Blog Archive

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No, we won’t change the corporate world with divestment and boycotts

corporate greed
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Boe Pahari’s short reign as boss of AMP’s lucrative investment management division and the resignations this week of AMP chairman David Murray and board member John Fraser have shown the power of major shareholders in public companies.


There was, you may recall, public outcry about Pahari’s elevation to chief executive of AMP Capital on July 1, after it was revealed he had been reprimanded for alleged sexual harassment in 2017 and docked 25% of his A$2 million bonus that year.

In any era—but certainly in the #metoo era—handing out a traffic ticket for (alleged) sexual harassment and three years later promoting the (alleged) wrongdoer to boss of AMP’s most important business was never going to fly.

In the end it was the company’s largest shareholder, Allan Gray Australia, that delivered Murray and AMP’s chief executive, Francesco De Ferrari, an ultimatum: go now or we’ll call a

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Technology
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Tacoma schools provides laptops for students in grades 6-12 ahead of remote learning

Tacoma Public Schools aims to help families avoid the scramble of last spring, when schools statewide were forced to go remote because of the coronavirus pandemic.

TACOMA, Wash. — The coronavirus pandemic complicated students’ return to school this fall unlike any other year, and Tacoma is hoping to smooth some of the hiccups from spring’s rush to online learning.

Tacoma Public Schools is currently distributing laptops to all students grades sixth through 12, ahead of online classes starting Sept. 9. Eventually, the district plans to get to 1-to-1 with all students, but a shortage of machines as districts nationwide scramble means younger ones will have to wait. There are more than 15,000 students enrolled across Tacoma’s middle and high schools, and 13,000 kindergarteners through 5th graders.

The return to online learning certainly means some strange first impressions for incoming freshman, like Alex Lindgren, who is starting at Stadium High School

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Software
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TBN drops Kenneth Copeland from programming lineup amid upcoming changes

By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter Follow
Televangelist Kenneth Copeland calls for a ‘supernatural heatwave’ to kill the coronavirus in New York City. | Screenshot: Facebook

Trinity Broadcasting Network said it will no longer air shows from controversial televangelist Kenneth Copeland starting in October as part of a series of upcoming programming changes at the international Christian television network.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries and TBN have had a business relationship for some 40 years, with the network airing Copeland’s “Believer’s Voice of Victory.”

In a statement emailed to The Christian Post on Tuesday, TBN Marketing Director Nate Daniels said the removal of Copeland’s programs, which will go into effect on Oct. 2, was part of several alterations.

“In pursuit of a new vision under Matt and Laurie Crouch’s leadership, TBN has been making changes to programming over the last several years,” Daniels said.

“As a

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Programming
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A Tesla Employee Foiled an Alleged Ransomware Scheme

Illustration for article titled A Tesla Employee Foiled an Alleged Ransomware Scheme

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli (AP)

CEO Elon Musk called a thwarted cyberattack against Tesla “serious” on Thursday after a Russian national reportedly tried to recruit and bribe an employee to install ransomware on the company’s network at its Gigafactory in northern Nevada.

The Justice Department released a complaint earlier this week about an attempted malware attack that doesn’t name the tech giant specifically, but Musk confirmed via Twitter that Tesla is the Nevada company mentioned in the report. “Much appreciated,” he tweeted Thursday, “This was a serious attack.”

Tesla’s massive factory in Sparks, Nevada, produces lithium-ion batteries and electric motors to power its fleet of vehicles. Per the complaint, the FBI charged a Russian national, 27-year-old Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, in an alleged conspiracy that involved bribing a Tesla employee “to introduce malicious software into the company’s computer network, extract data from the network, and extort ransom money

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Technology
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Democrats offer counter-programming around GOP convention site

Gary Grumbach

5d ago / 1:49 PM UTC

WASHINGTON — With the 2020 Republican National Convention hitting the airwaves this week, the Democratic National Committee is hitting the road with a series of counter-programming measures. 

If you’re driving around the nation’s capital Tuesday, you may see a mobile billboard funded by the Democratic National Committee. With stops at the White House, the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium and the Republican National Committee’s offices, the DNC hopes to attract eyeballs and tweets with its message focused on the unemployment rate, small businesses and evictions. 

