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Monday, November 2, 2020
Treyarch and Raven reveal more about Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War’s campaign and Zombies
Treyarch and Raven Software revealed more details about the Call of Duty: Black Ops -- Cold War single-player campaign and Zombies mode.Read More
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Be a 'secret agent' and other new ways to exercise
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Where to get your flu shot for cheap or free in 2020 - CNET
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The best movies to watch on Disney Plus for Thanksgiving - CNET
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6 of the best beauty tools to gift this year - CNET
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Facebook, Twitter plan to warn you if politicians prematurely declare victory - CNET
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AWS introduces new GPU-equipped P4 instances, powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPUs, offering 2.5x DL performance over P3 (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
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AWS introduces new GPU-equipped P4 instances, powered by Intel Cascade Lake processors and Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPUs, offering 2.5x DL performance over P3 — AWS today announced the launch of its newest GPU-equipped instances. Dubbed P4, these new instances are launching a decade …
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How social media sites plan to handle premature election declarations
The election results will start to come in as early as 7pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more votes processed, more counts updated. But we won’t have the final result that night.
This isn’t unusual: In the US, counting votes and officially certifying them always goes on longer than Election Day, and the coronavirus means the counting will probably take longer than that. But on Sunday, Axios reported that President Trump intends to prematurely declare victory if it looks like he’s leading in the early returns, even if there are still millions of votes left to be counted. He has denied this specific claim, but it is in line with his long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election, and matches his promise to use lawyers to stop ballot counting in Pennsylvania as soon as polls close—even though the state will still have many mail-in ballots left to count and report.
So what exactly will happen if a candidate prematurely declares victory before the contest is truly over?
Social media
This the front line. Any premature declaration will likely hit American networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube first, so the way these platforms handle this kind of activity will inform what happens next. Those three sites are planning to use labeling to deal with this kind of disinformation.
Twitter, the president’s social media platform of choice, says it will prominently label misleading tweets about election results from candidates, as well as any viral tweet. Disputed announcements will be met with a label that says “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”
To confirm results, the company will be leaning on state and local election officials as well as major national news outlets with dedicated election coverage desks. At least two sources will have to confirm the results of a race before a candidate can tweet about results without a warning label being applied.
YouTube, which has been a top campaign advertising battleground, will place an information panel on videos prematurely declaring victory. That will link to Google’s election results feature, which is being produced in partnership with the Associated Press.
“We’ll also continue to raise up authoritative content from news organizations and reduce the spread of borderline election misinformation,” said Google spokesperson Ivy Choi. “Additionally, if a piece of content, in the course of prematurely declaring victory, misleads viewers about voting or encourages interference in democratic processes, we will remove that in accordance with our community guidelines.”
When the polls close, all Google’s ad platforms—including YouTube and its search engine—will pause ads that reference the 2020 election. That may cut off another potential avenue for disinformation across the company’s internet empire.
Facebook is placing its own hopes in labels as well, including a preemptive notification in news feeds to follow authoritative news outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press for election results. Facebook’s normal response to false news is to reduce its spread on the network and partner with fact-checkers for additional labeling.
Elsewhere, TikTok’s policy reduces the visibility of posts prematurely claiming victory and is working on an “expedited” schedule with fact checking partners around Election Day.
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.
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What to Expect From Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on Election Day
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How to talk to kids and teens about misinformation
Tomorrow is Election Day in the US, which means we’ve reached peak political saturation: Americans are being hit with constant news alerts, a torrent of punditry and campaign ads on television, and even warring yard signs. The stakes are high, and we’re all struggling to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction.
Kids and teens are no different. Being young has never been easy, but it’s especially tough when social media, television programs, and maybe even the adults in your life often twist truth into misinformation.
Here are some tips for grownups and young people alike for how to talk with someone about misinformation and make sure the information you’re getting and sharing is true.
How to talk to kids about misinformation
We don’t know much about how kids are affected by conspiracy theories and misinformation. “There is so little research examining conspiracy beliefs in younger people,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and the mother of two teenagers. The literature has made clear that more education helps shield people against misinformation, and that same logic probably applies to kids, who may be likelier to believe misinformation the younger they are. Douglas is developing a psychometric scale to measure conspiracy theory belief in adolescents, but until then, we won’t quite know how kids take in misinformation—which makes fighting against it more difficult.
Be age appropriate. Not all kids are ready to handle the graphic details of George Floyd’s murder or the systemic racism underlying it, for example. Nor should they be if they’re younger than tween-age, says Tanner Higgin, the director of education editorial strategy at CommonSense Media. “For kids under seven, don’t involve them in political discussions or worrying about issues,” he says. Younger kids need to know they are safe and parents are keeping them safe, and worrying them—especially during a pandemic, when they have less contact with their friends—will backfire.
