I'm not sure what it gains anyone other than some sort or rallying against China as a political move, but why are they scouring obscure cables for evidence of a lab origin? There is plenty of evidence in plain sight. I found the best summary here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/424...

"The idea is to reduce human contact with food during the cooking process..." More like reduce human contact with paychecks.

Curious, Microsoft former M&A exec takes over rival to Hololens. Subtle.

From the article: "Clare Garvie, a lawyer at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, has written about problems with the government’s use of facial recognition. She argues that low-quality search images — such as a still image from a grainy surveillance video — should be banned, " Exactly. Garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, images taken for drivers' license photos have strict size, color and quality requirements so they can be used as adequate reference images when doing comparisons. While I'm sure the buzz coming out of this will be "AI and face recognition is racist", the real takeaway should be that these systems are being used in a manner that exceeds their technical capability.

News at 11...

Given the back and forth between China and the US - shifting blame and trying to score points at the other's expense - I'm hard pressed to believe the current numbers out of China are accurate. So this "who's in first" game is pointless.

With regards to facial recognition technology, I do believe it. Even people that are an 88% match according to the algorithm can many times look so different that it is easy to rule out via a quick visual assessment. Now I am talking about U.S. law enforcement agencies. I'm not clear on other areas of the world. I think the biggest danger is surveillance. Using your face to know where you are to keep tabs on you. I think the potential there is way more sinister than in the criminal apprehension use case.

Background: I do not work for Amazon and I have no knowledge of the internal workings of their specific system I've worked in the biometrics industry for quite some time. The headline and implications sound all very scintillating unless you know how real systems work and are used. With most algorithms, when you match two faces you get a "score". This score basically means "likelihood of the two faces being a match". When you run these through a system, you typically set a score threshold. Let's say the match confidence score is on a 1-100 scale - 1 being very unlikely to be a match, 100 being highly likely to be a match. You might configure the system to say "Give me all results where the score is 75 or above". Now, you are probably going to look similar to a fair number of people in the rest of the population, at least according to the algorithms. So they don't take the person with the highest score and put him or her in prison immediately. There are human operators and law-enforcement agents that would take the matches with the highest scores and 1) Visually inspect them to see if they really are that close or not 2) Do a quick background check to see if this person has been charged with related crimes previously 2) at the next level, do some research to see if the person that is a match could even be reasonably said to be in the area of a suspected crime at the time it occurred. Only then would the matched person even be brought in for questioning, much less charged with anything. So the fact that some subset of politicians have a 25% match rate using some threshold score value in a database of gosh-knows how many known criminals is not that far-fetched, and does not indicate that a suspect that might match the database at the same rate would be cuffed and brought immediately to prison. Now I'm not a fan of scanning entire crowds of people at an event or populated area hoping that you catch someone with an outstanding warrant, etc, which is a different issue. But the headlines and implications thereof grossly overestimate the role of a raw match in the larger process of investigating a crime.

While I'm in the camp that believes humans are causing temperatures to warm, the study readily admits that they looked at one data set, which indicated an increase over July 2016 of 0.07 F. Now a near 10th of a degree increase in a single study is certainly non-trivial, but I'll wait for the rest of the studies and summaries that include more than one data set before coming to any conclusions. And by conclusions the one I am concerned with is whether temperatures are rising even faster than the most dire predictions.

The idea is that long term the factories that make the batteries should be powered by renewables. Yes, there is a transition period and not every facility can do this overnight. It doesn't invalidate the technology or the long term necessity. Just an ICE industry piece to sow doubt.