Moscow-area farmers strapped modified VR headsets to cows to see if it improved their mood – and, of course, their milk production. The project subjected cattle to a simulated summer field with colors tuned for the animals’ eyes, giving them a decidedly more pleasing landscape than a plain, confining farm. And yes, the headsets were adapted to the “structural features” of cows’ heads so that they could see properly.
It appears to have worked, at least on a basic level. The first test reduced the cows’ anxiety and boosted their overall sentiment. While it’s not certain how well this affects the quality or volume of milk, there are plans for a more “comprehensive” study to answer that question.
CCTV camera marketed on its ability to determine ethnicity, particularly differentiating between Han Chinese and muslim Uyghur minorities.
Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable
City planners around the world have predicted traffic on the basis of residential density, anticipating that a certain amount of real-time changes will be necessary in particular circumstances. To handle those changes, they have installed tools like stoplights and metering lights, embedded loop sensors, variable message signs, radio transmissions, and dial-in messaging systems. For particularly tricky situations—an obstruction, event, or emergency—city managers sometimes dispatch a human being to direct traffic.
But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve. The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety. […] On top of all these problems, these rerouting apps are all out for themselves. They take a selfish view in which each vehicle is competing for the fastest route to its destination. This can lead to the router creating new traffic congestion in unexpected places.
[via Felix S.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/uber-knows-when-your-phone-is-about-to-run-out-of-battery-a7042416.html
👏🏿 Capitalism 👏🏿 wants 👏🏿 to 👏🏿 fuck 👏🏿 you 👏🏿 all 👏🏿 the 👏🏿 time. 👏🏿
Not CGI: drone footage of drift racing.
A robot that delivers its own elegy.
In Reuben Wu’s Photography, a View of Another World - Artsy
His goal, as with many of his projects, revolved around depicting places that appear free from a specific time or location. Lighting his scenes with drones, Wu illustrates the strength of the natural world, and “the magnitude of of time” that it took for these settings to form. Part of his ongoing project “Lux Noctis,” this latest group of fantastical atmospheric photos are inspired by what he deems the “anachronistic combination” of science fiction and 19th-century Romantic painting. (The Guggenheim and Met carry the series’s eponymous book.)
“An algorithm that scans resumes might say for example, ‘Oh, I notice when people use this kind of font, it has a high correlation with being productive, so this is the important feature.’ Is it? I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but [the algorithm] could do things like that and it’s hard to understand why,” Venkatasubramanian says.
Letting an algorithm make hiring decisions leads to strange biases.
“You are being judged for things that you’re probably not even thinking about in your resume, like for example your address. There was one HR department that has been using an algorithmically driven system that gives people extra credit if they live within a close radius of the workplace because the data showed that if you had a longer commute, you were more likely to to quit or to be fired within a year,” says Crawford. “So what that also means is that they’re just starting to hire people who live nearby, behind which there is a whole range of other discriminatory functions.”
Many are just now beginning to wake up to the discriminatory problems associated with algorithms. Experts like Crawford and Venkatasubramanian are starting to look for solutions.
“I’m really interested in what we do about it because I’m concerned about the kind of discrimination we’re seeing against entire groups, be they African-American, be they women, be they people who live in rural areas — you name it. And we’re seeing a form of group discrimination often occur in these kinds of systems. But there are things we can do about it,” Crawford says. “How do you have sort of internal systems that are checking for discriminatory outcomes? A lot of technology companies are looking into that. Another thing you can do is external audits.”
“Education is incredibly important. I’ve been educated myself just by looking at this,” says Venkatasubramanian. “Essentially we’re trying to formulate a mathematical way of of describing bias and describing how to be fair - how algorithms could be fair, and trying to implement that into the algorithms. So there are lots of things we can do. And I think we need a lot more study of this and there is more of a growing interest in the technical side of things and how to do this.”
Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars - The New York Times
In one of the more harrowing episodes, a man waved a .22-caliber revolver at a Waymo vehicle and the emergency backup driver at the wheel. He told the police that he “despises” driverless cars, referring to the killing of a female pedestrian in March in nearby Tempe by a self-driving Uber car.
“There are other places they can test,” said Erik O’Polka, 37, who was issued a warning by the police in November after multiple reports that his Jeep Wrangler had tried to run Waymo vans off the road — in one case, driving head-on toward one of the self-driving vehicles until it was forced to come to an abrupt stop.