There is a concise, succinct summary at Technology Review's “The Download” page (link below):
DeepMind’s AI is predicting how much energy Google’s wind turbines will produce
Google’s subsidiary DeepMind has created a machine-learning model to boost the use of wind power by predicting its likely output 36 hours ahead.
Drawbacks: Although the adoption of wind power has grown thanks to cheaper turbine costs, it will always suffer from unpredictability. That limits it compared with other energy sources that can reliably deliver power at a set time.
An experiment: To help solve this problem, last year DeepMind started building algorithms to boost the efficacy of Google’s wind farms in the US, according to a blog post. Researchers trained a neural network on weather forecasts and past turbine data, so it could predict power output 36 hours ahead. On this basis, the model recommends how to allocate power to the grid a full day in advance. This boosted the “value” of Google’s wind farms by about 20%, DeepMind claims, though it hasn’t really specified what form what value takes, or how it’s measured.
Implications: While it’s only been tested out internally so far, it’s not hard to imagine Google hoping to sell this technology to wind farm operators. And it’s another boost to Google’s carbon-free credentials.
Posted by Charlotte Jee
February 27th, 2019 7:28AM
“The name booby comes from the Spanish word bobo ("stupid", "foolish", or "clown") because the blue-footed booby is, like other seabirds, clumsy on land.[3] They are also regarded as foolish for their apparent fearlessness of humans.[2]”
This is also where we get the nickname “boob tube” for television (a.k.a. “idiot box”).
Any would-be objection based on ignorant, juvenile misreadings of this term is itself stupid, foolish & clownish.
Enough with the P.C. B.S.! Time to consider boycotting Debian for their junior high school level of immature oversensitivity. Sheesh!
Odd that the article fails to mention the core economics fundamentals at issue here, such as the stifling burden of union pensions for retired MTA workers. It also fails to note the core management issues, like union contracts prohibiting: a) firing employees for incompetence, or b) initiating merit-based pay increases as an incentive to improve performance. Failing infrastructure is a consequence of incompetent planning, management & maintenance, while failing finances is a consequence of entrenched expenditure largess. The article addresses neither of these concerns.
It also strikes me as peculiar that former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently donated $1.8 billion (!) to Johns Hopkins University—a private university in Baltimore, Maryland and his alma mater—but he has offered no financial assistance to his beloved city's core transportation system. It makes one wonder just how committed he is to fixing his city's financial & governance issues and/or core infrastructure problems. It's almost as if he prefers to leave those problems unaddressed so he can campaign to fix them in his next run for political office, while taking a substantial tax deduction for a donation to a private institution. Or perhaps he's just angling to become President of Johns Hopkins University? Or perhaps I'm just being cynical? *smirk*
So who defines these norms? Judeo-Christian ethicists? Islamic ethicists? Buddhist ethicists? Taoist ethicists? Wicken ethicists? Zoroastrian ethicists? Nihilists? Cats?
And who decides this authoritarian supremacy? The World Court? The United Nations? The Church of the Sub-genius? Squirrels? Dogs? Cats?
Given that domesticated cats invented the InterWebs solely for the purpose of exalting their mind-control influence over inferior humans—witness cat videos, cat means and LOL cats—I vote that the cats be the final, unquestioned arbiters of what is true and good. I, for one, welcome are new cat overlords.
To censor content risks losing safe harbor protections. Warning labels do not, so long as they can be contested & appealed, and maybe checked/tested (via algorithm) before publishing content. Moreover, categorically labeling an entire site/source as unreliable is more problematic then labeling a single item that site/source produces/publishes as being suspect.
Either way, this opens a Pandora's box of civil liability.
For instance: 1) How can one algorithmically check factual content for accuracy vs. editorial opinion? 2) How can one distinguish the spreading of a rumor or propaganda from mere reporting on the prevalence of a rumor or propaganda? 3) Who is the authorized arbiter of truth? 4) What if an unsubstantiated rumor is later proved to be true? 5) What if a generally accepted rumor is later proved to be false? Etc.
