The world's horrors have always informed the banality of everyday life, cross-referenced in the custom feeds of public headlines and personal stories, ticking and beeping and trickling down the surface of our collective attention. Contemporary tragedies are no different: sugar-coated, paradoxical, desperately complex and pulling hard at every authoritarian thread of the disintegrating global order. In Xinjiang and Sana'a, in Goma and in Portland. Embedded in the sprawling influence of ecommerce platforms, in the growing ethical failures and absurd political demands of software design - bright screens lit up and connect, mundane and unreal.
Federal authorities in New York on Wednesday seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told The Associated Press that 13 tons (11.8 metric tonnes) of hair products worth an estimated $800,000 were in the shipment.
“The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains,” said Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Trade.
On a warm November day, Earl Sweatshirt is holed up in his cozy Los Angeles duplex. His head is enveloped in a hood he never takes off, with two baby dreadlocks peeking out.
http://KEXP.ORG presents Kamasi Washington performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded December 2, 2016.
Songs:
Re Run
The Rhythm Changes
Host: Larry Rose
Audio Engineer: Kevin Suggs & Benjamin Adamson
Audio Mixing: Matt Ogaz
Cameras: Alaia D’Alessandro, Luke Knecht & Aron Roberts
Editor: Alaia D’Alessandro
The China Internet Report 2020 is the most comprehensive resource on China’s technology landscape. It offers insights into China’s tech trailblazers and the important trends shaping the world’s biggest internet community.
Searching Google’s ad buying portal for “Black girls” returned hundreds of terms leading to “adult content”.
Google’s Keywords Planner, which helps advertisers choose which search terms to associate with their ads, offered hundreds of keyword suggestions related to “Black girls,” “Latina girls,” and “Asian Girls”—the majority of them pornographic, The Markup found in its research.
Searches in the keyword planner for “boys” of those same ethnicities also primarily returned suggestions related to pornography.
Searches for “White girls” and “White boys,” however, returned no suggested terms at all.
A Russian design studio has developed an AI designer and, for over a year, have been passing it off as a human. To date, the network has been used successfully in over 20 of the studio’s commercial projects. Art.
Facebook’s engineers have developed a new method to help them identify and prevent harmful behavior like users spreading spam, scamming others, or buying and selling weapons and drugs.
They can now simulate the actions of bad actors using AI-powered bots by letting them loose on a parallel version of Facebook. Researchers can then study the bots’ behavior in simulation and experiment with new ways to stop them.
Simulating behavior you want to study is a common enough practice in machine learning, but the WW project is notable because the simulation is based on the real version of Facebook. Facebook calls its approach “web-based simulation.”
“Unlike in a traditional simulation, where everything is simulated, in web-based simulation, the actions and observations are actually taking place through the real infrastructure, and so they’re much more realistic,” says Harman.
Shudu Gram is a striking South African model. She’s what fashion likes to call “one to watch,” with a Balmain campaign in 2018, a feature in Vogue Australia on changing the face of fashion, and a red carpet appearance at the 2019 BAFTAs in a custom Swarovski gown. I’m also a model.
It all started with a sticky note. And a long to-do list. And two developers. And a dream to make people’s lives more organized and productive, wherever they worked and lived around the world.
In 1971, MIT grad and computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first official email.
For a long time, these were email’s two primary functions: direct peer-to-peer messaging (your friend emails you a funny link or life update) or business transactions (a brand solicits your patronage; a publisher sends you something to read). But in recent years, a third cohort of email sender has cropped up: the individually authored, mass-distributed email. Or, as we’re calling it for our purposes here, the single-operator newsletter. These are entrepreneurial folks going at it alone, independent of media organizations.
A multidão ocupou a estrada. O silêncio sobrepôs-se ao ruído dos automóveis, retidos temporariamente nos acessos àquela parte da cidade. As bicicletas preencheram irregularmente o alcatrão, algumas tombadas, de forma muito simbólica, enquanto asseguravam o espaçamento social entre os presentes. 16 minutos longos e sentidos de silêncio. Um minuto por cada ano de vida da jovem que ali falecera, não fazia ainda uma semana.
O “fim dos atropelamentos na cidade” foi o mote da vigília que a 16 de Julho juntou centenas de pessoas em frente à Biblioteca Nacional, no Campo Grande, em Lisboa. Seis dias antes uma jovem perdeu a vida ao ser atropelada quando atravessava, com a bicicleta pela mão, a passagem de peões que existe naquele local.
Outras cidades do país juntaram-se ao movimento de ciclistas e não ciclistas em homenagem a esta e outras vítimas de atropelamento. “Em Lisboa, Aveiro, Braga, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Mértola, Porto e Santarém, foram muitos os que apelaram à redução da velocidade dos carros nas cidades, ao respeito pelos mais frágeis, que não circulam protegidos por chapa”, noticiou o jornal Público.
Noutro artigo, o mesmo jornal dava conta que Portugal se encontra entre os piores da Europa no que diz respeito à mortalidade de peões no espaço urbano, com 1397 mortes entre 2010 e 2018 (80% dentro de localidades). Tomando como referência um estudo recente do European Transport Safety Council (2020), o país aparece em 5º lugar em 28 estados europeus, no número de peões mortos por milhão de habitantes.
De acordo com dados da Pordata, Lisboa é o concelho com maior número de atropelamentos no país, com 684 casos em 2018.
In early 2018, millions of digital clocks across Europe began falling behind time. Few took notice at first as slight disruptions in the power supply caused bedside alarms and oven timers running on the frequency of electric current to begin lagging.
Two recent disturbing events may finally awaken the world to the scale and horror of the atrocities being committed against the Uighurs, a mostly secular Muslim ethnic minority, in Xinjiang, China. One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance. Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel.
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