Facebook said on Friday that it had removed hundreds of accounts with ties to the Epoch Media Group. […] Researchers said the profiles used photos generated by artificial intelligence. […]

The people behind the network of 610 Facebook accounts, 89 Facebook Pages, 156 Groups and 72 Instagram accounts posted about political news and issues in the United States, including President Trump’s impeachment, conservative ideology, political candidates, trade and religion. “This was a large, brazen network that had multiple layers of fake accounts and automation that systematically posted content with two ideological focuses: support of Donald Trump and opposition to the Chinese government,” Mr. Brookie said in an interview. […]

The people behind the network used artificial intelligence to generate profile pictures, Facebook said. They relied on a type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks. These networks can, through a process called machine learning, teach themselves to create realistic images of faces, even though they do not belong to a real person. […] This A.I. technique did not actually make it harder for the company’s automated systems to detect the fakes, because the systems focus on patterns of behavior among accounts. […] Facebook said the accounts masked their activities by using a combination of fake and authentic American accounts to manage pages and groups on the platforms. 

{ NYTimes | Continue reading }

photo { Ian Strange, SOS, 2015-2017 }

Drunk shopping could be a $45bn /year industry, and only 6% of people regret their drunk purchases.

[…]

In 2017 Google and Facebook lost $100 million between them to one scammer who sent them fake invoices.

[…]

Using machine learning, researchers can now predict how likely an individual is to be involve in a car accident by looking at the image of their home address on Google Street View.

[…]

Drug names are changing: X and Z names (Prozac, Seroxat) are giving way to names ending in O or A (Natesto, Qsymia) which are more appealing to speakers of Romance languages in Europe and South America.

{ Fluxx studio | Continue reading }

[We] discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media. […]

Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as ‘stage setting’ for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting. […]

Some of these mysterious, partisan local news sites publish physical newspapers and many have minimal social media presence. At first, they do not  appear to be owned by the same network or organization, but a number of clues suggest that they are intimately linked. Our analysis demonstrates the links between the networks by identifying shared markers, such as unique analytics tokens, server IP addresses, and even shared design templates and bylines on articles. Further, the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for many of these websites—but not all—suggest they are part of Locality Labs, LLC. 

{ Columbia Journalism Review | Continue reading }

still { Martin Kersels, Pink Constellation, 2001 }

In 2016, London-based DeepMind Technologies, a subsidiary of Alphabet (which is also the parent company of Google), startled industry watchers when it reported that the application of artificial intelligence had reduced the cooling bill at a Google data center by a whopping 40 percent. What’s more, we learned that year, DeepMind was starting to work with the National Grid in the United Kingdom to save energy throughout the country using deep learning to optimize the flow of electricity.

Could AI really slash energy usage so profoundly? In the three years that have passed, I’ve searched for articles on the application of AI to other data centers but find no evidence of important gains. What’s more, DeepMind’s talks with the National Grid about energy have broken down. And the financial results for DeepMind certainly don’t suggest that customers are lining up for its services: For 2018, the company reported losses of US $571 million on revenues of $125 million, up from losses of $366 million in 2017. Last April, The Economist characterized DeepMind’s 2016 announcement as a publicity stunt, quoting one inside source as saying, “[DeepMind just wants] to have some PR so they can claim some value added within Alphabet.” […]

Many of McKinsey’s estimates were made by extrapolating from claims made by various startups. For instance, its prediction of a 10 percent improvement in energy efficiency in the U.K. and elsewhere was based on the purported success of DeepMind and also of Nest Labs, which became part of Google’s hardware division in 2018. In 2017, Nest, which makes a smart thermostat and other intelligent products for the home, lost $621 million on revenues of $726 million. That fact doesn’t mesh with the notion that Nest and similar companies are contributing, or are poised to contribute, hugely to the world economy.

{ IEEE Spectrum | Continue reading }

Someone is putting tiny cowboy hats on pigeons in Las Vegas

Electric scooter start-up Unicorn is shutting down after spending too much money on Facebook adverts

Man Loses Home After Failing To Pay $8.41 In Property Taxes

Participants learned less from personal failure than from personal success, yet they learned just as much from other people’s failure as from others’ success. [PDF]

The ability to process alcohol may have saved humanity’s ancestors from extinction, a new book suggests.