This Toronto Declaration is premised on a paranoid Luddite/SJW fallacy.
AI algorithms (systems) cannot “respect” human rights, because AI algorithms (systems) are not conscious, self-aware, nor intelligent. They simply are what they are and do what they do based on input data. This is classic Popeye Ontology: “I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam.”
This is akin to demanding that medical statistics stop being “racist” for determining that sickle cell anemia is more prevalent in African descendants or that obesity is more prevalent in Hawaiian descendants. Statistics and statistics-driven algorithms (like machine learning) are no more inherently biased than their input data. In fact, one of the key objectives of statistics is precisely to reveal and quantify this sort of skew / bias / trend in the input data.
Another example: I'm sure Bernie Sanders would like to demand that his calculator “respect” socialist economics but that's not how calculators work, and history, human nature, & mathematical facts don't lie: economic socialism doesn't work at scale. Disproportionately taxing a productive few to comfort the unproductive many yields an unstable system that ultimately collapses when the productive are incentivized to no longer produce (retire) or simply to leave the system (defect / emigrate / move their enterprise off shore).
So it is neither the systems/per se/ nor the input data that ultimately need SJW monitoring: it's the policies & politicians & corporations who regulate & manipulate & deploy them that bear close scrutiny. Attempting to anthropomorphize technology & data in order to besmirch & regulate its use is as insidiously cynical as it is scurrilously puerile.
This sort of ridiculous foolishness is what you get when you elect True Dodos to high office, like that silly Justin Bieber Timberlake Trudeau clownish kid.;-)
Your ISP (Interwebs Service Provider) has even more Personally Identifiable Information (PII) than either Facebook or Google combined. More even then the CIA, NSA & FBI.
Think about it: every single bit you send over the InterWebs goes through their routers over their wires, even if you use a satellite provider.
Who better than the 21st century TelCo's to trust w/ you most intimate on-line details? AT&T, Comcast, Frontier, Verizon, et al. all have spotless, impeccable records when it comes to respecting your privacy and guarding against data breaches.
NOT!
At least Google claims to strip the low-order octet (last 4 bits) from your 32-bit IP address when recording PII. That means they may know what ISP you're using and roughly in what town/county, but no finer resolution than that in their aggregate user data. Facebook makes no such claim, as far as I know. And your ISP records & retains full IP-address details in their logs for up to 2 years (or more), even if you're using VPN or Tor or some other presumed “privacy protection” device.
That's why unless you're using local strong encryption of all your data & Interwebs traffic, you're a privacy chump. Even then, though, that protects only your data, not your meta-data of with whom you've communicated, when and how many packets, etc. Big Brother likes it that way.
So why hasn't anyone dragged the ISP's before a Congressional hearing on data privacy yet? In who's pockets are they really... uhm... in? Just askin'.;-)
Starbucks, which (as every good conspiracy theorist knows) is merely a front for the NSA domestic surveillance complex.
Why else do you think they charge so much for cheap, plentiful coffee beans? It's to fund their nefarious, clandestine InterWebz hoovering, universal phone sweeping, bogus cell phone tower intercepts, public-space closed circuit camera dragnets, traffic camera espionage networks, GPS & spy satellite deployments, and so on. Even their free WiFi inside Starbucks lounges are nothing more than drop points for field agents.
Git yourselph a bike helmet wrapped in tin foil w/ rabbit ear antennae and get woke, bro.
“Big Brother is real. Big Brother is here. Big Brother is Starbucks.”
You realize that Google's anti-phishing thing works exactly the same way too? Except instead of Seattle, WA, it consults Mountain View, CA?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Unless I'm mistaken, both are proprietary services, the underlying software & algorithms of which are likely trade secrets.
Can anyone recommend good whitepaper summaries of both/either? (I'll conduct an on-line search in my copious spare time, but an expert recommendation may save me some trouble.)
