1. Technology
5. Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa
Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software
to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to
invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of
concern that someone might be listening.
Sometimes, someone is.
Amazon has employed thousands of people around the world to help improve
the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team
listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The
recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as
part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech
and help it better respond to commands.
The Alexa voice review process, described by seven people who have
worked on the programme, highlights the often-overlooked human role in training
software algorithms. In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa “lives in the
cloud and is always getting smarter.” But like many software tools built to
learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching.
The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees
who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica and from India to Romania,
according to the people who signed non-disclosure agreements barring them from
speaking publicly about the programme. They work nine hours a day, with each
reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two
workers based at Amazon’s Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors
of the Global Worth building in the Romanian capital’s up-and-coming Pipera
district. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and
bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon’s presence.
“We have strict technical and operational safeguards and have a zero
tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct
access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this
workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use
multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits
of our control environment to protect it.”
Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn’t
explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked
up by Alexa. “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and
natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of
frequently asked questions. In Alexa’s privacy settings, Amazon gives users the
option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of
new features.
(Source: www.bloomberg.com; 11th April, 2019)
6. Huawei can bring 5G to India in 20 days if given the green light
At a time when Indian telecom operators are looking to speed up 5G
roll-outs, Huawei India said that it is fully prepared to bring 5G to the
Indian market and can do so in a matter of 20 days once given the green light.
Addressing the India Mobile Conclave, Huawei India CEO Jay Chen said, “We are
committed to the India market and will be happy to work with service providers
and enterprises to bring 5G faster, safer and smarter to this market.”
Chen said that India’s rapid pace of digital adoption is being driven by
the government’s commitment towards digitising key aspects of the digital
economy. “In the last couple of years almost every new innovation introduced to
this market is introduced by Huawei. Massive MIMO is a word we first introduced
in India 5 years back.”
Elaborating on the potential of 5G for an emerging digital economy like
India, Chen said that “5G is like electricity” which will enable all industries
and help realise the digital mission and the goals set by the National Digital
Communications Policy (NDCP). Huawei is a global leader in 5G and it already
has 30 5G commercial contracts globally,” Chen added.
(Source: The Economic Times; 22nd March, 2019)
2. World News
7. Executions are falling worldwide
By one measure, at least, the world might be getting a bit less grisly.
The number of death sentences carried out worldwide fell by 30%, from 993 in
2017 to 690 last year, according to the latest annual count published by
Amnesty International, a human rights organisation. Those numbers are
consistent with the downward trend since the recent high of 2015 when 1,634
people were executed.
A reason to rejoice? Perhaps not. Amnesty’s count includes only known
executions, so it should be treated as the lowest possible estimate of judicial
killings. China, which is considered the most ruthless country when it comes to
capital punishment, has not been included in the total since 2009. Executions
there are thought to be in the thousands.
(Source: www.economist.com; 10th April, 2019)
8. Uber warns it might never make a profit
Uber Technologies has 91 million users, but growth is slowing and it may
never make a profit, the ride-hailing company said in its initial public
offering filing. The document gave the first comprehensive financial picture of
the decade-old company that was started after its founders struggled to get a
cab on a snowy night and has changed the way much of the world travels.
The S-1 filing underscores the rapid growth of Uber’s business in the
last three years and also how a string of public scandals and increased
competition from rivals have weighed on its plans to attract and retain riders.
The disclosure also highlighted how far Uber remains from turning a profit,
with the company cautioning that it expects operating expenses to
“increase significantly in the foreseeable future” and it “may
not achieve profitability”. Uber lost $ 3.03 billion ($ 4.25 billion) in
2018 from operations. The filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission
revealed that Uber had 91 million average monthly active users on its
platforms, including for ride-hailing and Uber Eats, at the end of 2018. This
is up 33.8% from 2017, but growth slowed from 51% a year earlier. Uber in 2018
had revenue of $ 11.3 billion, up around 42% over 2017, again below the 106%
growth the previous year.
Uber set a placeholder amount of $ 1 billion but did not specify the
size of the IPO. It was reported this week that Uber plans to sell around $ 10
billion worth of stock at a valuation of between $ 90 billion and $ 100
billion. Investment bankers had previously told Uber it could be worth as much
as $ 120 billion. Uber would be the largest IPO since that of the Chinese
e-commerce company the Alibaba Group in 2014, which raised $ 25 billion.
After making the public filing, Uber will begin a roadshow of investor
presentations on April 29. The company is on track to price its IPO and begin
trading on the New York Stock Exchange in early May. Uber faces questions over
how it will navigate any transition towards self-driving vehicles, a technology
seen as potentially dramatically lowering costs but which could also disrupt
its business model.
One advantage Uber will likely seek to play up to investors is that it
is the largest player in many of the markets in which it operates. Analysts
consider building scale is crucial for Uber’s business model to become
profitable.
(Source: www.afr.com; 12th April, 2019)
9. Will technical factors push Bitcoin to $ 50,000 in the coming years?
Veteran trader Peter Brandt recently made a bold prediction, saying that
Bitcoin could reach $ 50,000 in the next two years. Credited with forecasting
Bitcoin’s more than 80% decline in 2018, Brandt cited market history and
technical analysis when providing this estimate.