That said, don’t sugarcoat. If you’ve got a particularly precocious, mature kid who’s asking pointed questions and can digest information without spiraling into anxiety and worry, be clear and honest. Lying won’t help kids who will undoubtedly find out the truth elsewhere. “Even toddlers can understand how not telling the truth, or basing decisions on bad information, can be harmful,” says Peter Adams, the senior vice president at the News Literacy Project. “They can also understand foundational journalistic concepts like fairness or the importance of accuracy. You just need to tailor the examples or themes you employ to make this real to them.”
Try introducing a “lite” conspiracy theory. This might go against logic, but Douglas says that doing so is important, especially for more gullible little ones: “Once they believe in conspiracy theories, these beliefs are difficult to correct.” Protect against that by introducing a weak version of the misinformation before they’re exposed to it in the real world, and debunking it with them. This helps kids understand what’s problematic about the reasoning, so when a more persuasive conspiracy theory comes along, they’re able to step back and question it.
How to fight misinformation at any age
Remember that you, too, can fall for misinformation. Yes, even you. “A lot of teens—particularly those who are tech savvy—think that they’re too sharp to fall for misinformation so they don’t have to worry about it,” Adams says. But it bears repeating: No one is immune from misinformation.
Be wary of reposts. “If a claim or screenshot is crossposted to a different platform, it could be a sign that it’s missing context,” Alexa Volland says. She knows: Volland trains teen fact checkers across the United States with MediaWise’s Teen Fact Checking Network (a collaboration between the Poynter Institute, the Google News Initiative, and Facebook). She’s seen plenty of Instagram stories featuring screenshots within a screenshot, or screenshots of tweets posted within an Instagram story or TikTok. Solution: Go to the original platform and check out what that person was saying before sharing.
Reverse image searches are your best friend for meme checks. On social media, people sometimes post striking images that they think are about a particular news event but actually have nothing to do with that incident. Volland says that doing a simple reverse image search is one of the easiest, fastest ways to check if a viral image is really what it purports to be.
Ask yourself who is behind the information. Look at the organization or person who originally shared the story and think about their possible incentives. What do they stand to gain from the information that was shared? They may be motivated to twist the truth in ways that can lead to misinformation.
Get proof. Be your own fact checker and try to verify the information to the best of your ability. Consider: What is the evidence? Are there links to sources? Are those sources reliable? And are multiple other sources saying the same thing? Sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact might be useful here.
Check your own bias. Hello, confirmation bias: If you have a strong reaction of “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” or nod vigorously in agreement with a post, step back. “If it’s a claim that sparks an intense emotional reaction, that can translate into validation,” Volland says. That makes us more likely to believe misinformation.
Check for context. Volland says a lot of the misinformation that goes viral on social media pulls images out of context for memes. For example, her group debunked a viral image supposedly about recent Black Lives Matter protests that misled viewers with images from protests in Ferguson, Missouri, a few years ago.
Go private. Nobody likes being attacked, whether it’s at the dinner table or in the comments section on Facebook. Talk to someone who might be misinformed privately and separately, whether it’s in DMs or in person away from others.
Seek other perspectives. “We tend to read an article up and down but it’s important to open up multiple tabs and get out of your echo chamber,” Volland says. That means going to a news source that might lean the opposite way you tend to, or reading the tweets and press releases of politicians you disagree with. It might be hard, but it will make you more well-rounded and help you know what’s true and what’s inflated.
Check the comments. The comments section will often do a lot of the work in determining whether something is true or not by pointing to alternative sources, and it can be a fast, easy way to see if the post has been flagged by others as suspicious or misleading.
Conversation means meeting the other person halfway. As we’ve said before, being kind is ultimately the most powerful way to talk about misinformation. Attacking people for their beliefs can cause them to double down. Volland suggests “swapping sources” when a news story comes under dispute. Another tip: If a person is skeptical of a news source, presenting information from that source won’t be persuasive. Volland suggests instead seeking out a source you both can agree on and finding information there.
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How Amazon’s offsets could exaggerate its progress toward “net zero” emissions
In April, Amazon announced it would contribute $10 million to a pair of projects designed to pay forest owners across the Appalachian Mountains to manage their lands in ways that capture more carbon dioxide from the air.
It is one of the first investments in the retail giant’s $100 million Right Now Climate Fund, an initiative to support the use of “nature-based climate solutions” like forests, grasslands, and wetlands to absorb more of the greenhouse gas. Amazon launched it last year in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, a conservation nonprofit, as part of its effort to reach “net zero carbon” by 2040. Together, they’re developing ways Amazon and other companies can effectively pay others to prevent or remove enough emissions to counterbalance those from their own operations.
But offsets researchers reviewed one of the proposals for the forests in the eastern US on behalf of MIT Technology Review and warned it may significantly overstate carbon reductions. Moreover, studies and articles have repeatedly highlighted similar problems with other offset programs designed to incentivize additional carbon uptake through things like trees and soil.
That’s raising real concerns as a growing list of large companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and even oil and gas giants like Shell, trumpet “net zero emissions” plans that will rely heavily on nature-based offsets to theoretically cancel out their continuing climate pollution.
