Company executives showed off a new iPad Pro with a larger screen at an event at the Billy Graham Civic Auditorium on Wednesday, including a stylus to write on the screen and detachable keyboard — accessories that the company once ridiculed when it first introduced the iPad as a simple, stripped-down touchscreen device.
Steve Jobs, whose purist vision was instrumental in the original iPad, launched in 2010, once said of other companies’ devices: “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”
When Discrimination Is Baked Into Algorithms
As more companies and services use data to target individuals, those analytics could inadvertently amplify bias.
.. Software that makes decisions based on data like a person’s zip code can reflect, or even amplify, the results of historical or institutional discrimination.“[A]n algorithm is only as good as the data it works with,” Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst write in their article “Big Data’s Disparate Impact,” forthcoming in the California Law Review. “Even in situations where data miners are extremely careful, they can still affect discriminatory results with models that, quite unintentionally, pick out proxy variables for protected classes.”
.. But what about when big data is used to determine a person’s credit score, ability to get hired, or even the length of a prison sentence?
Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.
It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book.
.. The way humans often deal with these situations is that “they make eye contact. On the fly, they make agreements about who has the right of way,” said John Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and expert in driver safety and automation at the University of Wisconsin.
How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive
The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.
.. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper. Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.