Remember when Microsoft was criticized for enabling “workplace surveillance” over “productivity scores” in its Microsoft 365 office software which gave managers highly detailed profiles of each individual employee’s activity. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score apparently has roots in another Microsoft patent application for Systems, Methods, and Software for Implementing a Behavior Change Management Program, which also lays…
Tag: Art
That Mysterious Silver Monolith In the Utah Desert Has Disappeared
Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes CNN: A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state’s Bureau of Land Management said Saturday. The monolith was removed by an “unknown party” sometime Friday night, the agency said in a…
Pinwheel Cave rock art in California may depict hallucinogenic ‘trance flower’
Starting about 400 years ago, Indigenous people in California had hallucinogenic ceremonies in a cave by Santa Barbara. Source: https://www.livescience.com/rock-art-hallucinogen-california.html
AI Researchers Made a Sarcasm Detection Model
An anonymous reader shares a report: Researchers in China say they’ve created sarcasm detection AI that achieved state-of-the-art performance on a dataset drawn from Twitter. The AI uses multimodal learning that combines text and imagery since both are often needed to understand whether a person is being sarcastic. The researchers argue that sarcasm detection can assist with sentiment analysis and crowdsourced…
The International Space Station is 20 and going strong
20 years ago, three astronauts stepped aboard the ISS. It’s since hosted residents from many countries, creating humanity’s first history of living in space. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/20-years-iss-what-its-future-holds-nov-2-2020…
Tiny device enables new record in super-fast quantum light detection
Bristol researchers have developed a tiny device that paves the way for higher performance quantum computers and quantum communications, making them significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art. …
SpaceX Starship as a trash collector in Earth orbit?
SpaceX Starship’s many tasks may include launching humans into space, carrying satellites into orbit and — perhaps — removing troublesome pieces of space debris. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/spacex-starship-clean-up-space-junk…
New NASA posters feature cosmic frights for Halloween
Check out these 3 new posters from NASA’s Galaxy of Horrors, featuring cosmic frights for Halloween. They’re free to download, and available in English and Spanish. Source: https://earthsky.org/todays-image/nasa-halloween-2020-free-posters…
Researchers find direction decided by rate of coin flip in quantum world
Flip a coin. Heads? Take a step to the left. Tails? Take a step to the right. In the quantum world? Go in both directions at once, like a wave spreading out. Called the ‘walker analogy,’ this random process can be applied in both classical and quantum algorithms used in state-of-the-art technologies such as artificial intelligence and data search processes. However,…
We can harness the solar wind to sail to the farthest corners of space
Rockets eventually run out of fuel, which limits how far they can go. But now we are mastering the art of solar sailing, we can expect to keep exploring into distant, uncharted space Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833061-100-we-can-harness-the-solar-wind-to-sail-to-the-farthest-corners-of-space/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…