Saturday, December 6

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Autonomous “Driverless” Auto Racing — Wait What?
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AI, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Autonomous “Driverless” Auto Racing — Wait What?

Bringing AI up to speed – autonomous auto racing promises safer driverless cars on the road. The excitement of auto racing comes from split-second decisions and daring passes by fearless drivers. Imagine that scene, but without the driver – the car alone, guided by the invisible hand of artificial intelligence. Can the rush of racing unfold without a driver steering the course? It turns out that it can. An autonomous race car built by the Technical University of Munich prepares to pass the University of Virginia’s entrant. Cavalier Autonomous Racing, University of Virginia, CC BY-ND Enter autonomous racing, a field that’s not just about high-speed competition but also pushing the boundaries of what autonomous vehicles can achieve and improving their safety. Over a century ago, at the dawn...
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Wormlike Limbless Robots That Could One Day Be Used For Search And Rescue
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Wormlike Limbless Robots That Could One Day Be Used For Search And Rescue

We designed wormlike, limbless robots that navigate obstacle courses − they could be used for search and rescue one day. Scientists have been trying to build snakelike, limbless robots for decades. These robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors. With slender, flexible bodies, limbless robots could readily move through confined and cluttered spaces such as debris fields, where walking or wheeled robots and human rescuers tend to fail. However, even the most advanced limbless robots have not come close to moving with the agility and versatility of worms and snakes in difficult terrain. Even the tiny nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which has a relatively simple nervous systems, can navigate t...
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AI Tools — Friend Or Foe
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AI, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

AI Tools — Friend Or Foe

AI can help − and hurt − student creativity. Teachers across the country are grappling with whether to view AI tools like ChatGPT as friend or foe in the classroom. My research shows that the answer isn’t always simple. It can be both. Teaching students to be creative thinkers rather than rely on AI for answers is the key to answering this question. That’s what my team and I found in our study on whether AI affects student creativity, published in the Journal of Creativity and representing scholars from the University of South Carolina, the University of California, Berkeley and Emerson College. In the study, we asked college students to brainstorm – without technology – all the ways a paper clip can be used. A month later, we asked them to do the same, but using ChatGPT. We found that A...
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A History Of Surveillance And Control
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A History Of Surveillance And Control

Face recognition technology follows a long analog history of surveillance and control based on identifying physical features. American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited. In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects. Face recognition technology is the latest and most sophisticate...
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What FTC Case Against Ad Tech Giant Kochava Reveals About Data Brokers
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

What FTC Case Against Ad Tech Giant Kochava Reveals About Data Brokers

Data brokers know everything about you – what FTC case against ad tech giant Kochava reveals. Kochava, the self-proclaimed industry leader in mobile app data analytics, is locked in a legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission in a case that could lead to big changes in the global data marketplace and in Congress’ approach to artificial intelligence and data privacy. The stakes are high because Kochava’s secretive data acquisition and AI-aided analytics practices are commonplace in the global location data market. In addition to numerous lesser-known data brokers, the mobile data market includes larger players like Foursquare and data market exchanges like Amazon’s AWS Data Exchange. The FTC’s recently unsealed amended complaint against Kochava makes clear that there’s truth to what K...
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Do You Or Don’t You Trust Science?
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Do You Or Don’t You Trust Science?

Why some people don’t trust science – and how to change their minds. During the pandemic, a third of people in the UK reported that their trust in science had increased, we recently discovered. But 7% said that it had decreased. Why is there such variety of responses? For many years, it was thought that the main reason some people reject science was a simple deficit of knowledge and a mooted fear of the unknown. Consistent with this, many surveys reported that attitudes to science are more positive among those people who know more of the textbook science. But if that were indeed the core problem, the remedy would be simple: inform people about the facts. This strategy, which dominated science communication through much of the later part of the 20th century, has, however, failed at multip...
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How AI Can Help You Reduce Bottlenecks Between Life And Work
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AI, IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

How AI Can Help You Reduce Bottlenecks Between Life And Work

AI could improve your life by removing bottlenecks between what you want and what you get. Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making. Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions. AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar, call this AI overcoming “lossy bottlenecks.” Lossy is a term from information theory that refers to imperfect communications channels – that is, channels tha...
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ChatGPT Turns 1: AI Chatbot Revolution
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AI, IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

ChatGPT Turns 1: AI Chatbot Revolution

ChatGPT turns 1: AI chatbot’s success says as much about humans as technology. ChatGPT was launched on Nov. 30, 2022, ushering in what many have called artificial intelligence’s breakout year. Within days of its release, ChatGPT went viral. Screenshots of conversations snowballed across social media, and the use of ChatGPT skyrocketed to an extent that seems to have surprised even its maker, OpenAI. By January, ChatGPT was seeing 13 million unique visitors each day, setting a record for the fastest-growing user base of a consumer application. Throughout this breakout year, ChatGPT has revealed the power of a good interface and the perils of hype, and it has sown the seeds of a new set of human behaviors. As a researcher who studies technology and human information behavior, I find that Ch...
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Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of Technology Stealing Your Time
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of Technology Stealing Your Time

Technology is stealing your time in ways you may not realise – here’s what you can do about it. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. Smart phones provide a palm-size window to the world, enabling us to do almost anything at the touch of a button. Smart homes look after themselves, and virtual meetings mean that for many, time spent commuting is a thing of the past. So we should have more free time. Time which is now spent sleeping, relaxing or simply doing nothing – right? If the idea that you have more time than ever before is making you choke on your coffee, you are not alone. There is growing evidence that while digital technology may help us to save some time, we end up using that time to do more and more things. We recently interviewed 300 people across Europe to unders...
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What Are The Benefits Of Fact-Checking Social Media Posts?
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

What Are The Benefits Of Fact-Checking Social Media Posts?

People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn’t share their perspective – new research. People fact-checked social media posts more carefully and were more willing to revise their initial beliefs when they were paired with someone from a different cultural background than their own, according to a study my collaborators Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne and I recently published in Frontiers in Psychology. If you’re French, you’re less likely than an English person to believe a tweet that claims Britain produces more varieties of cheese than France. And if you’re English, you’re more likely than a French person to believe a tweet that claims only 43% of French people shower daily. More intriguingly, when pairs of English and French people fact-chec...
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