Number of Posts: 35
Posts 31 - 35
Google's future is useful, creepy and everywhere: nine things learned at I/O
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 18.5.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, privacy, threat
Summary | Google presented their new technology and their main focus is artificial intelligence. Google's Assistant is now proactively listening and making suggestion (for instance to leave the house early because of traffic) without users having to activate it by saying "OK Google". It will also be available accross devices. Google are attempting to replace Siri on Apple devices. Google's Assistant is much better developed in being able to understand colloquial commands. They are also working on connecting their Assistant with the camera, so that one could hold up the phone to a restaurant and get reviews about that restaurant pulled up. This has huge potential for making the lives of visually impaired people easier.
Image Description | Reuters and Getty images of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and the Google Assistant home speaker.
Image Tags | female(s), Google, male(s), YouTube
Nextdoor broke the social network mold. Could political ads make it just like Facebook?
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 5.5.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | politeness, politics, social media
Summary | A small but growing social media platform called "Nextdoor" caters to neighborhood exchanges. Neighbors are encouraged to define their neighborhoods and exchange useful information like good dentists and other public services or police activity in the neighborhood. They have explicitly defined that the rapport on the platform is supposed to be civil and pragmatic so the general tone is very polite, also because users' identities and addresses are confirmed (no anonymity). The platform urges users to report rants defining them linguistically as "ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation, provocative language, judgmental accusations, or repetitive explanations."
Image Description | A portrait of Nextdoor's CEO.
Image Tags | male(s)
'They're collaborating all the time': the schools making the most of mobile
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 13.1.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | childhood, digitized education, school, smartphone, youth
Summary | Some schools are embracing the technological advancements influencing our everyday lives by incorporating them into their classes. Some classes have even become entirely paper-free! Not all, however, the learning tools are chosen so as to to help maximize students' learning. Students are already familiar and comfortable with most of the technology and it makes no sense to ban smartphones from classrooms if they can enhance learning.
Image Description | Two girls looking at a smartphone together.
Image Tags | female(s), school, smartphone
Chatbot that overturned 160,000 parking fines now helping refugees claim asylum
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 6.3.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, law, WhatsApp
Summary | A Stanford student has developed a chatbot on Facebook messenger that helps refugees apply for asylum in the US, UK, and Canada. It helps them fill out the necessary forms by using plain English and they are working on an Arabic translation. He wishes he could have the service on WhatsApp so that it would be better encrypted.
Image Description | Facebook chats on smartphones and a laptop.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, Facebook, smartphone
The five lessons I learned from breaking my smartphone
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 24.1.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | brain, research/study, smartphone, technology-free
Summary | After dropping her smartphone in the sink, the author lives without one for six weeks and discovers that she sleeps better without a smartphone, enjoys being unavailable, few things need to be tended to urgently, that she spends less money, and her memory suffers from having a smartphone. Studies have also confirmed that it is detrimental to one's sleep pattern to sleep next to a smartphone because notifications release dopamin in the brain similarly to a nicotine or recreational drug addiction. She values the time she now has to just not be available for messages from work because we tend to respond to any and all messages as if they were urgent when really they are not. The author reports to spend less money because she can no longer do online shopping on the go without a smartphone. She has also realized how dependent on Google she has become. Neurological studies confirm that our brains are adapting to the constant accessibility of all information by remembering how to find it and googling again if necessary rather than remembering the little snippets of information.
Image Description | Getty image of a woman's hands holding a smartphone.
Image Tags | female(s), hand(s), smartphone
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