BTW, I never meant to imply that the tin-foil hat brigade is rational: just reactionary. Color them “triggered”.;-)
Ostensibly, Google actually has more information, since basically all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) all use Google's API, whereas now, Microsoft only got Edge and now optionally Chrome.
True.
Moreover, for those of us sucka chumps who set our local DNS servers to Google DNS ("8.8.8.8" & "8.8.4.4"), Google likely has a complete meta-data dossier on everything we do on the InterWebz anyway, complete with URL, timestamp, IP address, geo-location, browser signature, A1C, etc.
—–
Ref: https://developers.google.com/...
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps now is the time to finally switch to OpenDNS ("208.67.222.222", "208.67.220.220", "208.67.222.220" & "208.67.220.222").
—–
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or maybe even Cloudflare's spiffy new “privacy-first” DNS resolvers ("1.1.1.1" and "1.0.0.1").
—–
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Calling this a “port” of Windows Defender's “anti-phishing technology” is an extreme exaggeration, I suspect. Weighing in at only 295KiB total, this Chrome extension is apparently little more than a keyhole portal interface from the Chrome browser to the underling Windows Defender installed on your system platform.
So for those not running Chrome atop Windoze (like on Linux or MacOS or such), I suspect this Chrome Extension is merely a 295KiB no-op / placebo / bloatware.
I imagine the author of the Bleeping Computer® article (Catalin Cimpanu) may have been spoon-fed some verbiage from Microsoft in an undisclosed, backchannel press release of some sort. Sadly, this makes him look a bit like a breathless, sycophantic shill for The Big Blue Borg. *smirk*
I challenge anyone installing this extension on a non-Windows platform to demonstrate even a single URL that:
a) Windows Defender blocks on a Windoze box, but which...
b) Chrome's native built-in malware prevention tool (once enabled) does not catch on a non-Windoze box, but that...
c) Chrome on a non-Windoze box w/ this “Windows Defender Browser Protection” extension enabled does catch.
I venture that such an instance does not exist, unless this extension somehow leverages Microsoft's database of hinky URLs w/o using a locally underlying Windows Defender installation. In that case, I conjecture it could only do so by phoning home to Microsoft to check the URL against a remote on-line database... but that would then raise a massive privacy tsunami about remotely communicating what URLs you're visiting to some dark-site server somewhere in Redmond, WA. If so, let the tin-foil hat parade commence.
How convenient, considering Zuckerberg's upcoming testimony before Congress, I don't suppose he had anything to hide, nor was he worried about contradicting anything he said on line that might enter the public record? Of course not.
Surely he's as honest and trustworthy as everyone in Congress. Right?!
It is merely a coincidence that he debuted this new message deletion feature at this particular time. Obviously.
Wiped them like with a cloth, he did: “No witness, no crime.”
Sounds like naïve emotionalistic public relations propaganda to me. “We detect & report pre-crime!”
If it were really that simple to detect suicidal tendencies, wouldn't FB also announce efforts to detect/prevent:
* terrorist attacks
* domestic abuse
* human trafficking
* illegal drug trade
* illegal border crossings
* tax evasion
* racism
* blasphemy
* insults against the State
* thoughtcrime
* impure thoughts
* sarcasm
Etc. What a bunch o' hooey!
They might well intend this as a “cover our arses” defense against suicide liability suits, but it opens the door to a plethora of other suits if they don't also address a host of other comparable issues. The unintended consequences could be epically Orwellian.
All in all: this appears to be a bad idea poorly implemented, a.k.a. activist government policy pandering.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a concise, succinct summary at Technology Review's “The Download” page (link below):
Ref: https://www.technologyreview.c...
This sounds to me like the Maduro administration/military has just declared cyber war on its own people.
Could this be the world's first cyber civil war? Or has Syria, Iran, Russia or China already pulled a similar stunt?
Yes, congratulations on spotting my tongue-in-cheek sarcastic malapropism. Well done, Professor. ;-)
If this poor woman is being abused every 30 seconds, why doesn't she just change her Twitter handle? Maybe to something more male sounding?
I mean, really?! This isn't rocket surgery, people! Sheesh!!
Blue-footed booby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
“The name booby comes from the Spanish word bobo ("stupid", "foolish", or "clown") because the blue-footed booby is, like other seabirds, clumsy on land.[3] They are also regarded as foolish for their apparent fearlessness of humans.[2]”
This is also where we get the nickname “boob tube” for television (a.k.a. “idiot box”).
Any would-be objection based on ignorant, juvenile misreadings of this term is itself stupid, foolish & clownish.
Enough with the P.C. B.S.! Time to consider boycotting Debian for their junior high school level of immature oversensitivity. Sheesh!
Note that the total land area of Luxembourg (998 mi) is approximately that of Rhode Island in the U.S. (1,212 mi), according to Google.
Just sayin'. ;-)
Excellent. Thank you for sharing that article.
Odd that the article fails to mention the core economics fundamentals at issue here, such as the stifling burden of union pensions for retired MTA workers. It also fails to note the core management issues, like union contracts prohibiting: a) firing employees for incompetence, or b) initiating merit-based pay increases as an incentive to improve performance. Failing infrastructure is a consequence of incompetent planning, management & maintenance, while failing finances is a consequence of entrenched expenditure largess. The article addresses neither of these concerns.
It also strikes me as peculiar that former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently donated $1.8 billion (!) to Johns Hopkins University—a private university in Baltimore, Maryland and his alma mater—but he has offered no financial assistance to his beloved city's core transportation system. It makes one wonder just how committed he is to fixing his city's financial & governance issues and/or core infrastructure problems. It's almost as if he prefers to leave those problems unaddressed so he can campaign to fix them in his next run for political office, while taking a substantial tax deduction for a donation to a private institution. Or perhaps he's just angling to become President of Johns Hopkins University? Or perhaps I'm just being cynical? *smirk*
Where does it stop? Why some but not all? Who decides? What is the core legal rationale?
Seems to me like a huge politically driven can of worms... a slippery/slimy slope to oblivion.
...—witness cat videos, cat means and LOL cats—...
Oops: “means” -> ”memes”. I dearly wish there were a way to edit already-submitted comments. *sigh*
So who defines these norms? Judeo-Christian ethicists? Islamic ethicists? Buddhist ethicists? Taoist ethicists? Wicken ethicists? Zoroastrian ethicists? Nihilists? Cats?
And who decides this authoritarian supremacy? The World Court? The United Nations? The Church of the Sub-genius? Squirrels? Dogs? Cats?
Given that domesticated cats invented the InterWebs solely for the purpose of exalting their mind-control influence over inferior humans—witness cat videos, cat means and LOL cats—I vote that the cats be the final, unquestioned arbiters of what is true and good. I, for one, welcome are new cat overlords.
See how that works? Let the games begin! ;-)
Big Brother is no longer just watching: Big Brother is now taking direct action. ;-)
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Just sayin'.
Those who prefer a singular “data” should learn to say “data set” or "data point”, and be done with it.
Welcome to Mount Mole Hill.
Boy, just wait until the Tinfoil Hat Brigade gets ahold of this story! ;-)
To censor content risks losing safe harbor protections. Warning labels do not, so long as they can be contested & appealed, and maybe checked/tested (via algorithm) before publishing content. Moreover, categorically labeling an entire site/source as unreliable is more problematic then labeling a single item that site/source produces/publishes as being suspect.
Either way, this opens a Pandora's box of civil liability.
For instance: 1) How can one algorithmically check factual content for accuracy vs. editorial opinion? 2) How can one distinguish the spreading of a rumor or propaganda from mere reporting on the prevalence of a rumor or propaganda? 3) Who is the authorized arbiter of truth? 4) What if an unsubstantiated rumor is later proved to be true? 5) What if a generally accepted rumor is later proved to be false? Etc.
