Number of Posts: 10
Posts 1 - 10
Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein In a Wild Web
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 17.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, Facebook, marketing, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | Facebook’s head of global policy management recently agreed to remove anything that violates the Vietnamese law from the social network. Governments around the world (even in the US) are increasingly trying to keep control of what's happening online. As a result, governments and big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon don't always agree with each other. On the one hand, big tech companies want to have more control and power, and on the other hand, nations want to gain more control over people's online behvior. Facebook's desire to expand everywhere (e.g. in China) is one of the reasons for today's struggle between tech companies and nations. Facebook also faced some issues in Europe and Africa.
Image Description | Photograph of people using computers in a computer room, map of Facebook's users, two women laughing in front of a board displaying social media icons, Mark Zuckerberg and other people running in China, Mark Zuckerberg, his wife and daughters, glass building, people in front of a thumb-up sign, woman, crowd (some of them are using their phones), and people on their computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, Facebook, female(s), male(s), smartphone, social media
Teaching Kids Coding, by the Book
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, gender, school
Summary | A non-profit organization called "Girls Who Code" provides after-school coding classes and coding camps to girls all over the country. It started as an attempt to recruit more girls to computer programming and now the demand is far larger than the available spots. The organization is now publishing a series of books of entertaining nature whose protagonists are girls who code so as to make girls relate to computer programming and imagine themselves as coders.
Image Description | Women/girls huddled over a laptop together.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), school
Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)
How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 27.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, marketing, school
Summary | The Partovi brothers who are early investors in some major tech companies have started inversting in computer programming teaching. They advocate that all public schools in the US should teach students coding. Of course tehy have a personal interest: the more skilled coders there are, the better their field wil develop.
Image Description | Illustration of a man in front of a computer screen and a man teaching little children.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)
As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 29.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, threat
Summary | Computer programming classes are increasingly in demand at universities across the country. Reports of students plagiarizing and copying code from each other are however also increasing. It is difficult to find out whether students have cheated but identical mistakes are a dead giveaway. One programming professor has also written a programm to compare codes and find how similar they are indicating the likelihood that the two codes were collaboratively written.
Image Description | Image of a lecture hall showing the lecturer's laptop and an image of a female student walking on campus.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)
Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, privacy, threat
Summary | Many companies track potential customers' internet activity so that they find out when someone, for instance, has the flu and will likely respond to flu medication advertisements. They collect data about all users when they visit a tracking website and then tailor advertising to specific target groups. This is a violation of our privacy because this process is very obscure and it is difficult to protect oneself from it but there are a few softwares one can get to stop companies from tracking one's online activity.
Image Description | Hands typing on a laptop keyboard.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, hand(s)
Facebook Could Be Associated With a Longer Life, Study Finds
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 31.10.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, Facebook, research/study
Summary | A recent study about longevity shows that moderate Facebook activity correlates with better health and hence a longer life. Previous research shows that an active social life in general (so offline) also correlates with longevity. Because the results however only attast to correlation and not necessarily to a causal connection, it could also be that healthier people are just more social online and offline and not that sociability has an effect on health. It has been confirmed that a rich social life makes people happier while excessive Facebook use leads to people being unhappy.
Image Description | Woman instructing old man using a computer.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)
Ask Alexa? No, Hear This Alexa
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 16.1.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, threat
Summary | Amazon's new chatbot Alexa is constructed to make life easier for us: it is an assistant that gets you the information you need or fetches (orders) groceries for you. You can operated without hands by simply calling "Alexa" and the microphone and speaker station will 'wake up' to follow your instruction. But while the artificial intelligence bot learns to be more humanoid from us, we are likely to lose human interactional abilities if we start speaking with robots on regular basis.
Image Description | Image of the Echo devices (microphone and speaker station for Alexa) in a storage unit.
Image Tags | speaker
Secrets of the Emoji World, Now With Its Own Convention
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 7.11.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis
Summary | An obscure committee called Unicode Consortium made up of various representatives of leading technological companies world-wide has the ultimate power over which content gets turned into emojis and which does not. An emoji convention (Emojicon) is organized in San Francisco, decorated with emoji-shaped balloons, beach balls, bean bags, emoji foods, people dressed up as emojis, and with many expert speakers from academia, the corporate world, as well as artists and designers. Many of them are unhappy with such a small unrepresentative group of a few (likely) middle-aged, white men should decide on which emojis are available to everyone around the world. The Unicode Consortium has too much power over the global visual language.
Image Description | A hand reaching into a pile of emoji cut-outs. A person dressed as the peach emoji being interviewed. Two people in costumes taking a selfie.
Image Tags | emojis, hand(s), selfie
Stop Your 'Dying,' It's Killing Me
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 29.11.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | texting, youth
Summary | Digital writing culture, be it texting or posting on social media, has developed a widespread obsession with grotesque exaggerations. An example would be the fading popularity of LOL while statements such as “I’m literally dying” have become commonplace to express hilarity. Other staples for expressing strong feelings towards something in texting are “feels”, “YAAASS”, or “I can’t even” among many others. Although hyperbole has a long history as a stylistic device, contemporary online culture seems to have reached new levels.
Image Description | Illustration of a skeleton sitting in a coffin and taking a selfie.
Image Tags | male(s), selfie
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