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Payment firms back out in painful blow to Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Oct. 12, 2019

Oct. 12, 2019

Scherza coi fanti ma lascia stare i santi... <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/11/payment-firms-back-out-i…> Nearly every payment firm that initially agreed to join Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra has backed out, in a potentially fatal blow to the social network’s plan for a worldwide digital currency. Visa and Mastercard said on Friday they would no longer participate in the Libra Association and Latin American payment system Mercado Pago announced it would back out as well. Several other large companies have announced their departures . The payment processing company Stripe said it was stepping back, as well as the online auction company eBay. PayPal was the first of Libra’s big partners to exit, announcing last week it would no longer be involved. Facebook unveiled its plans for Libra in June 2019, announcing it meant to roll out the international digital currency publicly in 2020. Though it was built by Facebook, the company said the digital asset would be controlled by the Libra Association, a non-profit made up of a collective of international companies. Facebook Libra must meet strict standards, warns Bank of England When Libra was announced, the Libra Association was comprised about 30 founding companies. To be listed as founding members, these companies contributed a minimum of $10m (£8m). The first official meeting of the Libra Council is scheduled for 14 October in Geneva – in just a few days. Executives at Facebook and the Libra Association said the exits will not affect the product’s success. “Although the makeup of the association members may grow and change over time, the design principle of Libra’s governance and technology, along with the open nature of this project ensures the Libra payment network will remain resilient,” said Dante Disparte, head of policy and communications for the Libra Association. David Marcus, a former PayPal executive and co-creator of Libra, thanked Visa and MasterCard on Twitter on Friday, saying their dropping out is “liberating”. “I would caution against reading the fate of Libra into this update,” he said. “Of course, it’s not great news in the short term, but in a way it’s liberating. Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you’re on to something when so much pressure builds up.” The departures come as Facebook faces intensifying international legislative scrutiny over the currency. Politicians on both sides of the spectrum have questioned the privacy issues raised with Facebook controlling a currency, as well as concerns about money laundering. [...]

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Preventing Digital Feudalism by Mariana Mazzucato - Project Syndicate
by antonio.vetro＠polito.it Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

By exploiting technologies that were originally developed by the public sector, digital platform companies have acquired a market position that allows them to extract massive rents from consumers and workers alike. Reforming the digital economy so that it serves collective ends is thus the defining economic challenge of our time. Continua su: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/platform-economy-digital-feuda… av == Sent from my wireless device ==

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Colorado police partner with a popular doorbell camera company
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/22/ring-colorado-police-camera-surveilla… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The end of theory: does the data deluge make the scientific method obsolete? – Learning from Data
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

https://statisticallearningtheory.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/the-end-of-theor… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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How Photos of Your Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/11/technology/flickr-facial-rec… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Smart TVs are data-collecting machines, new study shows - The Verge
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

Smart TVs are data-collecting machines, new study shows Roku and Amazon Fire TVs are tracking you like everything else By Zoe Schiffer on October 11, 2019 9:34 am https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20908128/smart-tv-surveillence-data-col… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Is Amazon Unstoppable? | The New Yorker
by J.C. DE MARTIN Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

Is Amazon Unstoppable? Politicians want to rein in the retail giant. But Jeff Bezos, the master of cutthroat capitalism, is ready to fight back. By Charles DuhiggOctober 10, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers | Environment | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Oct. 11, 2019

Oct. 11, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-cl…> Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis. Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules. Google said it was disappointed by the US decision to abandon the global climate deal, but has continued to support CEI. Google is also listed as a sponsor for an upcoming annual meeting of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organisation that supports conservative groups including the Heartland Institute, a radical anti-science group that has chided the teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics”. SPN members recently created a “climate pledge” website that falsely states “our natural environment is getting better” and “there is no climate crisis”. Google has defended its contributions, saying that its “collaboration” with organisations such as CEI “does not mean we endorse the organisations’ entire agenda”. [...]

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Job opening at the College of Europe / Economics
by Luigi Scorca Oct. 10, 2019

Oct. 10, 2019

https://www.coleurope.eu/vacancies/job-vacancy-full-time-professor-100-depa… Luigi

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Excavating AI - The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets
by Giacomo Tesio Oct. 10, 2019

Oct. 10, 2019

You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs. But as you probe further into the dataset, people begin to appear: cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls. Things get strange: A photograph of a woman smiling in a bikini is labeled a “slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop.” A young man drinking beer is categorized as an “alcoholic, alky, dipsomaniac, boozer, lush, soaker, souse.” A child wearing sunglasses is classified as a “failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person.” You’re looking at the “person” category in a dataset called ImageNet, one of the most widely used training sets for machine learning. Something is wrong with this picture. Where did these images come from? Why were the people in the photos labeled this way? What sorts of politics are at work when pictures are paired with labels, and what are the implications when they are used to train technical systems? In short, how did we get here? [...] ImageNet quickly became a critical asset for computer-vision research. It became the basis for an annual competition where labs around the world would try to outperform each other by pitting their algorithms against the training set, and seeing which one could most accurately label a subset of images. In 2012, a team from the University of Toronto used a Convolutional Neural Network to handily win the top prize, bringing new attention to this technique. That moment is widely considered a turning point in the development of contemporary AI.[12] The final year of the ImageNet competition was 2017, and accuracy in classifying objects in the limited subset had risen from 71.8% to 97.3%. That subset did not include the “Person” category, for reasons that will soon become obvious. ____ Continua su https://www.excavating.ai/ Giacomo

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