This Toronto Declaration is premised on a paranoid Luddite/SJW fallacy.
AI algorithms (systems) cannot “respect” human rights, because AI algorithms (systems) are not conscious, self-aware, nor intelligent. They simply are what they are and do what they do based on input data. This is classic Popeye Ontology: “I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam.”
This is akin to demanding that medical statistics stop being “racist” for determining that sickle cell anemia is more prevalent in African descendants or that obesity is more prevalent in Hawaiian descendants. Statistics and statistics-driven algorithms (like machine learning) are no more inherently biased than their input data. In fact, one of the key objectives of statistics is precisely to reveal and quantify this sort of skew / bias / trend in the input data.
Another example: I'm sure Bernie Sanders would like to demand that his calculator “respect” socialist economics but that's not how calculators work, and history, human nature, & mathematical facts don't lie: economic socialism doesn't work at scale. Disproportionately taxing a productive few to comfort the unproductive many yields an unstable system that ultimately collapses when the productive are incentivized to no longer produce (retire) or simply to leave the system (defect / emigrate / move their enterprise off shore).
So it is neither the systems /per se/ nor the input data that ultimately need SJW monitoring: it's the policies & politicians & corporations who regulate & manipulate & deploy them that bear close scrutiny. Attempting to anthropomorphize technology & data in order to besmirch & regulate its use is as insidiously cynical as it is scurrilously puerile.
This sort of ridiculous foolishness is what you get when you elect True Dodos to high office, like that silly Justin Bieber Timberlake Trudeau clownish kid. ;-)
Suppression of Wrong Think is an act of LOVE®.
Welcome to the Future Hive Mind, where facts are acts of hate that detract from the collective conversation.
Your ISP (Interwebs Service Provider) has even more Personally Identifiable Information (PII) than either Facebook or Google combined. More even then the CIA, NSA & FBI.
Think about it: every single bit you send over the InterWebs goes through their routers over their wires, even if you use a satellite provider.
Who better than the 21st century TelCo's to trust w/ you most intimate on-line details? AT&T, Comcast, Frontier, Verizon, et al. all have spotless, impeccable records when it comes to respecting your privacy and guarding against data breaches.
NOT!
At least Google claims to strip the low-order octet (last 4 bits) from your 32-bit IP address when recording PII. That means they may know what ISP you're using and roughly in what town/county, but no finer resolution than that in their aggregate user data. Facebook makes no such claim, as far as I know. And your ISP records & retains full IP-address details in their logs for up to 2 years (or more), even if you're using VPN or Tor or some other presumed “privacy protection” device.
That's why unless you're using local strong encryption of all your data & Interwebs traffic, you're a privacy chump. Even then, though, that protects only your data, not your meta-data of with whom you've communicated, when and how many packets, etc. Big Brother likes it that way.
So why hasn't anyone dragged the ISP's before a Congressional hearing on data privacy yet? In who's pockets are they really... uhm... in? Just askin'. ;-)
Starbucks, which (as every good conspiracy theorist knows) is merely a front for the NSA domestic surveillance complex.
Why else do you think they charge so much for cheap, plentiful coffee beans? It's to fund their nefarious, clandestine InterWebz hoovering, universal phone sweeping, bogus cell phone tower intercepts, public-space closed circuit camera dragnets, traffic camera espionage networks, GPS & spy satellite deployments, and so on. Even their free WiFi inside Starbucks lounges are nothing more than drop points for field agents.
Git yourselph a bike helmet wrapped in tin foil w/ rabbit ear antennae and get woke, bro.
“Big Brother is real. Big Brother is here. Big Brother is Starbucks.”
