Items tagged with algorithm
If you ever wonder how certain pages or posts end in your Facebook feed, they drop their most widely viewed content reports quarterly. In the Q3 report a blogger has found that the most widely viewed page in the US, which has posted the third, fourth and eighth most viewed posts, is a page ran by a food blogger from Utah. The page is called Thinkarete Lifestyle and now mostly posts links to a website selling cookware and other home goods—we can assume this is mostly a drop shipping sort of deal. What's interesting here is this isn't what you would call a dead page, having a bot post content every so often but mostly linking its own affiliate links or webstore. This is a page that actively...
Read more...
The latest craze making the rounds on social media is a facial recognition program called ImageNet Roulette. It allows users to upload a selfie after which artificial intelligence will classify the photo with the tag that it thinks is appropriate for the subject person in the image. Some think that the program is fun, and others think it is downright racist, sexist and offensive. For example, it tends to classify anyone of any skin tone, or who uploads an image in poor light, with tags like "Black, Black person, blackamoor, Negro, Negroid," according to numerous user reports. Some of the tags it gives to people include things like "psycholinguist," "scientist," while other male subjects were...
Read more...
Anyone around in the '80s certainly played with a Rubik's Cube at some point. And many of those people probably ended up peeling stickers off to solve the infuriating puzzle. Researchers from the University of California-Irvine have created an AI system that is able to solve the Rubik's Cube in just over a second; it's called DeepCubeA. The scientists say that the AI system can solve the puzzle without any in-game coaching from humans or specific domain knowledge. In some circles, the Rubik's Cube is still a big deal, in 2015 a teen set a world record for solving a Rubik's Cube in 5.25 seconds. The AI system can solve the puzzle cube in a fraction of that time. Study senior author, Pierre Baldi,...
Read more...
Could YouTube partly be responsible for the increase in “flat earthers”? Researchers have discovered that many flat earthers were persuaded by YouTube videos. Many of these videos had been recommended or promoted by YouTube’s algorithm. A “flat earther” is a person who believes that the earth is a flat plane or disc instead of a sphere. Many ancient civilizations including the Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians held this belief and incorporated the theory into their cosmology. Although modern scientists have concluded that the earth is a sphere, the flat earth theory never truly disappeared. The theory has recently gained popularity thanks to social media. Dr....
Read more...
While Pokémon GO and Netflix are fun apps, they can also be huge data drains when not on WiFi. Google Play is investing in improvements to reduce the data that needs to be transferred for app installs and updates, while making data costs more transparent to users. Google recently rolled out a new delta algorithm “bsdiff” that reduces patches by 50% or more. In the past when one updated an app, they would essentially have to redownload the app and the large amount of data that accompanied it. Since 2012, only changes or deltas to APK files have been downloaded and merged with the existing files. Google has since been doing version checks of apps, and then sends out a patch that merges the changes...
Read more...
A group of French and American scientists publishing in the science journal Nature are reporting success in their attempt to develop software that allows damaged robots to quickly overcome many sustained injuries and continue with their tasks. A major problem in robotics has long been the inability of the machines to deal with unexpected circumstances, and in the case of damage suffered in the performing of their duties, they will usually just ignore the problem and thus make the it all the worse. Now, though, with inspiration drawn from nature itself, the scientists — Antoine Cully, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Danesh Tarapore of the Marie Curie University in...
Read more...
On Tuesday Google will change an algorithm in its search function that will give preference to websites that are deemed "mobile friendly" for searches run via cellular devices (searches run via browsers on computers and tablets will be unaffected). This change by the search behemoth is widely expected to have a more substantial search results impact than its two previous algorithm updates, Panda (12% affected) and Penguin (3% affected). Considering that mobile searches now make up nearly 50% of all Google search traffic* the algorithm update is sure to cause what marketing firm Somo is calling a "mobilegeddon", adversely affecting the search rankings of a significant number of websites....
Read more...
In celebration of its 15th birthday, Google announced that it has overhauled its search algorithm. The new tool is called Hummingbird, and its chief feature is conversational search; in other words, when you make a search query, instead of merely looking at keywords and popping out results that seem to match them the best, Hummingbird is designed to employ a higher level of understanding. For instance, if you say or type “What’s the best place to buy a TV near my house?”, the new algorithm might understand that by “place” you mean a physical store location, recognize that a “TV” is most typically sold in an electronics store, and try and pull up a store...
Read more...
Facebook is tricky. The site layout changes all the time, with menus, settings, and the like moving around, disappearing, reappearing, and being reworked with a slightly different name. Despite that, deleting a post from your Timeline seems mercifully easy: You just click the little icon in the upper right corner of a given post and then click Delete. Boom, done. Except apparently, that post isn’t actually deleted. Laura of “The Well-Prepared Mind” wrote a blog post detailing how she deleted everything on her Timeline, only to log back in some time later and find that everything had been restored. She says she did this twice, and sure enough, all those items are back. This doesn't...
Read more...