Lowering landowner costs
Trees suck carbon out of the air through photosynthesis and store it in their trunks, leaves, roots, and branches. Healthy forests with larger trees generally capture more carbon than overpacked forests, where smaller trees and other vegetation compete for water, sunlight, and space. When trees fall down and rot, or are cut down and converted into products like paper, much of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
The Nature Conservancy partnered with the American Forest Foundation to create a new offset protocol designed to allow owners of small tracts of wooded land to earn credits for taking steps to suck up and store more carbon.
The Family Forest Impact Foundation, an affiliate of the American Forest Foundation, will pay the landowners for carrying out two practices: promoting the growth of larger trees by harvesting less than previously planned, and thinning out competing shrubs and other vegetation. The change in practices must persist for 20 and 10 years, respectively.
The Family Forest Impact Foundation will, in turn, sell credits for the additional carbon that builds up on the properties to companies like Amazon on voluntary offset markets.
Family landowners largely haven’t participated in such markets up to now because complying with the programs can be complicated and expensive.
“Existing carbon forest markets weren’t working for small landowners,” says Christine Cadigan, director of the Family Forest Carbon Program at the American Forest Foundation. By easing some of the most cumbersome requirements, the groups believe they can reduce the costs by 75%, she says.
The organizations are working with Verra, a nonprofit that accredits offset protocols, to “review and validate” the approach. In the second Amazon-funded effort, known as Forest Carbon Co-ops, the Nature Conservancy is collaborating with the Vermont Land Trust to develop a similar program for owners of wooded lands ranging in area from 200 to 2,000 acres.
Amazon said the two programs together will draw down or prevent the release of 18.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2031. The company didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review before press time.
Over counting carbon reductions
Several outside researchers who have looked at the proposal, however, fear there are a few ways the program could overestimate the carbon reductions actually achieved.
The biggest red flag for Barbara Haya, a research fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is how the program deals with what’s known as “leakage.” This occurs when reduced timber harvests brought about by offset projects simply lead to increased harvesting elsewhere.
Haya says some earlier research suggests that more than 80% of such reductions can simply shift to harvesting on timberlands in neighboring regions or even other nations. But under the rules for the reduced harvesting practice, landowners would generally only need to account for a 10% leakage rate in their calculations.
This suggests that even if the family forest projects do draw down significant additional carbon, much of the benefit could be wiped out by larger harvests elsewhere, limiting the real-world climate benefits.
Some observers also worry about how the projects will be audited to ensure compliance.
One of the key ways the program promises to make participation less expensive is by eliminating the need for surveyors to come out and conduct detailed assessments of every project site.
Instead, the program will use an aggregation of sample plots in similar forests to figure out what would be expected to happen on the project land in the absence of the program, given common forestry practices in the region. They’ll then compare those figures with field measurements of additional stored carbon over time from a “statistically significant random sample of properties” enrolled in the program, to determine how much more carbon the practices should be saving or removing.
This approach may produce an accurate accounting over time, says Grayson Badgley, a plant physiologist at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University. But he says it will be tricky to ensure that all the assumptions are correct, and that they properly select and weight plots to reflect conditions and land management practices on the enrolled projects.
One risk that is that the forestry practices assumed to be common in the area could be more representative of large timber companies than family landowners. That would exaggerate the amount of harvesting that would have occurred in the program’s absence, thus overstating the carbon gains it achieves.
Finally, there are additional concerns about whether the program will bank enough credits to account for setbacks that could occur if landowners simply increase harvesting at the end of the 10- or 20-year contract terms—or as a result of natural risks to trees like wildfires, storms, and insect infestations, all of which are rising with climate change.
In an email, Cadigan stressed that they’re still in the approval process and are working through various adjustments based on public comments and other feedback. But she also said they’re confident that their methodologies will bring about sustained improvement in forestry practices and accurately estimate additional carbon removal over time.
“Once they’ve reset their management, it actually makes more economic sense for them to maintain this approach, and as a result, this management will have a long-term positive impact,” she wrote.
The broader risks
The family forest program is just one of numerous offset efforts that Amazon intends to eventually invest in or purchase credits from. The company also announced plans to provide more than $4 million to an “urban greening” program in Germany, another Nature Conservancy project.
Amazon is taking concrete steps to cut its direct corporate emissions as well. It’s invested in more than 30 large-scale solar and wind projects around the world and added rooftop solar panels to dozens of fulfillment or sorting centers, as part of its effort to run entirely on renewable electricity by 2025. The retailer also agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian with an eye toward ensuring that half of its shipments are “net zero carbon” by 2030.
But between its corporate facilities, data centers, operations, and suppliers, the company has a massive carbon footprint – and one still growing at last count. Last year it emitted the equivalent of more than 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, directly or indirectly. That’s up from around 44 million in 2018.
Amazon, like most companies, hasn’t specified what portion of its emissions it expects to address through nature-based offsets. But a heavy reliance on them creates very real challenges if most of these programs are, as a growing number of researchers believe, often overcounting actual reductions.
It allows companies to assert to customers, policymakers and others that they’re operating in a climate neutral way, while continuing to produce more planet-warming gases, on a ton-for-ton basis, than the programs are removing.