“Over 100,000 small businesses have shuttered for good,” one slide says. “As many as 7 million could close forever by the end of 2020,” says the next, as video of President Trump golfing plays.   

The goal is not to respond to what is said each night during the RNC, a DNC spokesperson told NBC News, but to share

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Programming
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How an F-16 Fighter Jet Lost a Dog Fight to a Computer

What would it mean if an unmanned, AI-enabled fighter jet were able to out-perform a manned fighter in a dogfight?

Well, that is what happened according to a DARPA-industry simulation exercise in which a drone fighter defeated a manned F-16 by a score of 5 to 0, according to a report from Breaking Defense.

“The three-day trials show that AI systems can credibly maneuver an aircraft in a simple, one-on-one combat scenario and shoot its forward guns in a classic, WWII-style dogfight. In a 5 to 0 sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest ” the Breaking Defense story says. 

There are several important things to bear in mind here, it would seem. Of course, AI is progressing so quickly that many presume highly-maneuverable, complex-decision-making drone fighter jets will be operational in the

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Computer
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Beshear offers way to expand internet to low-income students

FRANKFORT, Ky.

Kentucky will pump $8 million into a statewide effort to supply internet access to children in low-income homes as schools open with digital learning because of the coronavirus, Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration said Tuesday.

The investment — drawn from federal COVID-19 relief aid sent to Kentucky — is meant to close the “digital divide” that leaves some children in rural and urban areas without broadband access at home, Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman said. The initiative will help reduce the monthly cost for low-income parents to gain access to the internet for their school-age children, Coleman said.

About 32,000 Kentucky children lack internet access at home, she said.

“We have to do better by that remaining 5% of students that still do not have access to broadband in their homes,” Coleman told reporters.

Beshear recently urged Kentucky’s K-12 schools to wait until Sept. 28 to restart in-person classes to

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Internet
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Memers are making deepfakes, and things are getting weird

The particular deepfake algorithm that people were using comes from a 2019 research paper presented at NeurIPS, the largest annual AI research conference. Unlike other, more complex algorithms, it allows a user to take any video of a person’s face and use it to animate a photo of someone else’s face with only a few lines of code.

Windheim found the open-source algorithm in a YouTube tutorial and ported it into a Google Colab notebook, a free service for running code in the cloud. After a few tries, aided by the skills she’d picked up in the occasional coding class in college, she got the script to spit out a deepfake video. She then synched the song to the video with Kapwing’s tools, creating a new version of the meme.

Since she posted her tutorial on Kapwing’s YouTube channel, a number of other YouTubers have also made tutorials using the

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Technology
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More cancellations and distance programming?

As the pandemic continues to delay productions and push back release dates, Netflix as we know it may start to change as Hollywood shifts with the times.



a couple of people that are dressed up and posing for the camera

© Provided by Fansided


Netflix, the reigning king of streaming platforms, has studiously shepherded its millions of subscribers through this pandemic, seemingly with ease. Content, both original and licensed, has steadily been added to its collection without pause for months. COVID-19, however, is still lingering through the U.S. with no predictable end in sight. Hollywood has ground to a halt forcing productions to be delayed and, in a surprising turn, renewals to be reversed.

As we head into a shaky fall TV season with networks like The CW and CBS opting to air content that was previously behind a paywall, it’s beginning to look like unknown territory as Hollywood scrambles to figure out their content problem. The Society and I Am Not Okay

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Programming
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Future mental health care may include diagnosis via brain scan and computer algorithm

IMAGE

IMAGE: MRI images like this one were screened by a machine learning computer algorithm designed by a research team at the University of Tokyo. The algorithm learned to identify the brains…
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Credit: Image by Shinsuke Koike, CC-BY

Most of modern medicine has physical tests or objective techniques to define much of what ails us. Yet, there is currently no blood or genetic test, or impartial procedure that can definitively diagnose a mental illness, and certainly none to distinguish between different psychiatric disorders with similar symptoms. Experts at the University of Tokyo are combining machine learning with brain imaging tools to redefine the standard for diagnosing mental illnesses.

“Psychiatrists, including me, often talk about symptoms and behaviors with patients and their teachers, friends and parents. We only meet patients in the hospital or clinic, not out in their daily lives. We have to make medical conclusions using subjective, secondhand

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Computer