Scientists’ brains shrank a bit after an extended stay in Antarctica

In boxing, the question of brain injury and its sequelae were analyzed from 1928 on, often on profoundly somatic grounds. With domestic violence, in contrast, the question of brain injury and its sequelae appear to have been first examined only after 1990.

New research found that some people excel at deciphering subtle differences in cats’ faces that reveal mood

The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes.

New York City is a deathtrap for birds. About 90,000 to 230,000 feathered creatures drop dead each year after colliding with the city’s buildings.

Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites.

Dim Ambient Lighting Increases Game Play Duration and Total Spend

Why When You Eat Might Be as Important as What You Eat

The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders

Your neighborhood NYPD officer isn’t likely to be your neighbor and the average restaurant is better on Manhattan streets than avenues

‘Laziness has won’: apostrophe protection society admits its defeat

‘I want this on a shirt’ Background reading: bots designed by aggregating retailers will download the image and upload it to their own online stores within minutes

If The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old, How Can We See 46 Billion Light Years Away?

Untangling the Unknot

Watch Transit Maps Transform to Real-Life Geography

Banana wall vandalized with lipstick at Art Basel. “This is the gallery where anyone can do art, right?” Previously: ‘Hungry Artist’ Eats $120,000 Banana

balloons are ok and Foiled again

Norman McLaren, Dots, 1940

“Financial machine learning creates a number of challenges for the 6.14 million people employed in the finance and insurance industry, many of whom will lose their jobs — not necessarily because they are replaced by machines, but because they are not trained to work alongside algorithms,” said Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Cornell University professor. […]

Nasdaq runs more than 40 different algorithms, using about 35,000 parameters, to look for market abuse and manipulation in real time.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

related { 90% of high-tech job growth concentrated in just 5 cities: Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and San Diego }

photo { Matthew Reamer }

{ Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2020 — An Artist Just Ate One of Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 Bananas Off the Wall in Miami | Yoko Ono, Apple, 1966 — Apple was first displayed in a London gallery in 1966. It was here that Yoko Ono met John Lennon for the first time. “You know, he didn’t say anything. He just grabbed the apple and had a bite in it.” }

In Japan, one restaurant is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) robotics technology to enable paralyzed employees to remotely pilot robotic waiters. […] By 2023, the number of people with disabilities employed will triple due to AI and emerging technologies reducing barriers to access. […]

By 2024, the World Health Organization will identify online shopping as an addictive disorder as millions abuse digital commerce and encounter financial stress. […]

By 2024, AI identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements you see. […]

By 2025, 50% of people with a smartphone but without a bank account will use a mobile-accessible cryptocurrency account. […]

By 2023, up to 30% of world news and video content will be authenticated as real by blockchain, countering deep fake technology.

{ Gartner | Continue reading }

acrylic on canvas { Victor Vasarely, Micron, 1984 }

Urgency Reader is a quick assembling of texts, risograph printed in Pawtucket, RI, and bound as a book at the last minute to launch at the Odds and Ends Art Book Fair at Yale University Art Gallery on December 6, 2019. […] Inspired by Omnibus News #1 (1969), Assembling (1970–87), and other assembling publications, Urgency Reader is an experiment in publishing as a gesture of call and response: the quick circulation of a charged collection of texts—in some cases raw, in-progress, or sketchy—to a small but deeply engaged audience. […] The order of the texts as they appear in the book was determined by chance by assigning a series of random integers from random.org to the alphabetical list of contributors.

{ Paul Soulellis | Continue reading + Download }

In 1969 three Germans, Thomas Niggl, Christian D’Orville and Heimrad Prem, issued a call for submissions for a periodical in which interested individuals were invited to submit up to 2 pages of art works in an edition of 1500 copies each. Contributors were responsible for the cost of reproducing their own submissions, and all works would be accepted with no editing or censorship. Published the same year under the title Omnibus News, the periodical was comprised of 192 submissions (384 pages) sequenced alphabetically in an A4 format and in an edition of 1500.