Another issue is that the growing number of nature-based projects is creating larger pools of low-cost carbon offsets, the availability of which can undermine the viability of more reliable carbon-capture methods.
Bottom-line-minded companies will, for instance, likely pick a roughly $10 forestry offset that purports to cancel out the same ton of emissions that Swiss startup Climeworks is charging $1,100 to reliably remove and permanently store, using carbon dioxide sucking machines and underground geological formations. (Notably, Microsoft has said it only wants to pay $20 a ton for offsets as it looks to cancel out its entire corporate history of emissions, which some observers believe will steer it away from the more dependable means of carbon removal.)
It will also often be far cheaper for a corporation like Amazon to buy offset credits than to figure out the tougher aspects of corporate emissions reductions, like fully cleaning up the shipping process or ensuring that its vast network of suppliers is carbon free.
“You are essentially giving these large corporations a license to continue doing business as usual,” says Sam Davis, a conservation scientist at the Dogwood Alliance, an environmental nonprofit focused on protecting forests in the southern US. “If we really need and want to address climate change from a corporate perspective, then we can’t just pay the debt with fancy carbon credits and greenwashing.”
Climate models show that the world will now need to slash emissions and draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by midcentury to prevent really dangerous levels of global warming. But there are limits to how much forests and other nature-based systems can do to get us there.
Ideally, these options should be reserved for the really hard-to-solve parts of the decarbonization puzzle—like aviation, heavy industry, and methane from agriculture—or used to grant poor nations leeway to continue emitting a little longer as their economies develop, says Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo.
In other words, there are real risks if rich companies in rich nations buy up a disproportionate share of the cheapest sources of carbon removal while they’ve got plenty of other ways to drive their emissions toward zero.
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Halodoc uses AI to improve how doctors receive feedback
Due to Indonesia’s vast size and population, timely and reliable access to healthcare can sometimes be a challenge. Halodoc aims to change that with a mobile first-telemedicine platform that connects Indonesians to doctors and helps them arrange appointments, medicine deliveries and tests.
What’s distinctive about the Halodoc platform is that it draws on human-centered artificial intelligence: a promising new area of research that uses continuous human feedback to improve how AI systems work, and provides a better experience for the people who rely on those systems.
With support from Google’s Late Stage Accelerator, a program that assists high-potential startups, we assembled a team of doctors, data scientists, engineers, product managers and researchers to determine how technology could support Indonesian doctors’ work. One particular approach the team identified was using AI to replicate the mentoring and feedback that junior doctors receive from more experienced colleagues in hospitals—a process that’s important to improving quality of care, but is hard to reproduce on a larger scale.
We set out to create an easy way to provide feedback in virtual health, and worked with Google’s machine learning experts in the Late-Stage Accelerator to determine the best approach. With Google’s guidance, Halodoc's engineers applied Natural Language Processing in Bahasa Indonesia to measure, rank, and provide insights that can inform doctors’ decisions across the country—using thousands of consultations to train their machine learning models.
When doctors open the Halodoc app, they see information on how they performed based on their response time and quality index metrics, along with suggested actions on how they can improve their consultation quality. They also have the option of receiving further feedback and coaching from more senior doctors if needed.
Right now, more than five percent of Indonesians use Halodoc’s platform. As a result of applying AI principles to improve the quality of care that patients experience, our app ratings have increased from 4.5 to 4.8 stars in fewer than six months, while our overall doctor scores have improved by 64 percent.
From here, with Google’s help, we hope to continue simplifying Indonesia’s healthcare infrastructure and advance the application of AI in healthcare globally.
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Digital voting trialled in US presidential election
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Best cheap earbuds and headphones - CNET
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Sunday, November 1, 2020
Tinder: Dating-style app tech for brain scan research
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Online study company Chegg says its subscribers grew 69% YoY to 3.7M in the last quarter, as many parents from the US turn to online tutors, many from India (Eric Bellman/Wall Street Journal)
Eric Bellman / Wall Street Journal:
Online study company Chegg says its subscribers grew 69% YoY to 3.7M in the last quarter, as many parents from the US turn to online tutors, many from India — Coronavirus pandemic is boosting India's education-technology industry; 'We get that one-on-one attention they need and it's affordable'
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The best leggings in 2020 for yoga, working out and lounging - CNET
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In Avatar 2, Kate Winslet breaks Tom Cruise's underwater record - CNET
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The Haunting of Bly Manor ending explained, and all your questions answered - CNET
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The 16 best TV shows to binge-watch on Amazon Prime Video - CNET
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The 31 best TV shows to binge on Hulu - CNET
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52 of the best TV shows to watch on Netflix - CNET
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Best laptop for 2020 - CNET
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Best Blu-ray player for 2020 - CNET
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The 10 best car insurance companies in the US for 2020 - Roadshow
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11 best TV shows to binge on Disney Plus - CNET
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Zego, which provides real-time communication tools for enterprises and runs a Zoom-style videoconferencing service called TalkLine, raises $50M led by Tencent (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg:
Zego, which provides real-time communication tools for enterprises and runs a Zoom-style videoconferencing service called TalkLine, raises $50M led by Tencent — - Zego offers real-time voice, video technology solutions — Rival Agora raised $350 million in U.S. listing this year
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The Queen's Gambit: That ending explained and all your questions answered - CNET
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TikTok failed to ban flagged 'child predator'
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Best work light for mechanics in 2020 - Roadshow
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Donald Trump Is Attacking the Very Core of America
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Bundle Up! This Winter’s Best Tech Might Be a Good Coat
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iPhone 12 vs. Pixel 5: Apple and Google's 5G flagships compared - CNET
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Meng Wanzhou: Questions over Huawei executive’s arrest as legal battle continues
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How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories
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iPhone 12 review: One of our highest-rated phones of all time - CNET
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Researchers have developed a deep learning technique that can significantly decrease the computational capacity required to solve partial differential equations (Karen Hao/MIT Technology Review)
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
Researchers have developed a deep learning technique that can significantly decrease the computational capacity required to solve partial differential equations — Partial differential equations can describe everything from planetary motion to plate tectonics, but they're notoriously hard to solve.
