‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology
Email Us! Twitter Linkedin By: Hannah Devlin October 5, 2019 It can pick out shoplifters, international criminals and lost children in seconds. But as the cameras proliferate, who’s watching the watchers? Gordon’s wine bar is reached through a discreet side-door, a few paces from the slipstream of London theatregoers and suited professionals powering towards their […]
Met police admits it lacks records of King’s Cross face matches
By: Leo Kelion October 4, 2019 London’s Metropolitan Police Service says it does not have any records of the outcomes of a facial recognition tie-up with a private firm in the city. Last month, it acknowledged it had shared people’s pictures with the managers of the city’s King’s Cross Estate development. It had previously denied […]
Basic Income Recipients Spent the Money on “Literal Necessities”
By: Natalie Coleman October 4, 2019 A popular argument levied by opponents of universal basic income (UBI) — an unconditional, periodic payment given to all members of a society — is that recipients will use the money on frivolous purchases. But the first data is finally trickling in from a UBI experiment in Stockton, California […]
Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing
By: Alex Hern September 29, 2019 TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines. The documents, revealed by the Guardian for the first time, lay out how ByteDance, the […]
AI used for first time in job interviews in UK to find best applicants
By: Charles Hymas September 27, 2019 Artificial intelligence (AI) and facial expression technology is being used for the first time in job interviews in the UK to identify the best candidates. Unilever, the consumer goods giant, is among companies using AI technology to analyse the language, tone and facial expressions of candidates when they are […]
One in five workers have skipped meals to make ends meet in past year, survey finds
By: Ben Chapman September 27, 2019 One in five workers has skipped meals over the past year to make ends meet, according to research by the Trades Union Congress.When asked the same question two years ago, one in eight respondents said they had gone without food because they were short of money. This year almost […]
‘Afraid We Will Become The Next Xinjiang’: China’s Hui Muslims Face Crackdown
By: Emily Feng September 26, 2019 Gold-domed mosques and gleaming minarets once broke the monotony of the Ningxia region’s vast scrubland every few miles. This countryside here is home to some of China’s 10.5 million Hui Muslims, who have practiced Sunni or Sufi forms of Islam within tight-knit communities for centuries, mainly in the northwest […]
‘Absolute revolution’: UK biotech firms thrive despite Brexit threat
By: Julia Kollewe December 26, 2019 Biotech is one of the most promising parts of the British drug industry, not least according to the investors who continue to pump vast sums into the sector despite the looming shadow of Brexit. In the first eight months of 2018 alone it received nearly £1.6bn, compared with £1.2bn […]
Proof emerges that a quantum computer can outperform a classical one
By: Schrödinger’s cheetah September 26, 2019 IN AN ARTICLE published in 2012 John Preskill, a theoretical physicist, posed a question: “Is controlling large-scale quantum systems merely really, really hard, or is it ridiculously hard?” Seven years later the answer is in: it is merely really, really hard. Last week a paper on the matter was—briefly […]