{ Arte Contemporanea | Continue reading }

photos { Tania Franco Klein | Adrià Cañameras }

{ Tropical Malaise }

Last month, China saw its first lawsuit filed over the use of [facial recognition] technology by a Chinese law professor in eastern Zhejiang province. The professor sued a local safari park after it began forcing visitors to scan their faces to enter the park. The case has not been heard yet, but the park decided to allow visitors to opt between having their face scanned or using a fingerprint system—which still means the collection of visitors’ biometric data.

{ QZ | Continue reading }

related { New app claims it can identify venture capitalists using facial recognition }

electrophotographic (3M Color-in-Color) print { Sonia Landy Sheridan, SOnia in Time, 1975 }

You might think that lawyers representing abuse victims would want to publicly expose such information to bolster their clients’ claims. But that is not how the legal industry always works. Often, keeping things quiet is good business.

One of the revelations of the #MeToo era has been that victims’ lawyers often brokered secret deals in which alleged abusers paid to keep their accusers quiet and the allegations out of the public sphere. Lawyers can pocket at least a third of such settlements, profiting off a system that masks misconduct and allows men to abuse again.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

“It was never the intention to share the menstrual information with their customers” Japanese store ‘rethinks’ badges for staff on periods

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

we present evidence that violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high

Juveniles represented by legal counsel were over two times more likely to receive an out-of-home placement compared to those without attorneys. The lawyer penalty was robust over time

Verbal Messages Coming from Behind are Perceived as More Negative

Flavor is the most important factor in eCig appeal

Individuals with dark traits have the ability but not the disposition to empathize

gray matter volume differences between bilinguals and monolinguals (there is considerable heterogeneity of results that complicate the understanding of the bilingual brain)

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music.

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency

Quantum computing for the very curious

This page is designed especially for students of cheminformatics who are just starting to learn about how chemical structures are represented digitally.

An Outback pulling an Outback, stopped to eat at Outback, parked out back. [via many_loops]

Most of the research on happiness has documented that income, marriage, employment and health affect happiness. Very few studies examine whether happiness itself affect income, marriage, employment and health. […] Findings show that happier Indonesians in 2007 earned more money, were more likely to be married, were less likely to be divorced or unemployed, and were in better health when the survey was conducted again seven years later.

{ Applied Research in Quality of Life | Continue reading }

image { Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, Toilet Paper #1, June 2010 }

About 30% of the world’s population is possessed by ghosts. […]

The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts.

{ Spiritual Research Foundation | Continue reading }

Intelligence and education do not protect against superstition. […] I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

image { Fund｜Befund }

The air conditioner is nearly 100 years old, and yet it hasn’t evolved much — the technology is essentially the same as it was the day it was invented.

The cooling of our air is responsible for 10% of the planet’s electricity consumption. […] As the world heats, demand for air conditioners will only grow, especially in developing countries. This, in turn, will increase the impact that cooling appliances have on the climate, thus warming the Earth further and creating a vicious cycle. […] There are 1.2 billion room air conditioning units installed today, but that figure will soar to 4.5 billion by 2050. […]

A new coalition — led by India’s government and America’s Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a nonprofit environmental research organization — has launched the Global Cooling Prize, a $1-million competition to design the next generation of air cooling systems. […] The prize’s judges have shortlisted eight finalists, who will now build functioning prototypes that will be tested both in a lab and in real-world conditions at an apartment block in Delhi. […] Three of the eight finalists are from India, three are from the US and one each from the UK and China. […] The overall winner will be announced in November 2020.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

images { Lissajous knots }

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles.

Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer-generated abstract art, compared to when no titles were present (Study 1).

Mundane titles did not enhance the perception of profoundness, indicating that pseudo-profound bullshit titles specifically (as opposed to titles in general) enhance the perceived profoundness of abstract art (Study 2).

Furthermore, these effects generalize to artist-created abstract art (Study 3).

Finally, we report a large correlation between profoundness ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and “International Art English” statements (Study 4), a mode and style of communication commonly employed by artists to discuss their work.

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

Ethos Capital, a new commercial investment firm founded in the past few months in Boston, has 2 staff and only one major investment: a deal to acquire the 501c3 non-profit [Public Interest Registry] that currently runs the .org domain (valued at a few $B), for an undisclosed sum.

