Aleteia: The Catholic Church’s new tool for ending hunger: machine learning. “Drought, major storms, crop disease, other climate-related events, and illness are ‘shocks’ that threaten food security, says Catholic Relief Services, the American Catholic Church’s overseas aid agency. Now, CRS says it has a tool that it says can help aid agencies better respond to such shocks so that ordinary people don’t go hungry. That tool is called MIRA, or Measurement Indicators for Resilience Analysis.”
Research & Opinion
EurekAlert: Vaccine misinformation and social media
EurekAlert: Vaccine misinformation and social media. “People who rely on social media for information were more likely to be misinformed about vaccines than those who rely on traditional media, according to a study of vaccine knowledge and media use by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.”
Phys .org: Journalism is an ‘attack surface’ for those who spread misinformation
Phys .org: Journalism is an ‘attack surface’ for those who spread misinformation. “For all the benefits in the expansion of the media landscape, we’re still struggling with the spread of misinformation—and the damage is especially worrisome when it comes to information about science and health.”
DIY Photography: Why Flickr is a diamond in the rough, and how to make it awesome again
DIY Photography: Why Flickr is a diamond in the rough, and how to make it awesome again. “It was back in 2014 that I set up an account on Flickr. I posted a few images and forgot about the platform. Two years later I returned with a sensation of that this time it would be for good. Flickr is cozy — it feels like a small town where everyone knows each other. I would love to see that small town grow into a bustling city. Why? Because I have grown fond of the platform, and because I believe it has a ton of potential. What is already great about Flickr and what can be improved? I have a few thoughts.”
TechCrunch: Web traffic increases in 2019 were driven by mobile; top 100 sites saw average of 223B monthly visits
TechCrunch: Web traffic increases in 2019 were driven by mobile; top 100 sites saw average of 223B monthly visits. “Mobile adoption around the world is having a significant impact on the web’s traffic. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, out today, mobile web traffic has jumped 30.6% since 2017, while desktop traffic dropped 3.3%. But it’s not just the numbers that are changing. Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example, which is impacting core metrics web publishers today track.”
MIT Technology Review: The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world
MIT Technology Review: The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world . “The implication is that [Artificial General Intelligence] could easily run amok if the technology’s development is left to follow the path of least resistance. Narrow intelligence, the kind of clumsy AI that surrounds us today, has already served as an example. We now know that algorithms are biased and fragile; they can perpetrate great abuse and great deception; and the expense of developing and running them tends to concentrate their power in the hands of a few. By extrapolation, AGI could be catastrophic without the careful guidance of a benevolent shepherd. OpenAI wants to be that shepherd, and it has carefully crafted its image to fit the bill.” Deep, disturbing dive.
ScienceDaily: Researchers devise approach to reduce biases in computer vision data sets
ScienceDaily: Researchers devise approach to reduce biases in computer vision data sets. “Addressing problems of bias in artificial intelligence, computer scientists from Princeton and Stanford University have developed methods to obtain fairer data sets containing images of people. The researchers propose improvements to ImageNet, a database of more than 14 million images that has played a key role in advancing computer vision over the past decade.”
