Interesting
Reads – 2018-09-21
Contents
Articles
- The world's most prolific writer is a Chinese algorithm
- Data Localisation: A matter of rule of law and economic development
- Should India Stay Away from the Fourth Revolution?
- Science Daily Email Newsletters
- Not the apple of his eye: Steve Jobs' daughter recalls a complicated man
- The right trousers: robotic pants could help disabled walk again
- Antarctic glacier gets new name in wake of sexual harassment finding
- How Roblox Is Training The Next Generation Of Gaming Entrepreneurs
- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says there's opportunity in these 13 areas to make the world better
- The ABCs of Detecting and Preventing Phishing
Events /
Announcements
- SETS - National Workshop on “Blockchain Technology, Platforms and Security”
- CONNECT-2018: Conference and Exposition on Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
- ISDA-18: The 18th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications
- Webinar – Exploring the ROI of Blockchain Technology
- USAID Grant Funding for Development Innovation Ventures
- ICDCN-2019: The 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
- Mobile app and 2.7 lakh computers for free practice for JEE, UGC tests
========================================================
Articles
The
world's most prolific writer is a Chinese algorithm
“Inflatable
duck baby pool with canopy.” “Hot selling colourful temporary full arm tattoo
for men.” “Splendid reusable dog pee pad (minimum order: 500).”
Load
up the homepage for e-commerce giant, Alibaba – a wholesale shopping site
that’s more or less China’s answer to eBay – and you’ll find images and
descriptions of anything you could wish to buy, from kitchen sinks to luxury
yachts. Every item has a short headline, but most are little more than lists of
keywords: hand-picked search terms to ensure this USB phone charger or that
pair of flame-resistant overalls float to the top in a sea of thousands upon
thousands of similar items.
It
sounds simple, but there’s an art to this copywriting. Yet Alibaba recently
revealed that it is training an artificial intelligence to generate these item
descriptions automatically – and they’re not the only ones. Over the last few
decades AIs have been taught to compose music, paint pictures and write (bad)
poems. Now they’re writing advertising copy, 20,000 lines of it a second.
Data
Localisation: A matter of rule of law and economic development
A
global Internet with unrestrained global flow of data has been held up as the
ideal. However, while there is great value in it, there are also other, often
competing, imperatives of ensuring rule of law over the internet and data, and
using local and national data for encouraging domestic digital industry and for
policy making and governance. It is no longer possible to speak of 'free flow
of data' in any absolute sense, neither can 'data localisation' be instinctively
condemned. Different data need different treatments, which can lie on a
spectrum between these two ends. This policy brief by IT for Change examines
how 'data localisation' is often necessary for ensuring the rule of law and for
digital industrialisation of developing countries. Going forward we need more
nuanced views on the issues of global free flow of data and data localisation.
Related
story: Bringing data under the rule of law
Should India Stay Away from the Fourth Revolution?
Critics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution raise
many concerns against it mainly alleging job losses and rise in inequality.
This article debunks these concerns by emphasizing how the same concerns would
have been raised at the time of the First Industrial Revolution as well. We
then see what happened subsequently benefitting from our knowledge of history.
We then go on to examine why things unfolded that way tracing the reasons to
the very roots of human behavior. These factors still remain the same,
therefore there is every reason to expect that like the previous three, the
Fourth Revolution too would be a productivity enhancing one and make lives
better for all of us. Any job losses would at best be transitory. We then
finally argue that whether she wants the Fourth or not, it will impact India
and her economy carried by global trade and capital flows. Thus the only option
in reality for her is to prepare herself and not shun it. India is already
uniquely poised to reap the benefits. All she needs to do to minimize the
temporary pain is to ease out its business regulations – make it less costly
for entrepreneurs to hire labor because it is basic economic logic that if
hiring labor is more expensive than hiring machines, an entrepreneur will hire
a machine and vice versa. Another critical thing she must do is to develop her
human resource development and incentivize innovations.
Science Daily Email Newsletters
Science Daily offers free access to the latest news
via email newsletters that you can subscribe to at no charge, Each item contained in a newsletter includes
the story's headline, summary, and link back to the full-text version on the
Science Daily web site. Newsletters will be delivered to your email inbox
automatically. In order to subscribe,
just click on one of the links below marked by an email letter icon. You'll be
taken to a sign-up form where you can enter the email address that you'd like
to use to receive the newsletters.
