A senior search engineer at Google revealed that the company had to tweak its algorithm to combat misinformation after mass shootings. The Guardian reports: “In these last few years, there’s been a tragic increase in shootings,” Pandu Nayak, who joined the company 14 years ago to work on its search engine, said. “And it turns out that during these shootings, in…
Tag: algorithms
Algorithms Help Turbines Share the Wind
carbonnation writes: As Spock so elegantly opined, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Today Stanford U researchers presented the clearest proof to date that self-sacrifice can also benefit wind farms. In their demonstration at an Alberta wind farm, one turbine sacrifices a fifth of its generating potential to enable better performance by…
In a virtual world, the sky is no longer the limit
Kayleigh Oliver began her career as one of just six women in a room full of more than 100 computing students. 10 years later, she works as a QA and Release Manager at Immerse, a virtual reality training software company. Kayleigh also runs her own app development business in her spare time. We spoke to […]
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How To Evaluate Computers That Don’t Quite Exist
sciencehabit writes: To gauge the performance of a supercomputer, computer scientists turn to a standard tool: a set of algorithms called LINPACK that tests how fast the machine solves problems with huge numbers of variables. For quantum computers, which might one day solve certain problems that overwhelm conventional computers, no such benchmarking standard exists. One reason is that the computers, which…
Smartphones and Fitness Trackers Are Being Used To Gauge Employee Performance
A new system to assess the performance of employees is claimed to be more objective and thus more accurate by utilizing smartphones and fitness trackers. New Atlas reports: The passive system incorporates an app known as PhoneAgent, which was developed by Prof. Andrew Campbell at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College. Using the smartphone’s own sensors, that app continuously monitors factors such as…
YouTube Looks To Demonetization As Punishments For Major Creators, But It Doesn’t Work
YouTube is looking to send a message to content creators who step out of line by disabling ads on videos that infringe on the site’s policies. The punishment is meant to revoke a key source of income, presenting a strong incentive for users to change their behavior. But, as Julia Alexander writes via The Verge, many creators make money through other…
It’s a Match: Essential Skills Mapped to Critical Business Functions
By Kyle Clark, Enterprise Content Strategist Coursera’s Essential Skills Map identifies the skills of tomorrow for key functions, future-proofing your workforce while helping your business keep pace with digital transformation. ———- Technology is rapidly transforming the nature of jobs and skills. Partnering with over 1,900 companies globally through Coursera for Business takes us deep into […]
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Scientists Use Sound To See Around Corners
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Spies may soon have another tool to carry out their shadowy missions: a new device that uses sound to “see” around corners. Previously, researchers developed gadgets that bounced light waves around corners to catch reflections and see things out of the line of sight. To see whether they could do something similar with sound,…
Yahoo Japan Is Under Fire for Its China-Like Rating System
Some users of Yahoo Japan are rising up against Japan’s biggest web portal after the rollout of a new rating system that’s being compared with a social-scoring initiative in China. From a report: The 48 million people with a Yahoo! Japan ID will have to opt-out within a privacy settings webpage if they don’t want to be rated. The score is…
Do Google and Facebook Threaten Our ‘Ambient Privacy’?
This week Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski (also a web developer and social critic) asked readers of his blog to consider an emerging threat to ambient privacy. He defines it as “the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass…