Category: Things I Read

Facebook, Cognizant and modern slavery.

 Facebook moderators break their NDAs to expose desperate working conditions – The Verge … :

“Utley worked the overnight shift at a Facebook content moderation site in Tampa, FL, operated by a professional services vendor named Cognizant. The 800 or so workers there face relentless pressure from their bosses to better enforce the social network’s community standards, which receive near-daily updates that leave its contractor workforce in a perpetual state of uncertainty. The Tampa site has routinely failed to meet the 98 percent “accuracy” target set by Facebook. In fact, with a score that has been hovering around 92, it is Facebook’s worst-performing site in North America.“

Things and … things. Described. Little things, indeed

Reality update: Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description … :

“A Thing Description describes the metadata and interfaces of Things, where a Thing is an abstraction of a physical or virtual entity that provides interactions to and participates in the Web of Things. Thing Descriptions provide a set of interactions based on a small vocabulary that makes it possible both to integrate diverse devices and to allow diverse applications to interoperate.“

Nuclear, horses and Dabbelju

 Language wars: the 19 greatest linguistic spats of all time | Science | The Guardian … :

“‘Nucular’ war The fact that we used to make fun of George W Bush for his malapropisms seems quaint these days. But it was worrying to many of us at the time that the man in charge of the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal didn’t seem to be able to pronounce it right. He said “nucular” and it was one more black mark against his intelligence. But this syllable-flip is in fact a fairly common linguistic process called metathesis. All English speakers live with the results of historic metatheses that caught on: horse used to be “hros” and bird used to be “brid”.“

Interesting Study on Self-Supervised Learing…

Ai is now learning with images of kittens, and I really like the cats, birds and moving images examples in these slides: 

self_supervision3.pptx

The ImageNet Challenge Story … Outcomes Strong supervision:

• Features from networks trained on ImageNet can be used for other visual tasks, e.g. detection, segmentation, action recognition, fine grained visual classification

• To some extent, any visual task can be solved now by:
1. Construct a large-scale dataset labelled for that task
2. Specify a training loss and neural network architecture
3. Train the network and deploy

The US of A has a huge security problem: poverty

 The United States Has a National-Security Problem—and It’s Not What You Think | The Nation … :

“It’s time to rethink the American national security state with its annual trillion-dollar budget. For tens of millions of Americans, the source of deep workaday insecurity isn’t the standard roster of foreign enemies, but an ever-more entrenched system of inequality, still growing, that stacks the political deck against the least well-off Americans. They lack the bucks to hire big-time lobbyists. They can’t write lavish checks to candidates running for public office or fund PACs. They have no way of manipulating the myriad influence-generating networks that the elite uses to shape taxation and spending policies. They are up against a system in which money truly does talk—and that’s the voice they don’t have. Welcome to the United States of Inequality.“

New technologies should liberate us from work – A manifesto

Fully Automated Luxury Communism – A Manifesto

“In the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.“

Right-Wing populists as “Revenge of places that don’t matter”

The revenge of the places that don’t matter | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal … :

“Persistent poverty, economic decay and lack of opportunities cause discontent in declining regions, while policymakers reason that successful agglomeration economies drive economic dynamism, and that regeneration has failed. This column argues that this disconnect has led many of these ‘places that don’t matter’ to revolt in a wave of political populism with strong territorial, rather than social, foundations. Better territorial development policies are needed that tap potential and provide opportunities to those people living in the places that ‘don’t matter’.“

Let’s make them pay for using our personal data

“Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company. This happens not only with search requests but with almost everything. I’m pretty sure that your Uber’s trips, photos on Samsung cloud or liked songs are being collected, analyzed, formatted and eventually sold to other companies.“

http://amortizedcost.net/make-them-pay-for-personal-data/

Opinion | Why Is America So Far Behind Europe on Digital Privacy? – The New York Times

Once again Europe just doesn’t realize how far ahead we are in some technical an economic and social things. Wake up, lady!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/privacy-congress-facebook-google.html

“G.D.P.R.establishes several privacy rights that do not exist in the United States — including a requirement for companies to inform users about their data practices and receive explicit permission before collecting any personal information. Although Americans cannot legally avail themselves of specific rights under G.D.P.R., the fact that the biggest global tech companies are complying everywhere with the new European rules means that the technocrats in Brussels are doing more for Americans’ digital privacy rights than their own Congress.“

#toldyouso

“Forward-thinking legislation — and the public hearings that would inform its passage — are urgently needed. Americans deserve a robust discussion of what privacy rights they are entitled to and strong privacy laws to protect them.”
(…)

“Congress should seize the moment and the public momentum to enshrine digital privacy rights into federal law.“