It also offers more than 400 specific email
newsletters in a variety of topics. Click on the headings below to jump to the
full list of topics within each of Science Daily's main sections. The link to
the sign-up form for each topical email newsletter is marked by an email letter
icon.
Not the apple of his eye: Steve Jobs' daughter recalls a complicated
man
Lisa Brennan-Jobs didn’t escape her father's dark
side – he could be controlling and neglectful, she reveals in a telling yet
tender memoir that seeks to set the record straight.
When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told his daughter
Lisa Brennan-Jobs that the Apple Lisa computer was not named after her, it was
not a cruel lie to a little girl, she insists – he was teaching her "not
to ride on his coat-tails".
When Jobs refused to install heat in her bedroom, he
was not being callous, she says – he was instilling in her a "value
system". When a dying Jobs told Brennan-Jobs that she smelled "like a
toilet", it was not a hateful snipe, she maintains – he was merely showing
her "honesty".
It's a strange thing to write a devastating memoir
with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at
all. Yet that's exactly what Brennan-Jobs has done in a new memoir, Small Fry.
Thanks to a dozen other biographies and films, Apple obsessives already know
the broad outlines of Brennan-Jobs' early life: Jobs fathered her at 23, then
denied paternity despite a DNA match, and gave little in financial or emotional
support even as he became a god of the early computing era. Small Fry is
Brennan-Jobs' effort to reclaim her story for herself.
The
right trousers: robotic pants could help disabled walk again
Robo-trousers
that help people stand up, walk upstairs and get out and about are being
designed by British scientists in a government-funded scheme to help the
elderly and disabled stay mobile. The University of Bristol is developing
"smart trousers" with artificial muscles which give frail people
bionic strength so they can live independently for longer.
Antarctic
glacier gets new name in wake of sexual harassment finding
The changes sparked by the #MeToo movement have now reached Antarctic glaciers.
Last week, the Marchant Glacier was renamed the
Matataua Glacier in the wake of a finding of sexual harassment against its
namesake, geologist David Marchant. The change was made by the U.S. Board on
Geographic Names (BGN) in Reston, Virginia, an interdepartment agency of the
U.S. government.
“Boston University determined David Marchant
violated Title IX regulations, and U.S. policy says geographic features are to
be named for people who have made extraordinary or outstanding contributions to
the advancement of polar science,” says Kelly Falkner, director of the Office
of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia,
the lead agency for the U.S. Antarctic program. “Boston University found
Marchant created an environment that was hostile and harmful to fellow researchers,
particularly women. That behavior is unacceptable and impedes scientific
progress,” Falkner adds.
Related
story: Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at
noted scientist
Related
story: Boston University concludes geologist sexually harassed student
Related
story: World’s largest general science society OKs stripping honors from
scientists found to be sexual harassers
Related
story: NIH director expresses concern but offers no new policy on sexual
harassment for grantees
Related
story: Former head of climate change panel to stand trial for harassment
(in India)
How
Roblox Is Training The Next Generation Of Gaming Entrepreneurs
Roblox,
based in San Mateo, California, is a combination gaming and social media
platform. There are millions of games that players—mostly young people—can
explore with their friends, chatting and interacting all the way. But what’s
unique about Roblox is that the gaming company isn’t in the business of making
games—it just provides the tools and the platform for kids to make their own
unique creations. Most impressively, Roblox has turned its tween audience into
an army of fresh-faced entrepreneurs.
The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says there's opportunity in these 13 areas to
make the world better
In
2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation published its first annual
"Goalkeepers" report, highlighting global data to show that humanity
is headed in the right direction.
The
second annual report, released recently, focuses on the "formidable
challenge" of improving the lives of people in low-income countries, from
reducing poverty to increasing access to safe sanitation, with a particular
emphasis on African countries.
The
ABCs of Detecting and Preventing Phishing
Have you ever considered that you could be a target for phishing attacks?
It’s
not a new issue, but it’s a rising threat. Phishing attackers have been
constantly growing and improving their techniques. Let’s see how you can
actually start preventing phishing, since cybercriminal strategies became so convincing
that you can barely distinguish them from harmless communications.
And
all it takes to fall into their trap is a fraction of a second.
