Former reporter creates ‘Rate my Professor’ for newsrooms

Former reporter creates ‘Rate my Professor’ for newsrooms

Sistrunk was required to shoot her own video, report, edit, post on social media, and complete other tasks over 12-hour days—a schedule typical of reporters at local TV stations. Reviews are anonymous, but to contribute one, site visitors must fill out a survey with questions about their salary, the station’s news director, and the types of contracts employees are required to sign. The most popular piece was, and remains, Sistrunk’s earliest: “My First Job in TV News: Do I Eat or Pay Rent?”

Source: www.cjr.org

Across the rich world, an extraordinary jobs boom is under way

Across the rich world, an extraordinary jobs boom is under way

The unemployment rate—the number of people looking for work as a share of the total labour force—is at its lowest in decades (see chart 1). Over the past two decades the share of workers who have been in their job for less than a year has hovered around 20%, with no clear trend up or down. You would hardly know that the Spanish city’s average unemployment rate over the past five years has been close to 30%.

Source: www.economist.com

Boden – Native mobile cross-platform applications

Boden – Native mobile cross-platform applications

With Boden you can create native mobile cross-platform applications from one codebase. Boden uses the real user interface controls of the target platform, so users won’t recognize any difference to the look and feel they are already used to. Boden uses Facebook’s Yoga Layout engine accross all platforms.

Source: www.boden.io

Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias and Discrimination on Intimate Platforms

Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias and Discrimination on Intimate Platforms

We consider bias and discrimination in the context of popular online dating and hookup platforms in the United States, which we call “intimate platforms.” Drawing on work in social-justice-oriented and Queer HCI, we review design features of popular intimate platforms and their potential role in exacerbating or mitigating interpersonal bias. We identify and address the difficult ethical questions that nevertheless come along with such intervention, while urging the social computing community to engage more deeply with issues of bias, discrimination, and exclusion in the study and design of intimate platforms.

Source: papers.ssrn.com

Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

Network-level blocking allows you to block ads in non-traditional places such as mobile apps and smart TVs, regardless of hardware or OS. Since advertisements are blocked before they are downloaded, network performance is improved and will feel faster. Our Web interface offers control of your Pi-hole and a central place to view statistics.

Source: pi-hole.net

Terry Pratchett warned Bill Gates about fake news back in the ’90s

Terry Pratchett warned Bill Gates about fake news back in the ’90s

The Microsoft man wasn’t having any of Pratchett warned Bill Gates of how fake news would affect the internet, an unearthed interview has revealed

Posting on Twitter, journalist Marc Burrows – who is penning a book on Pratchett’s life – shared an image of a 1996 magazine, where the novelist spoke to Microsoft’s head honcho. Captioning his find, Burrows said that the fantasy writer had “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”, adding that “Gates didn’t believe him”. “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net,” Pratchett told Gates in GQ.

Source: www.nme.com

The Deepest Uncertainty (2013)

The Deepest Uncertainty (2013)

The Continuum Hypothesis states that there is no infinite collection of real numbers larger than the collection of natural numbers, but smaller than the collection of all real numbers. Kurt Gödel described a model that satisfies the axioms of set theory, which does not allow for an infinite set to exist whose size is between the natural numbers and the real numbers. Put another way: for there to be a proof of the Continuum Hypothesis, it would have to be true in all models of set theory, which it isn’t.

Source: nautil.us

Great vanilla web components MIT License

Great vanilla web components MIT License

jTools is a collection of lightweight common required javascript web components. The first version includes several common javascript tools in various frontend applications. The first collection brings the following plugins:

jTools brings the developer many advantages, such as:

The same code can render in differnet ways

jExcel is released under the [MIT license].

Source: github.com

Ctrl Shift Face: A growing ‘deepfakes’ YouTube channel

Ctrl Shift Face: A growing ‘deepfakes’ YouTube channel

Now, here’s another reminder that the tools to craft deepfakes are widely available for just about anyone with the right skills to use: the manipulated videos posted on YouTuber Ctrl Shift Face are particularly creepy. While the overall effect works, it isn’t totally perfect as you’ll see when Norton stands up that something isn’t quite right:

Youtube Video

In another clip, with the comedian Bill Hader, his face gradually transforms to match actors Al Pacino and Arnold Schwarzenegger when he performs impressions of them both during a interview with TV chat show host Conan O’Brien. It’s not entirely clear how Ctrl Shift Face crafts these apparently deepfake film clips, and how much compute and algorithmic training is required to achieve such uncanny results.

Source: www.theregister.co.uk