Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Up to 30 percent of the current employees in the banking industry may lose their jobs to new technologies in the next 10 years, according to new projections from Citigroup. A 112-page report, “Digital Disruption,” released on Wednesday, said that the number of employees at American banks would drop to 1.8 million people in the…
In 2013, the lyric-explanation website Rap Genius rebranded simply as “Genius,” and announced that it would try to annotate not only songs, but poems, essays, and news articles. Three years later, the startup has become a flash point in the panicked and disingenuous hustle to scrub the internet of unkindness, which has since gotten confused…
paging_filter Annotation start-up Genius made it easier on Monday to report abusive comments on the platform on Monday, following criticism from Massachusetts congresswoman Katherine Clark. Clark, a Democrat who has campaigned against online harassment, sent a letter to Genius on Monday asking the company to respond to concerns about online harassment. “Now that your platform…
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment that went from “friendly millennial girl” to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn’t learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to…
In a study published online March 14 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers looked at four widely-used tech assistants to try and find out how the increasingly ubiquitous tools responded to various health crises. Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Samsung’s S Voice, and Microsoft Cortana were evaluated on how well they recognized a…
Photo Joshua Reeves, a founder of the payroll management start-up Gusto. “Even in downturns, some businesses succeed,” he said of the shifting economic environment. Credit Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Technology stocks are gyrating. Valuations for once-vaunted private companies have been slashed and some start-ups have shut down. Even Apple’s…
For Bitcoin evangelists, every economic disaster is also an opportunity to, well, promote Bitcoin. From Greece to South Africa, Bitcoin has been vaunted as a technology with world-saving power, either by replacing a broken money system wholesale or just making it easier for people living in the West to send money back to their families…
Indian students gather for a protest against Free Basics in Hyderabad, on Dec. 29.Image: Mahesh Kumar A/Associated Press In a significant move, India’s telecom regulator has banned the differential pricing for different kinds of data according to the principles of net neutrality. This implies that zero-rating initiatives like Facebook’s Free Basics platform, which offers a…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Include: Need For Transparency And Accountability Tech companies have gotten better about disclosing their diversity data, but there are still a ton of companies that haven’t done so. In the reports that do exist, what’s often missing are insights around retention rates, which can be good indicators of a company’s culture and what…
When Daniel Joseph, a York University doctoral student studying labor and technology, found out about Coca-Cola’s GIF the Feeling promotion, he knew exactly what he wanted to make with it: a Coke-branded critique of capitalism. An accessory for Coke’s newly launched “Taste the Feeling” global ad campaign, GIF the Feeling is a website that allows…