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Galaxy S20 FE: This stellar phone is the best Samsung buy in 2020 - CNET
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Saturday, October 31, 2020
A profile of Discord, which lies at the center of the gaming world with 100M+ MAUs, as it pushes to turn into a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers (David Pierce/Protocol)
David Pierce / Protocol:
A profile of Discord, which lies at the center of the gaming world with 100M+ MAUs, as it pushes to turn into a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers — Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends …
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Cloud video surveillance company Eagle Eye Networks raises $40M Series E from Accel to invest in new AI projects such as license plate recognition (Christine Hall/Crunchbase News)
Christine Hall / Crunchbase News:
Cloud video surveillance company Eagle Eye Networks raises $40M Series E from Accel to invest in new AI projects such as license plate recognition — Eagle Eye Networks, a cloud video surveillance company, raised $40 million in Series E funding from Accel to advance its platform.
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StackHawk, whose tech helps developers find application security vulnerabilities before they get into production, raises $10M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures (Nick Greenhalgh/Denver Business Journal)
Nick Greenhalgh / Denver Business Journal:
StackHawk, whose tech helps developers find application security vulnerabilities before they get into production, raises $10M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures — With a successful beta at its back and paying customers onboard, Denver application security startup StackHawk announced Tuesday …
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Wise, a fintech startup that partners with other companies so that they can offer business bank accounts to their own customers, raises $12M Series A (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Wise, a fintech startup that partners with other companies so that they can offer business bank accounts to their own customers, raises $12M Series A — Fintech startup Wise has raised a $12 million Series A round. The company offers business bank accounts with an interesting go-to-market strategy.
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Varmilo's Moonlight mechanical keyboard is the smoothest I've ever used - CNET
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Skan, which helps enterprises automate repetitive business processes by combining data engineering with computer vision, raises $14M Series A (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Skan, which helps enterprises automate repetitive business processes by combining data engineering with computer vision, raises $14M Series A — Skan.ai, an AI-enabled process discovery and operational intelligence platform, today closed $14 million in funding.
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DriveWealth raises $56.7M Series C for its digital brokerage services that help broker-dealers and its global online partners access the US securities market (FinSMEs)
FinSMEs:
DriveWealth raises $56.7M Series C for its digital brokerage services that help broker-dealers and its global online partners access the US securities market — DriveWealth, LLC, a Chatam, N.J.-based global digital trading technology company, raised $56.7m in Series C funding.
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The best robot vacuum for 2020: Electrolux, Neato, iRobot Roomba, Eufy and more - CNET
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The Internet Archive starts adding banners on some Wayback Machine pages with links that provide contextual information from fact-checking organizations (Mark Graham/Internet Archive Blogs)
Mark Graham / Internet Archive Blogs:
The Internet Archive starts adding banners on some Wayback Machine pages with links that provide contextual information from fact-checking organizations — Fact checking organizations and origin websites sometimes have information about pages archived in the Wayback Machine.
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Forty-six top US companies including Apple, Google, and Twitter have filed an amicus brief supporting a legal challenge to block Trump admin's H-1B visa changes (Nandita Mathur/Livemint)
Nandita Mathur / Livemint:
Forty-six top US companies including Apple, Google, and Twitter have filed an amicus brief supporting a legal challenge to block Trump admin's H-1B visa changes — - The move comes in the wake of the US administration's proposal to scrap the computerized lottery system to grant H-1B work visas …
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Odaseva, a France-based data protection services provider for large-scale Salesforce customers, raises $25M Series B led by Eight Roads Ventures (Annie Musgrove/Tech.eu)
Annie Musgrove / Tech.eu:
Odaseva, a France-based data protection services provider for large-scale Salesforce customers, raises $25M Series B led by Eight Roads Ventures — French SaaS company Odaseva has raised $25 million in Series B funding to continue growing its data governance platform for enterprise.
