James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Nintendo Co Ltd. ended up becoming a big winner after recent announcements at Apple’s event this week. An event that while focused on shiny happy iPhones, water resistant wearables and iconoclastic wireless earbuds, also gave us the news that some of the …
Algorithms to reduce child sex trafficking: an interview with the creators of Spotlight
Thousands upon thousands of escort ads are posted online every day in the United States, and unfortunately some of these ads represent and exploit children. It has been the job of law enforcement in the U.S. to look through these ads and …
Unlikely big hitters back Microsoft in legal battle over data privacy
Microsoft’s ongoing case with the US government has taken lots of twists and turns since the FBI first demanded that Microsoft hand over data stored on one of its servers in Ireland. The case has been dubbed as historic, given that Microsoft …
It’s the end of the world as we know it and AI feels fine
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop … ” For many of those born before the 1990s, those lines from the movie Terminator were their introduction to …
Uber wants to tackle air pollution with fleet of electric cars, in a city it’s currently butting heads with
Uber Technologies Inc. just announced that it is taking on air pollution with its first fully electric vehicles available in London, U.K., a similar initiative to Uber’s electric car programs in Chicago and Lisbon/Porto in Portugal. Another Uber electric car project just …
Facebook: Human editors go, fake news arrives, everyone gets what the doctor ordered
Just as soon as news emerges that Facebook shuts the door on several of its former news editors so that an algorithm can do the job of picking the latest ‘trending’ news, rather than the sometimes biased brain of a breathing individual, …
Crowdsourcing mishap: Outrage in Saudi Arabia after Microsoft Bing translation says the country is ISIS
Representatives of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, as well as netizens in the country, have called for a boycott of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, after an unfortunate translation of the word ‘daesh’. Daesh, which has been used to replace ISIS, ISIL, IS, was recently discovered to translate …
The Internet of Things: A 101 guide to privacy in the digitized world
It was after writing a story earlier this year concerning a connected sex toy sending very private information about its users back to the manufacturer that I started to muse about the ever-expanding Internet of Things and consumer privacy. What are the implications of …
Australian academics say Microsoft Excel is messing up many scientific research papers
According to a recent report, Microsoft’s spreadsheet software, Excel, is to blame for numerous errors in academic papers. The report states that when the software has been used to name genes in the study of genetic science, the default settings in Excel …
As robots take driving jobs, who will pick up the pieces?
Since the advent of improved artificial intelligence a lot has been said about a future of mass unemployment, often under the perhaps hyperbolic umbrella threat of ‘The Robots are Coming!’. The robots might be coming to take your job, but there are limits …