Heh heh. ;-)
You realize that Google's anti-phishing thing works exactly the same way too? Except instead of Seattle, WA, it consults Mountain View, CA?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Unless I'm mistaken, both are proprietary services, the underlying software & algorithms of which are likely trade secrets.
Can anyone recommend good whitepaper summaries of both/either? (I'll conduct an on-line search in my copious spare time, but an expert recommendation may save me some trouble.)
BTW, I never meant to imply that the tin-foil hat brigade is rational: just reactionary. Color them “triggered”. ;-)
Ostensibly, Google actually has more information, since basically all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) all use Google's API, whereas now, Microsoft only got Edge and now optionally Chrome.
True.
Moreover, for those of us sucka chumps who set our local DNS servers to Google DNS ("8.8.8.8" & "8.8.4.4"), Google likely has a complete meta-data dossier on everything we do on the InterWebz anyway, complete with URL, timestamp, IP address, geo-location, browser signature, A1C, etc.
—–
Ref: https://developers.google.com/...
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perhaps now is the time to finally switch to OpenDNS ("208.67.222.222", "208.67.220.220", "208.67.222.220" & "208.67.220.222").
—–
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or maybe even Cloudflare's spiffy new “privacy-first” DNS resolvers ("1.1.1.1" and "1.0.0.1").
—–
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Calling this a “port” of Windows Defender's “anti-phishing technology” is an extreme exaggeration, I suspect. Weighing in at only 295KiB total, this Chrome extension is apparently little more than a keyhole portal interface from the Chrome browser to the underling Windows Defender installed on your system platform.
So for those not running Chrome atop Windoze (like on Linux or MacOS or such), I suspect this Chrome Extension is merely a 295KiB no-op / placebo / bloatware.
I imagine the author of the Bleeping Computer® article (Catalin Cimpanu) may have been spoon-fed some verbiage from Microsoft in an undisclosed, backchannel press release of some sort. Sadly, this makes him look a bit like a breathless, sycophantic shill for The Big Blue Borg. *smirk*
I challenge anyone installing this extension on a non-Windows platform to demonstrate even a single URL that:
a) Windows Defender blocks on a Windoze box, but which...
b) Chrome's native built-in malware prevention tool (once enabled) does not catch on a non-Windoze box, but that...
c) Chrome on a non-Windoze box w/ this “Windows Defender Browser Protection” extension enabled does catch.
I venture that such an instance does not exist, unless this extension somehow leverages Microsoft's database of hinky URLs w/o using a locally underlying Windows Defender installation. In that case, I conjecture it could only do so by phoning home to Microsoft to check the URL against a remote on-line database... but that would then raise a massive privacy tsunami about remotely communicating what URLs you're visiting to some dark-site server somewhere in Redmond, WA. If so, let the tin-foil hat parade commence.
Or am I just being overly skeptical?
How convenient, considering Zuckerberg's upcoming testimony before Congress, I don't suppose he had anything to hide, nor was he worried about contradicting anything he said on line that might enter the public record? Of course not.
Surely he's as honest and trustworthy as everyone in Congress. Right?!
It is merely a coincidence that he debuted this new message deletion feature at this particular time. Obviously.
Wiped them like with a cloth, he did: “No witness, no crime.”
Witness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sounds like naïve emotionalistic public relations propaganda to me. “We detect & report pre-crime!”
If it were really that simple to detect suicidal tendencies, wouldn't FB also announce efforts to detect/prevent:
* terrorist attacks
* domestic abuse
* human trafficking
* illegal drug trade
* illegal border crossings
* tax evasion
* racism
* blasphemy
* insults against the State
* thoughtcrime
* impure thoughts
* sarcasm
Etc. What a bunch o' hooey!
They might well intend this as a “cover our arses” defense against suicide liability suits, but it opens the door to a plethora of other suits if they don't also address a host of other comparable issues. The unintended consequences could be epically Orwellian.
All in all: this appears to be a bad idea poorly implemented, a.k.a. activist government policy pandering.
Problem solved. You're welcome.