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Joe Biden has finally disclosed who is raising him big money just days before Election Day
Biden has been sharply breaking from precedent in his Democratic Party.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden finally disclosed the roster of his biggest fundraisers on Saturday, unveiling the names of the 820 people who have helped him build a big-money juggernaut.
The list includes Biden surrogates like former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA); Hollywood filmmakers like Lee Daniels and Jeffrey Katzenberg; Silicon Valley billionaires like Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. The campaign did not specify how much these people raised for Biden efforts beyond that it was more than $100,000.
The release on a Saturday evening came at the last possible moment: Election Day is on Tuesday, and more than 90 million people have already voted, having done so without clarity on who his largest fundraisers are or what influence they may have had on his candidacy. Biden’s last-minute disclosure was a sharp departure from precedent in the Democratic Party, whose presidential candidates have regularly disclosed their so-called “bundlers” in a nod to transparency.
And that’s why campaign-finance reformers had grown concerned that Biden had not yet followed his predecessors Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s lead in releasing his bundlers for the general election.
Biden’s campaign had declined to answer inquiries about their bundlers until last week, when it told The New York Times that it would release their names by the end of October (which ended Saturday.) Both Obama and Clinton released updates on the list of people helping them raise big money at consistent intervals; Biden’s only prior update came on a Friday evening just after Christmas in 2019 during the Democratic primary with about 230 names, before his bundling operation beefed up in earnest.
“Congratulations on clearing an artificially low bar they set for themselves that defeats the entire purpose of transparency — allowing voters to know who is funding the campaigns asking for their support before casting their ballots,” said Tyson Brody, a Democratic operative who worked for Bernie Sanders and backs Biden, but is critical of the influence of large campaign contributors.
It makes strategic sense that the Biden campaign would not to draw attention to the bundlers who have helped him turn a lagging fundraising operation into a surprising powerhouse. Biden has worked to position himself as the candidate with the interest of the working and middle classes in mind, giving himself the nickname “Middle-Class Joe,” and casting the general election “as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue.”
And so, the Biden campaign has tried to draw focus to its small-dollar, online fundraising operation, rather than the celebrities, Silicon Valley billionaires, and Wall Street executives whose support undercuts some of the campaign’s messaging. That’s an especially important task for Biden given that many of these characters are prone to draw the scorn of the left, which is already skeptical of Biden and wants to see big campaign contributors play a smaller role in politics.
And the Trump campaign hasn’t been in much of a place to argue for transparency. Trump hasn’t released any information about his own bundlers at all.
So there’s been limited scrutiny. The upshot of that is that the 90 million people who have already cast ballots ended up voting with very limited information about the people who helped the campaigns raise the money that may have influenced those very votes.
The debate over bundler disclosure reflects a key campaign question of the Trump era: Should Trump’s own tactics set the standard for his Democratic rivals? Or should Democrats — who claim to prioritize reducing the role of money in politics — aspire to a higher, or at least the pre-Trump, standard?
Campaigns are only legally required to disclose bundlers who are registered lobbyists — everything else is voluntary. Trump and his most immediate GOP predecessor at the top of the ticket, Mitt Romney, declined to share any additional information. But prior to their campaigns, there had been a bipartisan tradition of at least offering some information in order to help voters understand who carried unofficial influence in their campaign; that was done by both John McCain and George W. Bush, who pioneered the modern bundling system and made being a bundler into something of a bragging right.
Bundlers do the often painstaking work of soliciting their networks for high-dollar campaign contributions: inviting their business associates to campaign events, making introductions to campaign staffers, and recruiting more bundlers to serve alongside them. Bundling can often end up be fiercely competitive, with campaigns closely tracking how much individuals have raised and bundlers sometimes finding themselves in competition for positions on leaderboards.
The Biden campaign has six levels of membership for its finance committee: ranging from a “Protector” who helps the campaign raise $50,000 to a “Biden Victory Partner” who brings home $2.5 million, according to a campaign document seen by Recode. Mementos that Biden has sent that top level of bundler include a gold-and-blue pin.
The Biden campaign sends out these buttons to the bundlers who have raised over $2.5 million for his bid.
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) October 26, 2020
A reminder of how the Joe Biden big-money machine works. pic.twitter.com/GRIYE0Otsl
Despite his preference to talk about his low-dollar fundraising operation, Biden has built an impressive big-money machine.
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Iconic James Bond locations in real life: How to travel like 007 - CNET
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Robot Bores: AI-powered awkward first date
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Profile of Shield AI, which raised money from a16z and others to develop autonomous military drones that scan buildings to help soldiers clear them (Elliott Ackerman/Wired)
Elliott Ackerman / Wired:
Profile of Shield AI, which raised money from a16z and others to develop autonomous military drones that scan buildings to help soldiers clear them — On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.