Events
/ Announcements
SETS - National
Workshop on “Blockchain Technology, Platforms and Security”
Society
for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS) is organising a National
Workshop on “Blockchain Technology, Platforms and Security” on 12th October
2018 at Chennai.
Contact:
Dr. P. Nageswara Rao, Workshop Coordinator. Email: workshop@setsindia.net Mobile: 9884143131, Landline: 044-66632506
CONNECT-2018: Conference
and Exposition on Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
CONNECT – the flagship event on Information and Communication Technology has been focusing on the Tamil Nadu’s leadership position in the ICT sector. The IT corridor in Chennai was conceptualized under CONNECT 2001 giving job opportunities to lakhs of people.
CONNECT-2018
on the theme “Accelerating Progress: Inclusive Digital Growth” is being
organised during 9-10 October 2018 at Hotel
Feathers, Chennai
Website:
https://ciiconnect.org
Contact:
contact Ms P Diwya at p.diwya@cii.in / 044-42444555 (541)
The 18th
International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications
ISDA
2018 is co-organized by Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), and will
take place December 6-8, 2018 at VIT Vellore.
Last
date for paper submission: 30th
Sep 2018
Webinar –
Exploring the ROI of Blockchain Technology
The
World Economic Forum is forecasting blockchain to account for up to 10% of
global GDP by 2027, and Innovators like you are hungry to know: will blockchain
live up to its hype? Find out in our next Now Being Served webinar – Exploring
the ROI of Blockchain Technology. You’ll
hear from top Forrester analysts and IBM Blockchain clients, learning how
companies in in various industries are creating blockchain-based business
models to transform the way they work. The webinar is scheduled on 27th
Sep 2018 at Noon EST
USAID Grant
Funding for Development Innovation Ventures
USAID
has relaunched its open innovation program, Development Innovation Ventures
(DIV), and is now accepting grant applications for products, technologies,
services, or applications that can scale breakthrough solutions to critical
global development challenges to improve millions of lives.
Proposals
for funding are accepted year-round across three stages, from any type of organization,
in any country in which USAID operates. Development Innovation Ventures offers
three tiers of startup financing:
Stage
1: Proof of Concept ideas can receive up to $200,000 in seed funding over 3
years
Stage
2: Testing and Positioning for Scale applicants can get $200,000 to $1,500,000
in supporting grants for 3 years
Stage
3: Scaling solutions can ask for $1,500,000 to $5,000,000 in investments over 5
years
In
addition to the donor funding listed above, DIV provides $1,500,000 for
research reports and evaluations that generate rigorous evidence of an
innovation’s impact and potential for expansion.
ICDCN-2019: The
20th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking
The
20th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN
2019), to be held between Jan 4-7, 2019 at Indian Institute of Sciences,
Bangalore, India will have a workshop on security privacy and dependability in
Smart and Connected Communities titled PerSeC3.
Deadline
for workshop paper submission: 30th Sep 2018
Mobile app and
2.7 lakh computers for free practice for JEE, UGC tests
The
National Testing Agency (NTA) has launched a mobile application to enable the
JEE aspirants and the UGC-NET candidates prepare for their tests Engineering
aspirants can prepare for the upcoming Joint Entrance Examination-Main
(JEE-Main) by taking mock tests on their smartphones. Higher Education students
gearing up for the University Grants Commission-National Eligibility Test
(UGC-NET) can also take mock tests ahead of their examinations to be held in
December this year. The National Testing Agency (NTA) has launched a mobile
application to enable the JEE aspirants and the UGC-NET candidates prepare for
their tests using their mobile phones. The mobile application can be downloaded
from the play store. Students, who do not have any smartphone or computer at
home, can also practice for the two competitive examinations at the test
practice centre, set up by the NTA in a total of 622 districts across the
country.
For
registration and more details visit https://www.nta.ac.in
For
mobile app visit https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nationaltestingagency
Archives
of Interesting Reads
To
access the past posts of Interesting Reads, pl. visit
Feedback
We
will be pleased to have your feedback on the “Interesting Reads” posts being
sent once in five days.
Pl.
share the links of any interesting things you come across so that we can
include them in these email posts.
Also,
pl. share the email ids of your colleagues, friends, peers and contacts, if you
want them to be included in the google group to get regular posts.
Pl.
send all your communications to hrmohan.ieee@gmail.com
With
regards
HR
Mohan
