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+17 +1
Twitter’s research shows that its algorithm favors conservative views
A post on Twitter’s blog reveals that Twitter’s algorithm promotes right-leaning content more often than left — but the reasons for that remain unclear. The findings drew from an internal study on Twitter’s algorithmic amplification of political content.
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+24 +1
Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even if they didn’t manage to solve it, they figured, Klein would learn a lot in the process. He went along with the idea. “I didn’t know to be intimidated,” he said. “I was just a first-year grad student — I don’t know what’s going on.”
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+20 +1
The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation
For the last 70 years, American transportation planners have been using the same model to decide what to build. There’s just one problem: it’s often wrong. In November 2011, the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project published a 595-page document that was supposed to finally end a decades-long battle over a highway. The project was a controversial one, to say the least.
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+9 +1
Biases in algorithms hurt those looking for information on health
YouTube hosts millions of videos related to health care. The Health Information National Trends Survey reports that 75% of Americans go to the internet first when looking for information about health or medical topics. YouTube is one of the most popular online platforms, with billions of views every day, and has emerged as a significant source of health information.
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+38 +1
DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm
We’re getting quite used to our algorithmic overlords. We’ve ceded, for the most part, that complex and invisible rulesets determine who will see our missives, travel pics, and RT dunks. More substantially, millions of workers now toil, essentially, for algorithms, whether via Uber, Lyft, Postmates, or the like. And the DoorDash tipping fiasco that unfolded this week highlights how increasingly dangerous this is—both in terms of the worker exploitation that nebulous algorithmic employment allowed for in the first place, and in the fractious and sometimes surprising nature of the fallout.
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+3 +1
A new algorithm finds nearby stars that could host hidden worlds
A new planet-hunting algorithm suggests that at least 9 percent of nearby stars could host planets orbiting out of sight — and the stars’ chemistry could help find the worlds. Planetary astrophysicist Natalie Hinkel of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and colleagues trained a machine-learning algorithm on a catalog of thousands of stars and their chemical compositions (SN: 5/11/19, p. 34).
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+29 +1
Algorithms Are Maximizing Profits By Colluding To Keep Prices High
Have you ever searched for a product online in the morning and gone back to look at it again in the evening only to find the price has changed? In which case you may have been subject to the retailer’s pricing algorithms. Traditionally when deciding the price of a product, marketers consider its value to the buyer and how much similar products cost, and establish if potential buyers are sensitive to changes in price. But in today’s technologically driven marketplace, things have changed.
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+30 +1
We've found a quicker way to multiply really big numbers
To multiply two numbers by hand take a few steps but it's something we're taught in school. When dealing with big numbers, really big numbers, we need to a quicker way to do things.
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+20 +1
Algorithms have already taken over human decision making
From the law to the media we're becoming artificial humans, mere tools of the machines.
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+3 +1
Mobile Machine-Learning Program Predicts Autism with High Accuracy
As autism rates continue to rise, the process of getting an autism diagnosis remains arduous and time-consuming for many families. Dennis P. Wall, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical data science at Stanford University, said the two standard autism diagnostic instruments involve lengthy observation and/or interview processes. If both are used, the process can take more than four hours. That’s a big part of the reason many diagnostic clinics have lengthy waiting lists.
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+17 +1
How American gambler won US$1 billion on Hong Kong horses
In the 1980s and 90s, computer nerd Bill Benter did the impossible: he wrote an algorithm that beat the unpredictability of the racetrack, winning big in the process. By Kit Chellel. (June 17, 2018)
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+3 +1
Dijkstra's in Disguise
A weighted graph is a data structure consisting of some vertices and edges, and each edge has an associated cost of traversal. Let's suppose we want to compute the shortest distance from vertex u to every other vertex v in the graph... By Eric Jang.
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How-to+1 +1
How to Remove Noad VarianceTV Adware
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+30 +1
Facebook and Google use 'dark patterns'
Facebook, Google and Microsoft push users away from privacy-friendly options on their services in an "unethical" way, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council. It studied the privacy settings of the firms and found a series of "dark patterns", including intrusive default settings and misleading wording. The firms gave users "an illusion of control", its report suggested. Both Google and Facebook said user privacy was important to them.
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+18 +1
Bail Algorithms Are As Accurate As Random People Doing an Online Survey
Algorithms that assess people’s likelihood to reoffend as part of the bail-setting process in criminal cases are, to be frank, really scary. We don’t know very much about how they work—the companies that make them are intensely secretive about what makes their products tick—and studies have suggested that they can harbor racial prejudices. Yet, these algorithms provide judges with information that is used to decide the course of somebody’s life.
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+13 +1
Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?
As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know — or how they know it.
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+37 +1
Pornhub launches new AI to watch and tag porn so humans don’t have to
Have you ever wondered about the poor souls that were tasked to watch and tag countless hours of Pornhub footage so you could have a wide array of options to choose from when you Google your favorite fetish? You might want to know that these invisible heroes are about to lose their spots to the AI overlords. Pornhub has announced it is launching a new AI-powered model that uses computer vision technology to autonomously detect and identify adult performers by their name.
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+5 +1
One-Way Salesman Finds Fast Path Home
The real-world version of the famous “traveling salesman problem” finally gets a good-enough solution. By Mark H. Kim.
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+16 +1
Amazon trounces rivals in battle of the shopping 'bots'
Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) who track rivals' prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working. Losing access to Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors' websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.
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+17 +1
I Am A Number. Am I Prime?
On the search for an efficient algorithm to tell if a number is prime. By Kaneenika Sinha.
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