Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares “Another take of the implications of Section 230… One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had ‘wronged’ her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google’s search results.” The New York Times reports:
Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The…
Tag: university of toronto
Most Popular Courses of 2020: A Year of Mental Health, Contract Tracing, and Job-Relevant Skills
By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer, Coursera In 2020, a record number of people turned to online learning as a source of hope, growth, and resilience amid economic uncertainty, and campus and workplace disruptions. Since March, there were more than 69 million enrollments on Coursera—a roughly 430% increase compared to the same period last year. […]
The post Most Popular Courses of…
Winning Bid: How Auction Theory Took the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
Tim Harford, writing for Financial Times: A well-designed auction forces bidders to reveal the truth about their own estimate of the prize’s value. At the same time, the auction shares that information with the other bidders. And it sets the price accordingly. It is quite a trick. But, in practice, it is a difficult trick to get right. In the 1990s,…
Scientists use AI to find tiny craters on Mars
All these years, NASA scientists have laboriously sifted through spacecraft images, to identify and classify markings on Mars. Now they’re using a new “classifier,” powered by artificial intelligence. What takes a human 40 minutes takes the AI tool an average of just 5 seconds. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nasa-artifical-intelligence-spots-craters-on-mars…
How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic
In China, the messaging platform blocked thousands of keywords related to the virus, a new report reveals. From a report: When the novel coronavirus was first discovered in China last winter, the country responded aggressively, placing tens of millions of people into strict lockdown. As Covid-19 spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, the Chinese government was just as…
Will Global Warming Drive Polar Bears Toward Extinction?
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
Polar bears could become nearly extinct by the end of the century as a result of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic if global warming continues unabated, scientists said Monday. Nearly all of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, from the Beaufort Sea off Alaska to the Siberian Arctic, would face being wiped out…
Measuring how long quantum tunneling takes
A team of researchers at the University of Toronto has found a way to measure how long quantum tunneling takes to happen. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes experiments they conducted and the result they found when attempting to measure how long quantum tunneling takes under certain circumstances. …
Mysterious Radio Bursts Reveal Missing Matter in Cosmos
sciencehabit writes: Roughly half of the “normal” matter in the universe — the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even us — exists as mere wisps of material floating in intergalactic space, according to cosmologists. But astronomers had no good way to confirm that, until now. A new study has used fast radio bursts (FRBs) — powerful millisecondslong pulses of…
Will Cellphone Tracing Bring a Tolerance of Surveillance?
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:
In a matter of months, tens of millions of people in dozens of countries have been placed under surveillance. Governments, private companies and researchers observe the health, habits and movements of citizens, often without their consent. It is a massive effort, aimed at enforcing quarantine rules or tracing the spread of the coronavirus, that has…
Helping Companies Respond to Employee Well-Being and Digital Readiness during COVID-19
By Leah Belsky, Chief Enterprise Officer, Coursera The spread of COVID-19 has profoundly affected the way companies operate. In a matter of days, organizations around the world transitioned millions of employees to remote working to keep their communities safe. How businesses respond during this crisis will have a lasting impact on employee engagement, productivity, and […]
The post Helping Companies Respond to…