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Friday, October 30, 2020
CISA, FBI say an Iran-linked APT targeted unsecured state election websites to harvest US voter info used to send threatening emails to some Democratic voters (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
CISA, FBI say an Iran-linked APT targeted unsecured state election websites to harvest US voter info used to send threatening emails to some Democratic voters — DHS CISA and the FBI today shared more info on how an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group was able to harvest voter registration info …
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The best soundbar for 2020: Vizio, Sonos, Polk, Yamaha, Roku and more - CNET
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How social media is preparing for US election chaos
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Hands-on with the Dash Cart at an Amazon Fresh store: cart sensors worked fine, but a two-bag limit, bag fill limit, and real-world hassles hinder experience (Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat)
Jeremy Horwitz / VentureBeat:
Hands-on with the Dash Cart at an Amazon Fresh store: cart sensors worked fine, but a two-bag limit, bag fill limit, and real-world hassles hinder experience — There were no lines outside Irvine, California's new Amazon Fresh grocery store on its opening day last week …
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Halloween's here: Weird horror films and TV shows you may have overlooked - CNET
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Apple rejects an app designed to verify a person's ballot status in PA, says the app violates its guideline which forbids compiling user data without consent (Mikey Campbell/AppleInsider)
Mikey Campbell / AppleInsider:
Apple rejects an app designed to verify a person's ballot status in PA, says the app violates its guideline which forbids compiling user data without consent — Apple on Friday rejected an app designed to ensure ballots are being correctly counted in Pennsylvania, saying the software violates App Store privacy guidelines.
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Deploying and using the Document Understanding Solution
Based on our day to day experience, the information we consume is entirely digital. We read the news on our mobile devices far more than we do from printed copy newspapers. Tickets for sporting events, music concerts, and airline travel are stored in apps on our phones. One could go weeks or longer without needing to have any paper currency in his or her wallet, as digital payments are ubiquitous. However, many companies across different industries still primarily operate on manual, paper-based processes. For example, healthcare payors, construction companies, and law firms deal with billions of documents and forms, making the process of finding information difficult and time-consuming. When documents are found, extracting information through manual data entry can be slow, expensive, and error prone, resulting in increases in compliance risks. Furthermore, domain experts need to identify and categorize domain-specific phrases and keywords (or entities), or use traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and keyword detection software that requires manual customization. These approaches can create scrambled output and unusable results. AWS AI services such as Amazon Kendra, Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Comprehend Medical help solve these challenges by automating data extraction and comprehension using machine learning (ML).
Overview of the Document Understanding Solution
The Document Understanding Solution (DUS) allows you to use the power of AWS AI for enterprise search, document digitization, discovery, and extraction and redaction of select information. Part of the Intelligent Document Processing services offered from AWS, this solution uses AWS artificial intelligence (AI) services to solve business problems.
Search and discovery
These challenges exist in almost every business vertical. Imagine a manufacturer that has to maintain archives of thousands – if not millions – of product and tool specifications. Without document digitization of archives, there could be massive underutilization of their highly valuable tool data and information retrieval could be complex and costly. In another example, a company in the financial industry could have 1000s of financial reports in paper format. Without a simple way to extract and digitize this data, it could take an extensive manual effort to keypunch it.
To help with these situations, DUS leverages multiple ML services, including Amazon Textract. Amazon Textract is a fully managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. Amazon Textract will move the data from the documents to a format that can be readily searched. Next, Amazon Kendra and Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) are available to provide the end user search experience in DUS. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Amazon Kendra uses ML to obtain better results for natural language questions, and will return an exact answer from within a document, whether that is a text snippet, FAQ, or a PDF document. In addition to Amazon Kendra, the DUS provides a rich search experience to the user through the use of Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at scale.
Control and compliance
In addition to search, the ability to analyze documents at scale is essential. Amazon Textract extracts text from documents, which can then be input into Amazon Comprehend or Amazon Comprehend Medical. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It can identify key phrases and entities, such as places, people, and brands. Amazon Comprehend Medical is similar to Comprehend. It is a natural language processing service that makes it easy to use machine learning to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text. It can identify medical entities, such as medical conditions and medications.
Identifying these key pieces of information allows for compliance controls through redaction. For example, an insurer could use this solution to feed a workflow that automatically redacts personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI) for their review before archiving claim forms by automatically recognizing the important key-value pairs and entities that require protection.
Other industries can also use this solution for complying with regulatory standards, such as GDPR and HIPAA. For example, this solution could be used by a law firm to redact PII, organization names or brand names. Another example includes a security agency needing to redact all vital information such as names, locations and/or dates from a case file for data security or privacy concerns.
Workflow automation
The DUS solution delivers results at scale in production workflows. Organizations can more rapidly process documents such as insurance claims and forms, and seamlessly extract tables from PDFs into CSVs to conduct additional analysis. With detection and categorization of medical entities and ICD-10-CM ontologies, medical institutes can recognize exponential savings in workforce, time, and other resources that are spent identifying and classifying patient information. All the data is stored by the solution in easily accessible formats, such as CSV and JSON files, which can be fed into downstream pipelines. Additionally, the bulk processing feature in DUS allows you to import a large number of documents directly for processing and analysis.
The following diagram illustrates the DUS architecture.
