I.
Technology
11.
Facebook working on new tech that can read human brain
Facebook is doubling down on its efforts towards making artificial
intelligence (AI) ubiquitous in its products and next year might see them turn
into reality.
Apparently, it is planning to build a new neural sensor that can read
people’s minds and convert those thoughts into actions. The new project will
push the social media giant further into the AI domain, some instances of which
did not go well with Facebook. Facebook has also announced a new tool that
summarises news articles into bullets so that readers do not have to spend much
time on them, a move that can potentially impact publishers on the social media
platform.
The announcements were made at Facebook’s yearly meeting that
involved everyone working at the company. The details of the meeting are not
available publicly but BuzzFeed News managed to obtain
an audio recording that was broadcast to all employees. Facebook has revealed
some serious plans that are associated with upgrades in the AI category, as the
company ends a predictably difficult year with even tougher events that posed a
challenge.
The neural sensor that the company is said to be developing uses the
resources of CTRL Labs, a company that Facebook acquired in 2019. According to
the report, the sensor will take the neural signals from the brain through the
spinal cord and arms, and right up to the wrist. This will allow users to make
physical actions based on their thoughts. According to Facebook, this will help
users holding a virtual object, typing and controlling a character in a video
game. This is uncannily similar to the nascent brain-reading technology that
Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is working on. It will be interesting to see what
spin Facebook gives to this tech.
Facebook has of late seen itself caught in several controversies,
including political inclination in India, discontent among employees and, most
importantly, the anti-trust cases over dominance in the US and elsewhere. One of
the controversies was the removal of hate speech which uses AI-powered tools
significantly. Facebook is now expanding its range to cover even more AI-enabled
products, including the new summarising app for news articles. It said some
20,000 employees have joined Facebook this year and that people were using
Facebook and its services more than ever, thanks to the pandemic.
But for Facebook AI is not a small accessory for its services to take
advantage. The social media giant is pegging AI as the panacea for all the
problems that it has faced and will likely deal with in the future. ‘We are
paving the way for breakthrough new experiences that, without hyperbole, will
improve the lives of billions,’ said Mike Schroepfer,
chief technology officer in the briefing, as per BuzzFeed News.
Facebook is using AI for almost everything, from curbing the spread
of misinformation on its social media platforms to removing hate speech, along
with scanning political content. Schroepfer even said
that AI is helping Facebook detect 95% of the hate speech rampant on the
platform. However, this is entirely opposite of what some ex-employees who have
worked closely with the company’s AI products have said, viz., that AI has
helped to remove less than 5% hate speech content. However, Facebook did not
come clean about this claim.
Source:
www.indiatoday.in – 16th December, 2020
12.
Twitter planning to create label for automated ‘bot’
accounts
Twitter Inc. is planning to create a new type of account for bots
next year that will identify them as automated, the company said in a blog post
that finalised plans for a reboot of its long-paused verification programme. The
company said bot accounts ‘can bring a lot of value to the service,’ but
acknowledged that ‘it can be confusing to people if it’s not clear that these
accounts are automated.’
For years, Twitter has faced calls from misinformation researchers to
disclose more information about bots which have been used to amplify / influence
operations and make certain narratives appear more popular on its site. It
started requiring developers to identify automated accounts as bots in March,
but resisted pressure to apply a designated label, saying as recently as in May
that ‘calls for bot labelling don’t capture the problem we’re trying to
solve.’
Twitter also said that it would build a new ‘memoralised account’ type in 2021 for people who have died.
Abuse of those accounts has likewise been a feature of information campaigns,
such as in one case documented last year by academic Marc Owen Jones involving
the verified account of an American meteorologist who died of cancer in 2016
that began tweeting pro-Saudi government content in Arabic two years
later.
In November, Twitter announced that it would restart its verification
programme early next year, after pausing submissions in 2017 amid criticism over
how it awarded the blue check-mark badges used to authenticate the identity of
prominent accounts.