This was initiated immediately after ICANN decided in May, over almost universal opposition, to remove the price cap on .org registrations with no meaningful price protections for existing or future registrants.

{ The Longest Now | Continue reading }

Internet Society (ISOC) has sold the .org registry Public Interest Registry (PIR) to private equity company Ethos Capital. […] PIR generated $101 million in revenue in 2018 and contributed nearly $50 million to Internet Society. […]

Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm lead by Erik Brooks. Brooks was at Abry Partners until earlier this year. Abry Partners acquired Donuts and installed former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah in the top spot there. […] The other person at Ethos is former ICANN Senior Vice President Abusitta-Ouri.

{ Domain Name Wire | Continue reading }

English speakers have been deprived of a truly functional, second person plural pronoun since we let “ye” fade away a few hundred years ago.

“You” may address one person or a bunch, but it can be imprecise and unsatisfying. “You all”—as in “I’m talking to you all,” or “Hey, you all!”—sounds wordy and stilted. “You folks” or “you gang” both feel self-conscious. Several more economical micro-regional varieties (youz, yinz) exist, but they lack wide appeal.

But here’s what’s hard to explain: The first, a gender-neutral option, mainly thrives in the American South and hasn’t been able to steal much linguistic market share outside of its native habitat. The second, an undeniable reference to a group of men, is the default everywhere else, even when the “guys” in question are women, or when the speaker is communicating to a mixed gender group.

“You guys,” rolls off the tongues of avowed feminists every day, as if everyone has agreed to let one androcentric pronoun pass, while others (the generic “he” or “men” as stand-ins for all people) belong to the before-we-knew-better past. […]

One common defense of “you guys” that Mallinson encounters in the classroom and elsewhere is that it is gender neutral, simply because we use it that way. This argument also appeared in the New Yorker recently, in a column about a new book, The Life of Guy: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Unlikely History of an Indispensable Word by writer and educator Allan Metcalf.

“Guy” grew out of the British practice of burning effigies of the Catholic rebel Guy Fawkes, Metcalf explains in the book. The flaming likenesses, first paraded in the early 1600s, came to be called “guys,” which evolved to mean a group of male lowlifes, he wrote in a recent story for Time. Then, by the 18th century, “guys” simply meant “men” without any pejorative connotations. By the 1930s, according to the Washington Post, Americans had made the leap to calling all persons “guys.”

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

Fake Lufthansa pilot tries to board airplane

Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government. His testimony shows how Beijing’s spies are infiltrating Hong Kong’s democracy movement, manipulating Taiwan’s elections and operating with impunity in Australia.

Meetings at work should be seen as a form of “therapy” rather than about decision-making, say researchers.

Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days. Air pollution effects on cognitive functions. Bonus: The Effect of Traffic Pollution on Academic Performance

Merely 20% of the Tinder users in the sample have had one-night stands following Tinder use

Letting robots kill without human supervision could save lives [2017]

5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

More than a third of Ph.D. students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by Ph.D. study, according to results of a global survey of 6,300 students from Nature.

Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones

Facebook, Google fund nonprofit think tanks shaping federal privacy debate

There Will Be No Turning Back on Facial Recognition

Jeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakers

Faces and licence plates are among the details that can be clearly seen in a 195 billion pixels photograph of Shanghai [photo + read more]

China to take over Kenya’s main port over unpaid huge Chinese Loan [Thanks Tim]

The rise of ‘ghost kitchens’

Salon Kitty was a high-class Berlin brothel used by the Nazi intelligence service for espionage purposes during World War II. The Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS, or SD) took over the brothel, had the place wire tapped and all the prostitutes replaced with trained spies in order to gather data on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries.

Thai photographer Visarute Angkatavanich portrays Siamese fighting fish (Betta Splendens)

it’s a single shot of herself dancing to a tearful voicemail from her ex-boyfriend, asking her to take him back after he confessed to cheating

Chilean protesters using lasers to take down a drone.

pitfalls can be easily dismissed — like photos of the Earth from space, which flat Earthers believe are photoshopped

The rise of ‘facadism’ in London [Thanks Tim]

See Forever™ from the observatory at One World Trade Center. Choose to skip just the ticket line or all the lines. [Thanks Tim]