Friday, April 17, 2020
Covid-19 fear: Electronics brands Samsung, Apple let offline stores sell online
Car pooling may take a back seat post virus attack
London-based BenevolentAI, which uses drug industry data and research to discover new drug applications, highlights the promise of AI in fight against COVID-19 (Tom Simonite/Wired)
London-based BenevolentAI, which uses drug industry data and research to discover new drug applications, highlights the promise of AI in fight against COVID-19 — Software suggested an arthritis drug might quell an out-of-control immune response that damages the lungs. Now it's being tested in a clinical trial.
NBC marks Peacock “soft launch” with striking teaser for Brave New World
Alden Ehrenreich stars as antihero John the Savage in NBC Peacock's forthcoming series Brave New World, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's seminal dystopian novel.
NBC's Peacock streaming service marked this week's "soft launch" with a short teaser trailer for one of its original programs: Brave New World, an adaptation of the ultimate dystopian science fiction novel by Aldous Huxley. It's short on details but visually striking, so while Peacock is relatively late to the streaming scene, the series looks like it could be a winner for the fledgling service.
Brave New World (the novel) was inspired by H.G. Wells' optimistic utopian novels. Huxley set out to write a parody of them, but eventually "got caught up in the excitement" of creating his own "negative utopia." He also cited D.H. Lawrence as an influence, although George Orwell noted strong similarities to a 1921 Russian science fiction novel, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. (Huxley was openly accused of plagiarism by Polish author Mieczyslaw Smolarski, who believed the similarities to two of his novels were too strong to be "accidental analogy.") The fact that Huxley wrote Brave New World as the Great Depression spread from the US to the UK influenced its theme of achieving stability, even at the cost of individual freedoms.
Brave New World is set in the year 2540, in the World State city of London, where people are born in artificial wombs and indoctrinated through "sleep-learning" to fit into their assigned predetermined caste. Citizens regularly consume a drug called soma (part anti-depressant, part hallucinogen) to keep them docile and conform to the strict social laws. Promiscuity is encouraged, but pregnancy (for women) is a cause for shame. Needless to say, both art and science (albeit to a lesser extent) are viewed with suspicion. "Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive," Resident World Controller of Western Europe Mustapha Mond tells the novel's antihero protagonist, John the Savage. "Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."
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In a setback to Amazon, a federal judge put the JEDI cloud contract lawsuit on hold, following a DOD report that dismissed objections to project (David Shepardson/Reuters)
In a setback to Amazon, a federal judge put the JEDI cloud contract lawsuit on hold, following a DOD report that dismissed objections to project — A U.S. judge on Friday put on hold a suit by Amazon.com Inc challenging the Pentagon's decision to award a $10 billion contract to Microsoft Corp.
How Trump's 2020 campaign is poised to replicate its 2016 success on Facebook, using FB's agnostic algorithmic ad tools as intended and expanding Trump's base (Ian Bogost/The Atlantic)
How Trump's 2020 campaign is poised to replicate its 2016 success on Facebook, using FB's agnostic algorithmic ad tools as intended and expanding Trump's base — Look at a thousand of the millions of Facebook ads Donald Trump has run, and it's hard to believe that they represent a winning strategy.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Zoom Meeting App Rolls Out New Measures as Security Fears Mount
Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency Gets Revamp in Response to Backlash
Pony.ai tests autonomous delivery service in Irvine, CA for purchases on ecommerce site Yamibuy, as lockdowns have suspended testing of its robotaxi service (Christian Shepherd/Financial Times)
Pony.ai tests autonomous delivery service in Irvine, CA for purchases on ecommerce site Yamibuy, as lockdowns have suspended testing of its robotaxi service — Chinese autonomous vehicle start-up repurposes fleet to transport goods in California — Chinese autonomous vehicle start …
Zoom rival BlueJeans snapped up by Verizon for less than $500 million
Uber expects up to $2.2B impairment charge, drop in quarterly revenue due to pandemic
Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of "culturally neutered" companies that have sought to distance themselves from "masculine energy" (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)
Riley Griffin / Bloomberg : Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves ...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