It said it would begin removing verified badges from inactive and
incomplete accounts that fail to adhere to the new guidelines as of
20th January,
2021, although it would leave up inactive accounts of people who
are no longer living while working on the new memorial feature.
Source:
www.indianexpress.com – 18th December, 2020
II.
World
13. A four-day
workweek for five days’ pay? Unilever New Zealand is the latest to try
it
Unilever New Zealand has said that it would begin a one-year
experiment to allow all 81 of its employees to earn their full salaries while
working one day less per week, a move the company said might actually boost
productivity and improve employees’ work-life balance.
The company, which imports and distributes tea, soap, vaseline and ice cream, is the
latest to experiment with the long-discussed four-day workweek. Some business
and productivity experts say the concept may finally get a serious look amid a
pandemic that has altered how billions live and work around the
globe.
Nick Bangs, MD of Unilever New Zealand, said
the four-day week experiment represented a fundamental shift in how the company
views its work force.
‘Our goal is to measure performance on output, not time,’ he said in
a statement. ‘We believe the old ways of working are outdated and no longer fit
for purpose.’
The goal, he said in an email, is to get the same amount of work done
in fewer hours for the same pay. ‘If we find that we’re all working the same
number of hours as before but in four days, then we’ve missed the opportunity
this trial presents us with,’ he said.
Essentially, Unilever is testing what the British historian and
writer C. Northcote Parkinson theorised was the nature
of man and time. ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion,’ he wrote in 1955.
The concept has been widely disseminated – it was in the first
sentence of Mr. Parkinson’s New York Times obituary – and has filtered its way into popular thinking. Michael
Scott, the bumbling manager of a regional midsize paper distributor in NBC’s
‘The Office,’ demonstrated a working knowledge of the idea in a conversation
with his supervisor, Jan Levinson, after she caught him watching television with
his staff during work hours.
Jan: How would a movie increase
productivity, Michael? How on earth would it do that?
Michael: People work faster after.
Jan: Magically?
Michael: No, they have to make up for the time they lost watching the
movie.
Nick Bangs, luckily, is relying on more than just Michael Scott
witticisms. Experts at the University of Technology
Sydney Business School are consulting with the company, as is Andrew Barnes,
founder of Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand firm that shifted to a shortened
workweek in 2018.
‘A contract should be about an agreed level of productivity,’ Barnes
said at the time. ‘If you deliver that in less time, why should I cut your
pay?’
The move to a four-day workweek has been kicked around for decades,
well before Richard M. Nixon, as Vice-President in 1956, predicted it would come
to pass in the ‘not too distant future.’
Still, it has remained elusive. Though technology has made employees
more productive (thanks, email!), it has not led to employees working fewer
hours (thanks again, email!).
In a work-centric culture, people simply are not wired to unplug from
the office, particularly in industries like finance, medicine and consulting,
according to Paolo Gaudiano, an adjunct associate
professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Source:
www.nytimes.com – 3rd December, 2020
14. World’s ‘Most
Exceptional’ teacher wins Rs. 7 crore prize, splits it among nominees
Over a decade ago, in 2009, Ranjitsinh
Disale walked into the Zilla
Parishad school in the remote
Paritewadi village of Solapur; it was a rundown building that had a cattle-shed on
one side and a storeroom on the other. The students, mainly from the tribal
community, accommodated themselves in the middle room; just 2% of them were
girls.
But today the school is known to the world, thanks to the efforts of
Ranjitsinh who transformed its educational system
through technology.
For his extraordinary work to empower girls and promote education,
Ranjitsinh is now the world’s ‘Most Exceptional
Teacher’ after being conferred with the Global Teacher Prize 2020. The prize
money awarded is $1 million, equivalent to Rs. 7 crores in India.
Instituted by the Varkey Foundation, the
award attracted 12,000 nominations from across the world out of which ten were
shortlisted in 2019. Ranjitsinh was one of
them.
