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Submission + - Radio Reporter Who Lost Voice Returns to Air Using App Built from Archived Audio (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Jamie Dupree had been a radio reporter from 1983 until the Spring of 2016, when he lost his voice. His official diagnosis is a rare neurological condition known as “Tongue Protrusion Dystonia” – for some unknown reason when he tries to talk, his tongue pushes forward out of his mouth, and his throat clenches, leading to a voice that is strangled and strained, as it is a struggle to string together more than a few words at a time.

Dupree's plight attracted the attention of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who went to the floor of the House and delivered a speech that publicized Dupree's voice troubles and the lack of answers. Other reporters wrote stories about Dupree and people inside his company, Cox Media Group, tried to find a high tech solution to get him back on the air. They eventually found a Scottish company named CereProc (https://www.cereproc.com) which agreed to sift through years of Dupree's archived audio to build a voice – which, when paired with a text-to-speech application – would sound like Dupree and get him back on the radio.

Dupree writes that the App works and will allow him to “talk” on the radio again. Starting next week, be will again provide stories to news-talk radio stations and be back on the air in hourly newscasts.

Submission + - Killer robots will only exist if we are stupid enough to let them (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Heritype
Heritype writes: The idea of killer robots rising up and destroying humans is a Hollywood fantasy and a distraction from the more pressing dilemmas that intelligent machines present to society, according to computer scientists. Sir Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, predicts that AI will bring overwhelming benefits to humanity, revolutionising cancer diagnosis and treatment, and transforming education and the workplace. If problems arise, he said, it will not be because sentient machines have unexpectedly gone rogue in a Terminator-like scenario.

“The danger is clearly not that robots will decide to put us away and have a robot revolution,” he said. “If there [are] killer robots, it will be because we’ve been stupid enough to give it the instructions or software for it to do that without having a human in the loop deciding.” Prof Shadbolt made the comments ahead of a talk at the CogX conference in London on Monday

Comment Re:Faux outrage (Score 1) 63

by NichardRixon (#56759478) Attached to: Mark Zuckerberg and the 2012 Facebook Moscow Hack

"You GAVE Facebook that information on yourself.

For people who signed up for FB, yes, I agree. And they are fucking idiots, the lot. However, the problem is those idiots give FB information on their friends who never signed up for FB, so you can't totally stay out of their clutches."

I disagree on both counts. Non-technical people can't be expected to know the ramifications of putting their information on Facebook. Even among those who know it's going to be used for targeted advertising, the many other ways this data can be used is not generally understood.

Are people who don't know that getting an auto loan from a company that calculates interest based on the rule of 78s idiots, too?

Submission + - SPAM: Chinese Journalist Banned From Flying, Buying Property By 'Social Credit Score'

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: China is rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave. But there are consequences if a score gets too low, and for some that’s cause for concern.

When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” he said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

And the list is now getting longer as every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score — a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - My Initial Impressions of Google's New Gmail User Interface (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: Google launched general access to their first significant Gmail user interface (UI) redesign in many years today. It’s rolling out gradually — when it hits your account you’ll see a “Try the new Gmail” choice under the settings (“gear”) icon on the upper right of the page (you can also revert to the “classic” interface for now, via the same menu).

But you probably won’t need to revert. Google clearly didn’t want to screw up Gmail, and my initial impression is that they’ve succeeded by avoiding radical changes in the UI. I’ll bet that some casual Gmail users might not even immediately notice the differences.

Submission + - Largest Star Map Ever Drops Online, Thanks to the ESA (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by S810
S810 writes: The European Space Agency has released a treasure trove of data from its Gaia Spacecraft; totaling around 1.7 billion stars. This star map is the largest of it's kind to date. In addition to the star map, the data also contains motion and color data of 1.3 billion stars relative to the Sun.

From the article, the data also includes "...radial velocities, amount of dust, and surface temperatures of lots of stars, and a catalogue of over 14,000 Solar System objects, including asteroids."

