Category: Blogging

It’s pretty crazy to think about, but it seems quite likely that narrow, applied AI has really come into its own recently. Personally I’m looking forward to more semi-autonomous cars—and expecting less collisions!

By the holidays next year, you will either be shuttled in an auto piloted car or you’ll be sharing the road with one. Either way, very few drivers in the Western world will be able to change lanes in 2016 without considering that the agent operating the vehicle next to them may not be human. The experience might be subtle, but the reality is enough to give us all pause at the shift in our technological environment.

Source: 2016: The Year of AI Made Real

A (sadly) rare positive story about police! This is the second program that I’ve heard of from Washington which I believe will really lead our nation’s law enforcement towards safer, more effective behavior.

Creating guardians, calming warriors: A new style of training for police recruits emphasizes techniques to better de-escalate conflict situations

Source: New style of police training aims to produce ‘guardians,’ not ‘warriors’ | The Washington Post

TL;DR: Passive participation in Facebook is correlated with a drop in mood.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding in the recent literature, however, is that people do themselves the most harm when they’re not posting. [Experimenters] instructed half of the subjects to use Facebook actively and half to use it passively. Active use is “posting status updates, chatting, responding to a comment,” Verduyn explains, while passive use is “scrolling through news feeds, looking at pictures, and looking at status updates.”

A few hours after the session, the active users felt the same, yet the passive users felt a drop in mood. “When you’re just passively using Facebook, you develop more feelings of envy, which in turn lead people to feel worse over time,” Kross says.

On the one hand, the finding is a good thing. It means that there’s a way to escape the Facebook blues without losing access to social media’s positive benefits: Be more active.

…The growing body of research on social media’s dark sides, Krasnova says, gives us the chance to build a new social media etiquette, one that will reattach the world of Facebook to reality and pay off in true friendships, full of both the costs and the benefits of caring.

Source: Do Facebook and Twitter Make You Depressed?

This is… unexpectedly awesome. As it’s been said, “That which gets measured, gets managed.” Hopefully better data about law enforcement officers’ use of force will lead us to less of it.

“We are responding to a real human outcry,” said Stephen L. Morris, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which oversees the data collection. “People want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using force. It always fell to the bottom before. It is now the highest priority.”

The FBI’s efforts follow a year of national focus on fatalities and injuries at the hands of police, with widespread frustration over the lack of reliable data on the incidents.

Morris said the data will also be “much more granular” than in the past and will probably include the gender and race of officers and suspects involved in these encounters, the level of threat or danger the officer faced, and the types of weapons wielded by either party.

The data also will be collected and shared with the public in “near real-time,” as the incidents occur, Morris said, instead of being tallied in aggregate at the end of each year.

Source: FBI to sharply expand system for tracking fatal police shootings – The Washington Post

Today in PLEASE YES: Jeff Bezos just offered to shoot Donald Trump into space.

The best part: him or Elon Musk are basically the only people who could actually do it. Oh, and it’s also one of the literal handful of tweets Bezos has ever sent. Well done, sir. Well done.

Source: Jeff Bezos just offered to shoot Donald Trump into space | The Verge