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Timnit Gebru, a high-profile AI ethics researcher and leader in the field, has been forced out of Google. Gebru, who announced the news on Twitter Wednesday night, wrote that she was fired by Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean over an email she had written to a list consisting of women and allies at Google Brain. Read More …
Yes, Siri can set timers, alarms, and reminders. But Apple’s voice-enabled AI assistant is much more capable than you might think. The problem is that Apple hasn’t published a definitive list of all the things Siri can do. And while such a list would likely be overwhelmingly massive, here’s a list of lesser-known commands that are truly useful when it comes to making your day a bit easier. “Open [app name]” Your iPhone’s home screen is an unfortunate mess of folders and apps numbering into the zillions. One result is you can never seem to find those apps you downloaded years ago but only need to use once in a while—there’s just no muscle memory involved. For those times, a quick “Hey, Siri—open Couch to 5K” instantly opens up your virtually-cobwebbed fitness app without requiring you to flick through screen after screen to find it. “Take me home” This one’s a godsend for the perpetually lost—especially when in the car. The phrase opens up Maps and starts navigating you back to the comfort of your abode. “Split a check [number] ways” You’re out eating with friends or coworkers and nobody’s itching to pick up the tab. Read More …
E ric Feigl-Ding picked up his phone on the first ring. “Busy,” he said, when asked how things were going. He had just finished up an “epic, long” social media thread, he added—one of hundreds he’s posted about society’s ongoing battle with the coronavirus. “There’s so many different debates in the world of masking and herd immunity and reinfection,” he explained, among other dimensions of the pandemic. “We at FAS, we’ve been kind of monitoring all the debates and how we’re seeing signals in which the data goes one way, the debate goes the other,” he said, referring to his work with the Federation of American Scientists , a nonprofit policy think tank. He rattled off a rapid-fire sampler of hot-button COVID-19 topics: the growing anti-vaxxer movement, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and antibodies, the body of research suggesting masks could decrease viral load, along with a quick mention of the debate among experts about what airborne means. This whirlwind tour through viral COVID-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus—a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate—was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS. The thread was widely criticized by infectious-disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the preprint had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density ; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet—but his influence has only grown. At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on COVID-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to more than a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist Read More …
Shareholders of Pinterest are suing members of the company’s board of directors and several top executives for allegedly ignoring or deliberately enabling discrimination against women and people of color. The suit claims that the board of directors, including Pinterest cofounders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, either actively perpetrated or knowingly ignored high-profile allegations of discrimination and retaliation against Pinterest’s former COO Francoise Brougher and two Black female executives, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks. Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment. The suit singles out Pinterest board chair, cofounder, and CEO Silbermann in particular for creating a boys’ club at the top that systematically ignored claims of pay disparity and an inability to advance for women and people of color. In addition, it alleges that even when employees told Silbermann about Pinterest’s problems, he did nothing to change the situation. “He repeatedly placed himself before the Company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s White, male leadership clique,” the suit reads. In the summer of 2020, Ozoma and Banks first shared their stories of being underpaid, underappreciated, and misleveled on Twitter. The two came forward after Pinterest issued a statement in the wake of the George Floyd protests and said that they wanted to expose the company’s hypocrisy for saying Black lives matter publicly, while mistreating its Black employees privately. (While Pinterest first denied Ozoma and Banks’s allegations, the company has since done an about-face and hired a law firm to assess its internal practices.) “I spoke up so people would know and I want accountability but don’t expect it in a white supremacist system,” Ozoma says. Their story prompted other former and current Pinterest employees to speak out , including Brougher, who filed a gender discrimination lawsuit two months later. Her suit lays out how she was given a different stock compensation vesting schedule than her peers, dramatically affecting her compensation. After she raised concerns, she says, she was cut out of meetings, including the company’s IPO roadshow—even though she was the company’s second-in-command and the only executive who’d participated in an IPO before. She was later fired. Days after Brougher went public, Pinterest employees staged a virtual walkout in support. Pinterest has not commented on the active litigation. This new lawsuit claims that the board’s and executives’ actions have resulted in a breach of fiduciary duty, waste of corporate assets, and abuse of control Read More …
Forget Snapchat or Instagram. The new social network of the moment is a shameless MySpace clone, created by a student developer who was only a few years old during that site’s heyday. The new network in question, SpaceHey , doesn’t hold back in its attempt to re-create MySpace’s mid-aughts vibe. Sign up for the site, and you can create a profile page with status updates, a personal blog, and a list of hobbies. Visit a friend’s page, and you’ll see whether they’re online along with their current mood. And yes, you can customize your profile. SpaceHey is the project of An—he goes by just his first name online —who says he’s an 18-year-old student in Germany. In a nod to MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson , An automatically befriends everyone who creates a profile on the site. On Sunday, he had about 1,000 friends. On Monday, that number had doubled , as sites such as HackerNews and ProductHunt took notice. Over Twitter, An says that while he never experienced MySpace firsthand, he heard plenty about it on the internet and from older friends Read More …