Deploying DUS
For instructions on setting up DUS, see Document Understanding Solution on AWS Solutions.
Deploying DUS sets up a web application that you can use for document understanding. The deployment includes setting up infrastructure in your AWS account and pre-loading sample documents.
Using DUS
Once you have successfully completed deploying the DUS demo, you are then provided with instructions on how to login into the application. After logging in, you are directed to the homepage, as seen below. You have three options which cover the common use-cases in document understanding solution: Discovery, Compliance, and Workflow Automation.
When you select the Discovery track you will be directed to the preloaded documents page or the Document List page. You may select one of the preloaded sample documents or upload your own document. From here, you can search for a specific document by using a phrase or keyword.
If you decide to upload your own document, choose upload your own documents above the available documents. You will then be directed to a new page to upload your own documents. This page also has sample documents from different industry verticals for you to experiment with.
Back on the Document List page, you will find some PDF and image files. Text in these documents are not actually tagged or available to use by default. However, since these documents have been processed by the solution, you will now be able to search for information within these documents. If you decide to search for a specific phrase or keyword in the search bar, then the solution will analyze the text it has extracted from the documents and provide you with search results. The search results can be displayed in three different ways; a comparative view of Amazon ES (traditional search) and Amazon Kendra (semantic search), just Amazon ES or just Amazon Kendra .
For Amazon Kendra results, you also have the option to provide feedback by either up-voting or down-voting an Amazon Kendra suggested answer.
Amazon Kendra also supports filtering based on user context. Under the Amazon Kendra results view, you can filter results based on the users for the preloaded documents. Click the Filter button to the right of the Amazon Kendra Results title. You can then select a persona and one of the suggested questions to display filtered results. Amazon Kendra will then rank results based on the selected persona. You can toggle between the various personas to compare how the results differ. For demonstration purposes, the Document Understanding Solution comes with preloaded documents and personas from the medical industry. You will be able to notice that based on the question and persona selected, results are ranked differently creating a more targeted search experience for the user.
From the Document List search results view, you can select a document that you want to further explore. This will direct you to the Document Details page. See the following image.
The following image shows the tool bar above the search bar, where you can choose to see different types of information from the document.
The tabs have the following functions:
- Preview – Under this tab, you are able to view the original document as well as download a searchable PDF version of the document. This helps users to convert their documents – be it images or PDFs into easily searchable PDF files.
- Raw Text – Under this tab, you can access all the text identified in the file.
- Key-Value Pairs – Under this tab, key-value pairs from the document are highlighted. In this process, all forms in the document are identified and stored in a key-value pair format. If desired, you can download a CSV file of the key-value pairs. This is especially useful for organizations that have structured data and would want to automate their data extraction and storage workflows. For example, organizations that have a lot of forms like job applications or medical patient forms.
- Tables – Under this tab, you can view all the tables identified in the document. Like the key-value pairs, you can download the tables in the CSV format. Companies dealing with balance sheets or with invoices would find this feature extremely useful since it allows users to easily convert tables, images and PDFs into CSV files which can then be used for further analysis.
- Entities and Medical Entities – Under these tabs, you can find the general and medical entities in the document respectively. These entities include persons, locations, dates, PHI and medical information which helps organization to easily identify and extract critical medical data in a document.
For exploring redaction controls, choose the Compliance option on the toolbar. Here you can choose to redact information like key-value pairs, entities, medical entities or even keyword matches by switching to the respective tabs on the tool bar and choosing Redact. One example of how this feature may be useful is to consider a clinic that wants to redact PHI information before they decide to share medical records. Another example is an organization that wants to redact specific information identified as keylue pairs in forms present in their documents. As seen in the following image, you can redact information, download the redacted document and even clear redactions after use.
In terms of Workflow Automation, the Document Understanding Solution also provides some input and output capabilities via the AWS Console which makes it easier to integrate DUS into an existing pipeline. DUS supports a bulk document processing mode, in which you can simply input documents into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket which will be asynchronously analyzed and made available in the application. More information on bulk processing is available on the AWS Solutions Implementation Guide. Results from the different AWS AI services are all stored within Amazon S3 buckets and the corresponding metadata is available in Amazon DynamoDB tables. This helps users of the solution to build downstream pipelines from these datastores that hold the document analysis data.
Summary:
This post reviewed how you can integrate Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and Amazon Kendra to conduct enterprise search, document digitization, document discovery, and extraction and redaction of select information.
To access the DUS source code, see Document Understanding Solution on GitHub. This solution has been made open source so that you can extend and incorporate the solution into your AWS workflows.
About the Authors
Simran Baxendale is a Program Manager in the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. She helps define, coordinate and execute program strategy for the demos applications team.
Curtis Bray is a manager in the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. He leads the demos applications team that focuses on building use case based demos that show customers how to unlock the power of AWS AI/ML services to solve real world business problems.
Alex Chirayath is an SDE in the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. He helps customers adopt AWS AI services by building solutions to address common business problems.
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The best beer subscription boxes - CNET
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