‘I will distribute half the amount (of the prize money) to the other
nine contestants for their exceptional work,’ Ranjitsinh told the host, Stephen Fry, in an interview
during the live telecast of the event.
Explaining the reason for this, Ranjitsinh
says he may have won the award but he cannot change the world by himself. All
the runners-up should get equal opportunity to continue their exceptional work,
he said.
With the remaining amount, he told Maharashtra Times, he would dedicate 30% of the amount to conceiving a Teacher
Innovation Fund across India. ‘Twenty per cent of the prize money will be spent
to bring 5,000 students together from war-afflicted zones of the world to form
the Peace Army,’ the 32-year-old teacher said.
Speaking to The Times of India, the teacher who oversees 110 students, worked hard to convince
girls and their parents to educate them. Thanks to his efforts, there are no
teenage marriages in the village and it sees 100% attendance rates today. The
school also got the ‘Best School Award’ from the Maharashtra State
Government.
Ranjitsinh was also in the limelight in 2016 when he started a QR code system
in school textbooks that was replicated across the State and the country. He had
introduced the technology to make education interactive and accessible to
students in the digital format. ‘I once saw a person scan the QR code from the
scanning device and realised that the same principle could get replicated for
transferring textbook information to digital mediums,’ he explained.
However, it was not just the technology that needed work. As the
majority of the students understood only Kannada, he had to learn the language
and translate the syllabus from Class I to IV and share his knowledge with the
help of the technology. Recently, one of the tribal girl students graduated from
university.
The technology helped students access video
lectures, audio poems and assignments. In 2017, the State Government announced
that it would have QR-coded textbooks for all classes. The following year, the
Central Government announced a plan to replicate the model.
His latest international recognition is not the first for this modest
teacher. In 2018, Ranjitsinh received the Microsoft
Innovative Educator Expert award. He was also recognised for his innovation by
the Government of India which conferred on him the National Innovation
Foundation’s ‘Innovator of the Year’ award.
Source: www.thebetterindia.com – 4th December,
2020
15. The British must
return the Bakhshali Manuscript with world’s oldest
zero to India
The world’s most important mathematical document is the Bakhshali Manuscript. Written on birch-bark in Sanskrit, it
is the world’s oldest extant document to use a zero symbol. It was written by a
Brahma?a identified as the
‘son of Chajaka’ and was found in the North-Western
region of British India in 1881.
Rudolf Hoernlé, a Christian missionary who
studied the Bakhshali Manuscript later stole India’s
most precious manuscript and gave it to Oxford University in 1902.
The most comprehensive research on this subject to date appears in a
book by Takao Hayashi titled ‘The Bakhshali Manuscript: An Ancient
Indian Mathematical Treatise.’
Such a precious document does not belong to descendants of the
British Raj. This document belongs in India – not in the hands of its former
British masters.
Background information
Having initially studied economics at the University of Melbourne,
Jonathan J. Crabtree is an autodidact, studying the history of mathematics since
1983.
In 1968, at age seven Jonathan noticed a 398-year-old problem with
his teacher’s explanation of mathematics. India’s zero was missing from
England’s 1570 definition of multiplication.
Having been perplexed by this and other maths education errors during
his school years, at the age of 21 he found himself in a hospital facing bleak
news. If he moved, he might never walk again. With both his dreams and his spine
shattered, he prayed for a miracle and promised to fix maths if he ever walked
again.
Today, elementary maths historian and www.podometic.in founder
Jonathan J. Crabtree is a guest lecturer at schools, universities and
mathematics conferences. Having reviewed writings in Latin, Greek, Arabic,
Sanskrit and other languages, his provocative presentations reveal how the
foundations of ancient Bharatiya (Indian) mathematics
are vastly superior to many western ideas taught today.
Source: www.kreately.in – 9th December,
2020
