Mislead

Credit: CC0 Public Domain When media coverage doesn't include the numerical magnitude of a scientific study's effect, the risk of readers developing biases increases significantly, according to a new University of Michigan study. The study is published in the journal Psychological Science. People may incorrectly assume that the findings are of…

New research analyzed texts from Silicon Valley to understand the influence of digital capitalism today. The research revealed that solutionism, the belief that technological solutions can address societal issues profitably, is dominant among tech leaders and is spreading in the digital economy. Nachtwey critiques this ideology, arguing that it overlooks democratic processes and often fails to address real problems, exemplified by the practices of companies like Tesla and Meta. Credit: SciTechDaily.com How significantly…

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election. The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or…

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or…

Shortcomings of current metagenomic analyses. Credit: Serrano-Antón et al., CC-BY 4.0Research study of simulated microbial communities shows analyses are flawed by incomplete <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>DNA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in…

Market regulator Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has passed two interim orders against entities that used YouTube channels to manipulate stocks, barring them from the capital markets. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), in preliminary investigations, identified 46 entities that used the video streaming platform to pump and dump stocks. These entities — a mix of traders and market analysts — used four YouTube channels to market stocks by uploading misleading videos on YouTube channels and…

And why ML interpretations are not always reliablePhoto by Jason Leung on UnsplashIf there is something I really hate hearing is the classical authority argument “Statistics shows that *insert a fact here*”.With the democratization of statistical tools and machine learning, it is easier than ever to crunch some numbers into insights. Still, everyone should pay attention about not fall into some very counterintuitive traps that can lead to bias studies made a bit too fast or without the view of an expert of the subject.In…

Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation” is yet another movie about slavery. Our Black colleagues express a resounding fatigue with films on Black oppression and triumph. Watching these films is stressful, and people grieve those ancestors brutalized for profit and pleasure. But the main reason these movies drain so many people is that they risk rendering the past as over and offer only salvation as a route to survival. Critical portrayals of U.S. history are timely: The Supreme Court is debating outlawing affirmative action, and…

Ellison gave her first public account of her actions in a Dec. 19 plea hearing in Manhattan federal court. “I knew that it was wrong,” she said, according to a transcript of the hearing. Former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison said she and FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried knowingly misled lenders about how much the trading firm was borrowing from the cryptocurrency exchange. Ellison gave her first public account of her actions in a Dec. 19 plea hearing in Manhattan federal court. “I knew that it was wrong,” she…

Planning to shop for Christmas. The Black Friday sale will live very soon and so the botnet army. Wondering what a botnet army is? They are zombie digital shoppers who will turn upside down your shopping experience. Botnets are essentially cyber-controlled systems infected with malware and viruses and are used for unauthorized access to remote devices. Botnets can steal information, cause information leaks, and DDoS attacks. The remotely infected devices will become zombie computers and often the devices are often tens…