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There’s no industry that moves faster than tech. The newest and hottest thing one week becomes old hat in need of a 2.0 version the next. That puts tech professionals in the anxious position of knowing there’s always more they need to know to stay on top of the latest innovations and techniques. Even the most connected and inspired tech practitioners need a reservoir of knowledge to fall back on when they need to add a new skill to their toolkit....

Roughly one in five people in the US have registered with a disability, with a similar figure for the UK. But when creating new products or services, investing resources to make technology accessible for impaired users can seem like taking the scenic route to market. An expensive deviation from a lean go to market strategy. It’s easy to toss accessibility considerations in the ‘nice to have’ bucket. ‘Accessibility as an afterthought’ is a frustration I’ve heard on repeat for the last decade....

I know a lot of people are spending hours on Clubhouse every week. Some want to engage in a conversation, and some want to play it in the background as white noise. Whatever might be your reasons, here are some apps to amp up your Clubhouse experience. Clubhouse bio builder People on Clubhouse are obsessed with bios filled with emoji. And it’s not really easy to build a description like that on your phone....

Adobe is now building a live-streaming feature in its Creative Cloud apps. The company made this announcement at its MAX event earlier this week. It has already shipped the feature as a beta version in Adobe Fresco, an iPad app for painting, to select users. The company’s Chief Product Officer, Scott Belsky, told The Verge while the feature is similar to live-streaming on Twitch, people who’ll be watching this live stream will be interested in tools being used by the artist: Adobe currently has a program called Adobe Live, which lets featured artists host a live stream on Behance and YouTube....

Take this unofficial Nike advertisement that a neural network spit out after being trained on seven years worth of the company’s commercials: TNW caught up with the faux-advertisement’s creator, Jean-Baptiste Le Divelec, via email, who shared their inspiration for the project with us: Sure, the ad might sound like a jumbled, cacophonous word-soup of gibberish. But there’s a vein of inspiration pulsing within it. Seriously, “If you can’t beat him, legend that thing!...

Caltech researcher Lina Necib named the collection Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. She suspects the stars are remnants of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way many moons ago. To develop the AI, Necib and her team first tracked stars across a simulated galaxy created by the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. They labeled the stars as either born in the host galaxy, or formed through galaxy mergers....

The team developed the map using an optical survey of three-quarters of the sky produced by the Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakalā, Maui. They trained an algorithm to identify celestial objects in the survey by feeding it spectroscopic measurements that provide definitive object classifications and distances. “Utilizing a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm, we leveraged the spectroscopic training set of almost 4 million light sources to teach the neural network to predict source types and galaxy distances, while at the same time correcting for light extinction by dust in the Milky Way,” said lead study author Robert Beck, a former cosmology postdoctoral fellow at IfA....

Eyal Weizman, the director of London-based investigative group Forensic Architecture, was first informed by email that his visa waiver had been revoked. No reason was given for the revocation. The next day, he went to apply for a visa at the US Embassy in London, where an officer told him that he couldn’t travel to the country because an algorithm had identified a security threat. “He said he did not know what had triggered the algorithm but suggested that it could be something I was involved in, people I am or was in contact with, places to which I had traveled (had I recently been in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia or met their nationals?...

The project, dubbed Tidal, uses underwater cameras connected to computer vision software to analyze fish behaviors that the human eye can’t see. In a blog post, Tidal general manager Neil Davé said the system could monitor thousands of individual fish habits to understand their eating patterns and movements. It will also collect information on their environment, such as temperatures and oxygen levels. Farmers can use the insights to keep their fish healthy, optimize their feeding, and reduce waste....

You’ve probably heard of DeepMind and its AI systems. The UK-based Google sister-company is responsible for both AlphaZero and AlphaGo, the systems that beat the world’s most skilled humans at the games of Chess and Go. In essence, what both systems do is try to figure out what the optimal next set of moves is. Where humans can only think so many “moves” ahead, the AI can look a bit further using optimized search and planning methods....

