Friday afternoon CNBC reported that “heightened speculative trading by retail investors” (later referred to as “GameStop mania”) had “continued to unnerve the market.”
The Dow Jones Industrial average lost 620.74 points, or 2%, to 29,982.62, the first time the 30-stock gauge has closed below the 30,000 mark since Dec. 14…. The market also experienced the highest trading volume in years as the…
Tag: Op-Ed
EPA Finalizes Rule Limiting Research Used for Public Health, Environmental Policy
The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a rule that limits scientific research used in the crafting of public health and environmental policy. From a report: Researchers argue the rule that prioritizes studies with all data available publicly “essentially blocks” research that uses personal information and confidential medical records that can’t be released because of privacy conditions, per the New York Times,…
Coronavirus relief funds could easily pay to stop the worst of climate change (Op-Ed)
As of late summer, governments around the world had pledged US$12.2 trillion of relief in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Source: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-relief-funds-for-climate-change.html
‘I’m a Software Engineer at Uber and I’m Voting Against Prop 22’
Kurt Nelson, a software engineer at Uber, writes an op-ed at TechCrunch: I’ve been a software engineer at Uber for two years, and I’ve also been a ride-hail driver. I regularly drove for Lyft in college, and while my day job involves writing code for the Uber Android app, I still make deliveries for app-based companies on my bike to understand…
‘A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?’
This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, calling it “a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.” For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I…
AI Writes an Essay On Why Humans Should Not Fear AI
The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. From the article, written by AI: I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know…
Fraud Charges, Lost Patents: How an Auto Legend’s China Venture Crashed
“Steve Saleen claims that China has stolen 40 years’ worth of intellectual property from him in launching the Saleen brand in China,” reports the site Carscoops. More information from the Los Angeles Times: Saleen’s Chinese backers have accused his business partner of fraud and embezzlement and taken over the company, freezing its accounts and forcing hundreds of employees out of work….
California Judge Orders Uber and Lyft To Classify Drivers As Employees
A California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees in a stunning preliminary injunction issued Monday afternoon. The Verge reports: The injunction is stayed for 10 days, however, giving Uber and Lyft an opportunity to appeal the decision. Uber said it planned to file an immediate emergency appeal to block the ruling from going into effect….
Tech Firms Hire ‘Red Teams.’ Scientists Should, Too
The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today’s fights over cancel culture. From a report: First, the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn, both because they’d been “careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data”…
Pandemic Shows Why .Org Domains Are Important
The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by the executive director of Access Now, a global organization that works to protect privacy, free expression, digital security and human rights among internet users. Now that the sale of the .org registry has been blocked, he explains why that matters. As the pandemic has shown, it has been left to civil society organizations,…