly—it’s never been easier.

This week on Gadget Lab, we reckon with streaming’s growing pains and think ahead to what watching TV will be like in five or 10 years.

Matt Burgess / Wired: In occupied Ukraine, Russia is forcing multiple ISPs to reroute connections through Russian infrastructure, subjecting traffic to censorship and surveillance  —  In occupied Ukraine, people’s internet is being routed to Russia—and subjected to its powerful censorship and surveillance machine.

Thomas Brewster / Forbes: TikTok is less transparent than US platforms about how long it keeps content deleted by users, as US law enforcement agencies increasingly seek to get such data  —  New!  Follow this author to improve your content experience.  Got it! … The FBI said it used cell-tower data earlier …

Katie Collins / CNET: The EU toughens its disinformation Code of Practice, covering deepfakes, bots, fake accounts, and more; Meta, Google, TikTok, Twitter, and others have signed up  —  Katie Collins  —  Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer.  Officially, she is CNET’s European correspondent …

The most advanced atomic clocks don’t just tell time – they could soon get so ludicrously accurate that they could be used for detecting gravitational waves and testing the limits of relativity

Volunteers who spent a working week in a virtual-reality environment have reported more anxiety, lower productivity and migraines – which could have big implications for the future of work

Using computer-vision algorithms to crunch through satellite image and shipping location data has revealed areas where ships may be catching seafood illegally

Look, I can’t help how my brain is wired, but I can trick it into relaxing.

Nikkei Asia: Japan’s business and government agencies are panicking as Internet Explorer shuts down; a March survey showed 49% of organizations use the browser for work  —  Government, corporate users scramble to find alternative to Microsoft program  —  TOKYO — Microsoft bids farewell to Internet Explorer …

Aislinn Keely / The Block: BitMEX co-founder Benjamin Delo is sentenced to 30 months probation without home confinement after pleading guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act  —  BitMEX co-founder Benjamin Delo received 30 months probation without home confinement for Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) violations.

The Markup: Investigation: ~300 US crisis pregnancy centers, which try to dissuade people from abortions, share website visitor info with Facebook via Meta’s tracking pixel  —  The social media giant gathers data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account

A robotic game of cat and mouse shows how neuromorphic chips inspired by the brain could allow small robots to make decisions without using too much power

The US military is funding research to develop “Reefense” structures that rapidly recruit oysters and coral for defence against storm surges

MIT School of Engineering and Northpond Ventures today announced the launch of the MIT-Northpond Program — Advancing Life Science and Engineering Innovation. The five-year engagement is funded through Northpond Labs, the research and development-focused affiliate of Northpond Ventures. The program aims to generate ideas in the life sciences by connecting Northpond’s experienced venture capital investors with MIT’s […]

Sponsor content from Siemens.

In February 2020, MIT professor David Simchi-Levi predicted the future. In an article in Harvard Business Review, he and his colleague warned that the new coronavirus outbreak would throttle supply chains and shutter tens of thousands of businesses across North America and Europe by mid-March. For Simchi-Levi, who had developed new models of supply chain […]

“Fusion energy was always one of those kind-of sci-fi technologies that you read about,” says nuclear science and engineering PhD candidate Evan Leppink. He’s recalling the time before fusion became a part of his daily hands-on experience at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he is studying a unique way to drive current in […]

When expanding internationally, don’t assume your existing strategy will transfer seamlessly.

How one start-up overcame the unique challenges involved in serving the U.S. public sector.

The economics are clear: Renewables are cheap enough for the country to rapidly decarbonize. Less evident is the political will to pull it off.

James Vincent / The Verge: YouTube launches a corrections feature, letting creators add infocards at a relevant timestamp  —  Instead of having to re-upload a whole video  —  Everyone makes mistakes, but if you mess up a fact or flub a line in a YouTube video it can be hard to correct the error.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Boston-based Zoovu, which offers tools to improve product discovery across apps and websites, raises $169M led by FTV, bringing its total funding to $200M+  —  The competition in ecommerce has become fiercer as the pandemic drives shoppers online.  At the same time, customers have grown to expect better experiences.

In occupied Ukraine, people’s internet is being routed to Russia—and subjected to its powerful censorship and surveillance machine.

Pop music fans know that their faves can’t change the world’s systemic problems—that’s not what they’re asking for.

Financial Times: Celsius portrays itself as a simple company offering “financial freedom” but risky trades and bets have led to a crisis, halving its assets to $12B in May  —  Celsius Network co-founder Alex Mashinsky was in a defiant mood on Twitter this past weekend.

Later this year, NASA is set to launch a probe the size of a tennis court to the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where remnants of the early solar system circle the sun. Once inside the asteroid belt, the spacecraft will zero in on Psyche, a large, metal-rich asteroid […]

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies a small and cool M-dwarf star, named HD 260655, and astronomers […]

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Cloudflare says it mitigated a 26M requests per second DDoS attack, the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date, surpassing a 17.2M rps attack in August 2021  —  Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare said today that it mitigated a 26 million request per second distributed denial-of-service …

The bigger problem is what happens when we act as if AIs are conscious, and how that could be used against us.

Arguments over whether Google’s large language model has a soul distract from the real-world problems that plague artificial intelligence.

For centuries, zoological law taught that sexual inequality was inevitable. Then women began studying Darwin for themselves.

Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950, but now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess

Kellen Browning / New York Times: A Massachusetts court rules that a proposed ballot measure, backed by Uber and Lyft, to classify gig drivers as independent contractors, violates state law  —  The ruling ends a $17.8 million campaign by companies like Uber and Lyft that would have led to the classification of their drivers as […]