As the years passed, the pals drifted apart. But Rizzotto never forgot about Magnetron. When OpenAI released the GPT-3 language model, Rizzotto saw a chance to rekindle the friendship. The self-described “full-time mad scientist” chronicled the resurrection in a YouTube video. His story provides a cautionary tale about the dangers — and delights — of AI. Friends reunited As a child, Rizzotto had given his imaginary friend a detailed life story....

Apple revealed that, alongside the launch of the new iPhone models, it will be offering a new trade-in program allowing those who want to upgrade to pay in monthly installments. Depending one which old device you trade in, you could get the new iPhone 11 — regular price $699 — for $399, or $17 paid in monthly installments. The iPhone 11 Pro would go from $999 to $599 or $25 a month, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max (wow, that’s a mouthful) would go from $1099 to $699 or $29 a month....

The main factor behind the bugginess of recent releases, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, was the rate at which developers were committing changes — often daily, or at least weekly. These commits proved problematic, however, for other Apple developers. When one code change, or commit, went live (they go live by default in Apple’s coding environment), it often made test builds unusable for a period of time. This limited the amount of time testers could spend with the software and kept developers from fine-tuning feature releases as they were busy fixing bugs instead....

— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaOne) August 25, 2020 Earlier this year, CEO Tim Cook said that the company will open an online store this year in India, followed by a physical store the next year. We’ve asked Apple to provide more details, and we’ll update the story if we hear back. The company is also doubling down on production efforts in the country as it has started assembling the new iPhone SE 2020 locally....

Apple’s walled garden for AI tends to keep the Cupertino company out of critical media’s crosshairs. So it’s a bit of a shock when a story breaks demonstrating that the house that Jobs and Woz built is just as dangerous and unhinged as the rest of big tech when it comes to machine learning. Exhibit A: The Wall Street Journal today reported that Apple’s developing an AI-driven system that uses biometric data obtained from iPhone users to diagnose mental illness and autism....

The Safari feature — dubbed “Fraudulent Website Warning” in iOS and macOS — is meant to enhance online security by cross-referencing URLs against an external blacklist service provided by safe browsing providers such as Google and Tencent. “This feature appears to be ‘on’ by default in iOS Safari, meaning that millions of users could potentially be affected,” said John Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green. But for this to work, browser makers, including Apple and Mozilla, “send information calculated from the website address to Safe Browsing providers to check if the website is fraudulent,” aside from potentially logging your your IP address....

Positive messages are usually repeated, definite, specific, and personal. They should also be communicated by an authority figure who shows empathy (see graphic below). While our study does not identify what the most effective components of a positive message are (the sample was too small), the results imply that, for example, a positive message that is not specific or personalized and is delivered by a doctor perceived to lack authority and empathy, will not have the desired effect....

Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice president for digital affairs, told reporters that “as it stands right now, GDPR would say ‘don’t use it’, because you cannot get consent,” EURACTIV revealed today. GDPR classes information on a person’s facial features as biometric data, which is labeled as “sensitive personal data.” The use of such data is highly restricted, and typically requires consent from the subject — unless the processing meets a range of exceptional circumstances....

No matter what job you have or what life you lead, there will always be stress. If you don’t have money worries, you’ll have kids-worries. If you have a partner, you’ll have relationship-stress, and if you’re alone, maybe that stresses you out. Life is stressful and uncertain, and that’s part of what makes it fun. Nerves before a performance are healthy, but work stress shouldn’t overtake your life. I know you’ve heard this a million times before, but never underestimate the importance of tuning out and putting some distance between you and your job....

The 14 firms – including Barclays, Nasdaq, Credit Suisse Group, Banco Santander, ING, and Lloyds Banking Group – have registered a new entity to control the devleopment of the token, dubbed ‘utility settlement coin’ (or USC for short), The Wall Street Journal reports. The financial giants have poured over $60 million into the new company, called Fnality International. The token, which has been in the works for four years now, will function both as a payment device and a “messenger that carries all the information required to complete a trade,” according to the report....