Technology

YouTube creators are panicking as YouTube classifies their videos as directed towards kids when they are not. It's a dumb algorithm. It would classify this as a comic book probably. A human would never classify this channel as for kids under 13: Vivziepop Ok, @YouTube My videos are SET as NOT FOR KIDS. WHY are they being recommended nothing but kid channels??? Is this a bug? It's not MY fault if I set my channel AND videos AIMED at adults as "not for kids" n they still are considered such. That's on you. It's a lil nerve wracking. — Vivienne Medrano (@VivziePop) November 14, 2019 Or this:…

It's November of 2019 which means that we have officially arrived at the opening of the science fiction cult classic "Blade Runner." Let's talk about what it got right. I was at a local theater showing of "Evil Dead: The Musical" a few weeks ago and at the end was a lot of 1980s music. The crowd that evening was overwhelmingly high school theater geeks and they knew every song, from "Come On Eileen" to "Take On Me." They knew them well enough to mash up dances from other periods while they were singing. "When you were in high school, did you listen to 1950s music?" I asked my wife, because…

In India, farming is being held back by the efforts of activists like philosopher Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., who charge $40,000 per speech to tell Western audiences that more science in their country is bad.  Experts argue just the opposite, it is instead activism holding India back that has made farmers less able to to compete in a global market.  They should be dominant. India is the largest producer of milk, and many grains, in the entire world, argues Divakaran Padma Kumar Pillay, but food security is lacking because environmental groups scare them about technology, and that keeps…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already re-configuring the world in conspicuous ways. Data drives our global digital ecosystem, and AI technologies reveal patterns in data. Smartphones, smart homes, and smart cities influence how we live and interact, and AI systems are increasingly involved in recruitment decisions, medical diagnoses, and judicial verdicts. Whether this scenario is utopian or dystopian depends on your perspective. The potential risks of AI are enumerated repeatedly. Killer robots and mass unemployment are common concerns, while some people even fear human extinction. More…

Self-driving cars are the future. Some day our grandchildren will look back on today and be baffled that we ever debated about whether or not to save hundreds of thousands of lives per year. Yet crashes will still happen, and there is a debate about how those will be handled. Right now, automobile deaths that don't start off as heavily risky (drunk, high) involve a great deal of bad luck and perhaps a modicum of skill. Artificial intelligence tasked with deciding what to do as an accident occurs will have to get socialist about it, according to a new paper; choosing the course of action that…

Our present moment is characterized by a growing obsession with the long term. The study of climate change, for example, relies on increasingly long-range simulations. Science’s predictions are no longer merely hypotheses for validation or invalidation but are often grave threats – of growing scope and severity – that must be prevented. Predicting oncoming peril demands a proactive response. This means that, increasingly, the pursuit of technoscience tends towards not only passively investigating the natural world but also actively intervening in it. In the case of the climate, one thing this…

Twitter is widely considered a cesspool because any unhinged crackpot can claim science is a vast corporate conspiracy, but at least claim they let everyone lie equally. Except U.S. political conservatives don't believe that is really true, they contend Twitter is biased against them. Gab hopes to take out the bias against political pundits that Twitter management happens not to like, promising a completely unregulated platform championing "free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online" but a new analysis by academics says that Gab still has its own hierarchy and…

This fall we will get a new "Teminator" movie, marking 35 years that a dystopian nightmare about robots taking over and killing us all has been front and center in pop culture awareness.  The dystopian nightmare may happen to fish first. Swimming terminators could be ready to fight against one of the world's most problematic invasive species, the mosquitofish. Found in freshwater lakes and rivers worldwide, soaring mosquitofish populations have decimated native fish and amphibian populations, and attempts to control the species through toxicants or trapping often fail or cause harm to…

At the Ubicomp 2019 conference,University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate students Ali Kiaghadi and S. Zohreh Homayounfar debuted health-monitoring sleepwear they call "phyjamas." The electronically active garments contain unobtrusive, portable devices for monitoring heart rate and respiratory rhythm during sleep. The inventors designed a new fabric-based pressure sensor and combined that with a triboelectric sensor - one activated by a change in physical contact - to develop a distributed sensor suite that could be integrated into loose-fitting clothing like pajamas. They also developed…

Implanted brain electrodes can help alleviate symptoms of tremors like with Parkinson's disease but current probes face limitations due to their size and inflexibility. Neurotechnology may be on the verge of a major renaissance and mesh electronics could lead to a way to design personalized electronic treatment for just about anything related to the brain. Scientists can detect the general areas of the brain where decision-making, learning, and emotions originate, but tracing behaviors to specific neurons is not yet possible. Right now, when the brain's complex circuitry starts to misbehave…