Comment Re:No it smells of nothing (Score 3, Informative) 76

by NichardRixon (#56499209) Attached to: Scientists Discover That Uranus Smells Like Rotten Eggs

It's odd that the Oxford scholars didn't mention the toxicity of hydrogen sulfide, but mention suffocation from inhalation of methane and the effects of low temperatures. Although the odor can be detected at very minute concentrations, (around 0.000047 ppm) it's about as poisonous as cyanide at about 360 ppm. Suppression of the sense of smell doesn't happen instantaneously, and many deaths have occurred because victims who noticed the odor thought the gas had dissipated when they could no longer smell it.

Comment Frustrating (Score 1) 151

by NichardRixon (#56493275) Attached to: Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google

It's frustrating to realize how many Slashdot readers actually believe that Google collects all of the data it does simply for the purpose of targeted advertising. Consider the fact that they have algorithms to read every message that goes through Gmail. They combine this with data they gather in following almost everyone as they surf across the web. The emails provide loads of personal, and personally identifiable information about anyone using the service, as well as anyone replying to those who do.

Keeping this in mind, why do you think they are trying so hard to be the foremost developers of AI? To do targeted advertising?

They've been releasing bits and pieces of information on what they can already do for several years. How many here have read about it and been concerned? What will happen when their AI gets several magnitudes of order better?

To a somewhat lesser extent this applies to MS, Facebook and Amazon, and many lesser known information warehouses. None of them have shown any indication that their applications will continue to be considered to be benign, even by those who can't yet even imagine that all of this is taking place.

This is at least part of the reason that Elon Musk is pushing for government regulation of AI.

Submission + - SPAM: Algorithm automatically spots "face swaps" in videos

Submitted by yagoda
yagoda writes: Andreas Rossler at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and colleagues [] developed a deep-learning system that can automatically spot face-swap videos. The new technique could help identify forged videos as they are posted to the web.

But the work also has sting in the tail. The same deep-learning technique that can spot face-swap videos can also be used to improve the quality of face swaps in the first place—and that could make them harder to detect.

The new technique relies on a deep-learning algorithm that Rossler and co have trained to spot face swaps. These algorithms can only learn from huge annotated data sets of good examples, which simply have not existed until now.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - ICANN global Whois system expected to shatter on May 25 with new GDPR law (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by monkeyzoo
monkeyzoo writes: In a letter sent to DNS overseer ICANN, Europe's data protection authorities have effectively killed off the current service, noting that it breaks the law and so will be illegal come 25 May, when GDPR comes into force.

ICANN now has a little over a month to come up with a replacement to the decades-old service that covers millions of domain names and lists the personal contact details of domain registrants, including their name, email and telephone number.

ICANN has already acknowledged it has no chance of doing so. The company warns that without being granted a special temporary exemption from the law, the system will fracture, perhaps even resulting in the Whois service being turned off completely while a replacement was developed.

Critics point out that ICANN has largely brought these problems on itself, having ignored official warnings from the Article 29 Working Party for nearly a decade, and only taking the GDPR requirements seriously six months ago when there has been a clear two-year lead time.

European agencies responded and tore ICANN's plan to shreds, pointing out that it needs to be much more precise and to include both compliance and auditing functions. Critically, however, it did not address ICANN's request for a moratorium.

Even the idea of a moratorium appears to have been invented by ICANN. This is no evidence of a similar request from any other industry, and the GDPR is, after all, a globally applicable law that affects everyone.

Submission + - Doctors tried to lower $148K cancer drug cost; makers triple price of pill (arstechnica.com) 2

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: Imbruvica, a compound that treats white blood cell cancers, has until now been a bargain at $148,000 per year. Until now, doctors have been able to optimize dosage for each patient by prescribing up to four small-dose pills of it per day.

But after results from a recent small pilot trial indicated that smaller doses would for most patients work as well as the large ones, its manufacturer, Janssen and Pharmacyclics, has decided on the basis of the doctors' interest in smaller dosages to reprice all sizes of the drug to the price of the largest size. This has the effect of tripling the price for patients, and doctors have now put off any plans for further testing of lower dosages.

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