“Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined forces to award $750,000 to seven organizations, including ones that help detect deepfakes and promote open access of government data. Last week, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the MIT Media Lab announced seven winners of their first “AI and the News: An Open Challenge” competition. Each winner received a grant to help with the development of technology platforms that address the problem of misinformation in society. Read more at LegalTech News…” [Alternate source, no paywall]
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Category Archives: Internet
Google training journalists to identify fake news
Google blog: “In the last year our News Lab has trained nearly 300,000 journalists in person and online around the world on digital tools for journalism, with a goal to reach 500,000 journalists by 2020. We’ve partnered with the International Fact Check Network and dozens of newsrooms worldwide to quell the spread of misinformation, especially… Continue Reading
The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media
“This is the 7th World Happiness Report. The first was released in April 2012 in support of a UN High level meeting on “Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm”. That report presented the available global data on national happiness and reviewed related evidence from the emerging science of happiness, showing that the quality… Continue Reading
Experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books assess the damage
The Guardian – The UK Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. “…The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their… Continue Reading
Social Media Addiction Is a Real Disease, U.K. Lawmakers Say
And Facebook and Google Must Be Taxed for It – Fortune: “For the last few years, some psychologists have been warning of the dangers of social media addiction—a phenomenon that whistleblowers from within tech industry say has been deliberately fostered by companies such as Facebook and Google. Now, lawmakers in the U.K. say social media… Continue Reading
Find peer-reviewed research from the world’s most trusted sources
“Semantic Scholar is a free, nonprofit, academic search engine from AI2….See the Semantic Scholar FAQ “Semantic Scholar helps researchers find better academic publications faster. Our engine analyzes publications and extracts important features using machine learning techniques. The resulting influential citations, images and key phrases allow our engine to “cut through the clutter” and give you… Continue Reading
This Site Detects Whether Text Was Written by a Bot
Futurism – Reassuringly, Futurism articles registered as being written by humans. “Last month, developers from OpenAI announced that they had built a text generating algorithm called GPT-2 that they said was too dangerous to release into the world, since it could be used to pollute the web with endless bot-written material. But now, a team of… Continue Reading
Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users’ Passwords Exposed Online
Motherboard: “Elsevier, the company behind scientific journals such as The Lancet, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world. It’s not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted,… Continue Reading
How Podcasts Learned to Speak The once useless-seeming medium that became essential.
Vulture: “There are now an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production (that’s a real number, not some comically inflated figure I invented to communicate “a lot”), offering up roughly 28 million individual episodes for your listening enjoyment (again, a real number; yes, someone counted). The first two seasons of the most popular podcast of all time, Serial,… Continue Reading
How to Block Violent Videos on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
Lifehacker: “Because it’s 2019, and livestreaming has had five years or so to really build up into a mainstream activity that people actually do, this means that horrific acts of violence and terror around the world have a greater-than-zero chance of having some video component attached to them. After all, now that plenty of people… Continue Reading
Coming Soon to a Courtroom Near You? What Lawyers Should Know About Deepfake Videos
The Recorder (Law.com / paywall] via free access on Yahoo} “Are rules that guard against forged or tampered evidence enough to prevent deepfake videos from making their way into court cases? …If you follow technology, it’s likely you’re in a panic over deepfakes—altered videos that employ artificial intelligence and are nearly impossible to detect. Or else you’re over… Continue Reading
America’s doctors warn Google, Twitter, and Facebook: Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing tech platforms
Business Insider: The American Medical Association (AMA) is worried that anti-vaxxers are weaponizing the world’s biggest social media platforms, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Parents often use these platforms to spread misinformation about vaccine dangers that aren’t real. Doctors say the content is having a dangerous impact on the number of vaccinated people in America,… Continue Reading
