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Daily Archives: February 18, 2019

A Look at Past and Future Climate Change in Less Than a Minute

Yale Environment 360: “Two new videos visualize how drastically global temperatures have changed since 1900 — and how much worse they will get by the end of this century. The data visualizations, created by Antti Lipponen, a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, depict 200 years of climate change in each of the world’s 191 countries in less than a minute.

“Rapid global warming really exists, has been global in the past, and has affected all the countries in the world,” Lipponen told Yale Environment 360. “Unfortunately, the future does not look different — temperatures will continue rising rapidly and all countries will be affected by climate change.”…

Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice

Richardson, Rashida and Schultz, Jason and Crawford, Kate, Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice (February 13, 2019). New York University Law Review Online, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN in PDF: “Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using algorithmic predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity and allocate… Continue Reading

How badly is Google Books search broken, and why?

Via Sapping Attention blog: “I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I’d point out something that I’ve noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically… Continue Reading

DeepFakes – how will AI impact our next election?

Axios: “Researchers have broadened the controversial technology called “deepfakes” — AI-generated media that experts fear could roil coming elections by convincingly depicting people saying or doing things they never did, Axios’ Kaveh Waddell reports. A new computer program, created at the San Francisco-based OpenAI lab, is the latest front in deepfakes, producing remarkably human-sounding prose that… Continue Reading

Google Translate is a manifestation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language

Quartz: “More than 60 years after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on language were published, the artificial intelligence behind Google Translate has provided a practical example of his hypotheses. Patrick Hebron, who works on machine learning in design at Adobe and studied philosophy with Wittgenstein expert Garry Hagberg for his bachelor’s degree at Bard College, notes… Continue Reading

Thousands of scientists run up against Elsevier’s paywall

Nautre – Researchers have been left without access to new papers as libraries and the major publisher fail to agree on subscription deals. “Researchers at German institutions that have let their Elsevier subscriptions lapse while negotiating a new deal are hitting the paywall for the publisher’s most recent articles around 10,000 times a day, according… Continue Reading

A guide to anti-misinformation actions around the world

Poynter: “In mid-March, a European Commission high-level group published its final report on misinformation, drawing upon the input of experts from around the world who gathered over several weeks to help the European Union figure out what to do about misinformation. The report created by the high-level group — announced in November to help the EU craft policies to… Continue Reading

ISDA Publishes Guidelines for Smart Derivatives Contracts

Perkins Coie – “The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) has published the first in a series of guidelines for what it colloquially refers to as “smart derivatives contracts” (the Guidelines).* A smart derivatives contract is a derivative that incorporates software code to automate aspects of the derivative transaction and operates on a distributed ledger,… Continue Reading

How Brexit Is Creating New Political Factions

The Guardian Data Visualization – How Brexit has created four new political factions – Analysis of Commons voting patterns show how Europhobe and Europhile rebels from both main parties are forming new parliamentary blocs “Our study clusters MPs by the similarity of their voting patterns: if two MPs always vote the same way, the chart… Continue Reading

Inside the 18th-century contest to build the White House

National Geographic – In 1792, leading architects entered a competition to build the President’s House, George Washington judged it, and the winner built an American icon. “It may seem like Washington, D.C. was the perfect spot for the U.S. captial, but its selection was controversial. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and others wanted the… Continue Reading