“I believe that charts reflect underlying supply and demand fundamentals
and that’s how we have to look at it,” he stated on Yahoo Finance YFi PM. After
bottoming out in 2015, Bitcoin prices enjoyed a parabolic advance, emphasised
Brandt. Now, he expects crypto currencies will once again enter a parabolic
bull market.
While several analysts emphasised that Brandt’s prediction certainly
could materialise, many were understandably sceptical, emphasising their
wariness of price forecasts. “Peter Brandt’s assessment is purely based on
technical indicators and market history,” noted Joe DiPasquale, CEO of crypto
currency fund of hedge funds, BitBull Capital. “While technical analysis has a
place in all markets, past performance is no guarantee for future results,” he
stated.
“Meanwhile, however, the current rally is consolidating nicely and we
can expect further price appreciation if the trend continues,” added
DiPasquale. Several analysts emphasised the key importance of Bitcoin expanding
its user base, noting that if the digital currency makes enough progress on
this front, it could hit $ 50,000.
(Source: www.forbes.com; 10th April, 2019)
10. Vietnam orders monks to stop profiting from karma rituals
Vietnamese authorities have ordered monks at a popular Buddhist pagoda
to stop “soul summoning” and “bad karma eviction” ceremonies after an
investigation found the rituals were a scam.
Tens of thousands of worshippers have been paying the 18th
century Ba Vang pagoda in northern Quang Ninh province between one million and
several hundred million dong ($ 45 to $ 13,500) to have their bad karma
vanquished, according to the state-run Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper. The
Committee for Religious Affairs, a government body, issued a statement on its
website on Friday saying “the ritual goes against Buddhist philosophy and
violates Vietnam’s law on religion and folk beliefs.”
“It has a negative impact on social order and security,” it added.
Three times a month, monks hold a two-day ceremony to “summon wandering
souls” and “remove bad karma,” demanding donations, supposedly representing
good deeds, to help cure bad karma and make up for supposed bad deeds in
previous lives. Such rituals have been going on for years, but the practice has
drawn unfavourable attention as the amounts demanded by the monks soared to the
point where they began taking payments by bank transfers and by instalments.
Ba Vang pagoda was built on a mountain slope in Uong Bi district of
Quang Ninh province. It was recently renovated and expanded to become one of
Vietnam’s largest pagoda complexes. Only a minority of Vietnam’s 95 million
people follow Buddhism, but many non-Buddhists go to pagodas and temples and
practise a form of folk religion that includes some Buddhist practices.
Religions that are not registered with the government are prohibited. The Ba
Vang pagoda belongs to a registered Vietnamese Buddhist association.
(Source: www.apnews.com; 22nd March, 2019)
11. Black hole snapped: How the picture of one of the universe’s most
secretive objects was clicked
By definition, a black hole can’t be seen. As a cosmic gobbler of all
matter on its periphery, these sinkholes have gravitational fields so powerful
that even light cannot escape them, rendering their contents invisible. As the
concept of black holes (the cemeteries of spent stars above a certain mass and
massive cosmic objects) followed from Einstein’s theories of general
relativity, scientists have had intricate mathematical descriptions and
speculation on how they look, how many of them exist, how they behave, where
they might be located and their relationship to the universe. Based on this,
there has been a plethora of visual and artistic descriptions of black holes.
However, there has never been visual confirmation of their existence, until
now.
On 10th April, 2018 astronomers shared an image, now
christened on Indian Twitter as a “giant medu vada in the sky,” from the
black hole at Messier 87 or M87. It was a blurred, yellowish orange frame
surrounding a black centre. While this wasn’t vastly different from how
astronomers and artists have visualised black holes for decades, it’s still
great to see reality correspond to imagination. The black hole measures 40 billion
km. across – three million times the size of the earth – and is 55 million
light years from earth. (A light year is about 9.46 trillion km.). It is bigger
than our entire solar system and a scientist described it to the BBC as “the
heavyweight champion of black holes in the universe.” The image has been
analysed in six studies co-authored by 200 experts from 60-odd institutions and
published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Since the 1970s, astronomers have known that there are “super massive”
black holes (about a billion times heavier than the sun) in the Milky Way or
galaxies close to it. While black holes themselves are invisible, the region
around them – the luminous frenzy of charged particles from matter in their
vicinity – is, in theory, “visible”. Since black holes are the result, mostly,
of heavy stars collapsing in on themselves, radiation emitted by particles
within the disc are heated to billions of degrees as they swirl around the
black hole at close to the speed of light, before vanishing into them.
The astronomers used a technique known as interferometry, which combines
radiation from eight telescopes from around the world in a way that it appears
as one single telescope capture. What this virtual telescope could capture were
traces – electromagnetic radiation – from jets of particles spewed from the
event horizons of the black hole. This faint radiation, in the form of mostly
radio waves, would have travelled trillions of kilometres and for the telescope
to observe them would be the equivalent of trying to snap a picture of an ant
from the moon.
(Source: www.thehindu.com; 13th
April, 2019)
