Big data promises fairness. With enough information about individuals and populations, we can design algorithms that will identify the best possible answer to a given question, free of human bias. Algorithms, after all, are not racist, sexist, or elitist.
Donald Trump’s policy of calling every world leader just took a dramatic turn. His day’s roster of congratulatory conversations included a phone call with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen—demolishing the long-held US “One China” policy, in place since Richard Nixon was in office.
In 2015, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin became the first translated novel to win the Hugo Award, one of the highest honors in sci-fi. A surprise hit inside and outside China, the book left English-language readers unsure about where to get more Chinese sci-fi. Now, Three-Body Problem translator Ken Liu is here to help: His new anthology, Invisible Planets, is a collection of excellent contemporary Chinese sci-fi short stories, by seven different authors, in English translation.
In 2007, I became obsessed with a musician named Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a nearly forgotten French eccentric who created a singular style of punk-rock deeply influenced by African music and funk. I read incessantly about her music, but I could not find a way to actually listen to it. Amazon’s catalog was limited, so I couldn’t buy a CD. Spotify didn’t exist yet. And even illicit file-sharing sites came up dry on searches for Lizzy.
There is a lot separating voters for and against Trump: broadly speaking, they differ based on race, gender, and education, to name a few. A deep dive into a massive dataset of tweets show they also differ in the way they talk.
Election night in America has had two surprise successes: Donald Trump and the New York Times’ addictively nerve-racking live presidential forecast. Anxious election watchers have been glued to the news organization’s constantly fluctuating dashboard of speed dials that show each candidate’s chances of winning the presidency.
This morning Eric Trump proudly announced on Twitter that he had voted for his father, Republican candidate Donald Trump. In this tweet, he included a photo of his ballot (which is illegal in the state of New York).
American voters can be fickle. Over 10% of them still don’t know whether to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, according to national poll averages. And they can be deterred from voting altogether by the most mundane of factors: the weather.
In 1981, when IBM was launching its first PC, Apple ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, sardonically welcoming its new competitor to the personal computer market.
Coming up with a great Halloween costume is tricky. But coming up with one that tells people you are a switched-on, globally aware business professional? That’s damn near impossible.
Here’s the full list of carefully curated words, phrases, and actions, you can look forward to for the third presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Tune in to this page for real time updates during the debate. (It starts at 9pm, US eastern time.)
Here’s the full list of carefully curated words, phrases, and actions you can look forward to for the second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Tune in to this page for real time updates during the debate. (It starts at 9pm, Eastern time.)
On Monday (Oct. 3), Fox News’ popular The O’Reilly Factor included a segment of “Watters’ World,” a regular video segment in which Fox correspondent Jesse Watters does unfunny but allegedly comedic man-on-the-street interviews. This most recent clip was entitled “Chinatown,” and it featured Watters sampling political opinion in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood. At time of writing the YouTube video for the segment had 200 upvotes and 1100 down votes.
In January 2011, protests broke out across Egypt to demand an end to the despotic and repressive regime of Hosni Mubarak. The protests were largely organized online, through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Mubarak quickly realized this, and launched a counterattack: He severed all access to the internet from within Egypt.
We New Yorkers are told, repeatedly and often, that if we see something, we should say something. The point is, that ”something”—an unclaimed bag or suspicious package—may contain a bomb or other device meant to cause harm.
Online platforms have a hard time handling hate speech. Twitter, for example, has slowly—many would say too slowly—shifted from its hands-off approach toward policing derogatory tweets, culminating most recently in the banishment of Milo Yiannopoulos, a famously hateful tweeter.
The Chinese currency has just entered a new phase in its journey to become more important to the world economy: Starting today, the yuan is officially a member of the International Monetary Fund’s basket of global reserve currencies.
An eloquent defense of the Black Lives Matter movement has come from an unlikely source: the white CEO of a major American corporation.
Lately, a lot of smartphones have been exploding. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 keeps blowing up, and there’s a rumor going around that one of the new iPhone 7’s may have combusted in the box.
This week the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Global Competitiveness Report, an assessment of how dynamic each country’s economy is. Switzerland came in first, extending its streak to eight years.
Learning a language comes with all kinds of benefits: It has been shown to make you smarter, make your brain more resilient, and open up job opportunities.
Last night (Monday), Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met in their long-awaited, first-ever presidential debate. The unenviable position of moderating the debate and keeping the candidates on-topic fell to Lester Holt, anchor of NBC Nightly News. A week before the debate, Holt announced that there would be three points of discussion: ”America’s Direction,” “Achieving Prosperity,” and “Securing America.”
http://qz.com/791437/presidential-debate-hillary-clinton-in-florida-and-the-story-behind-the-viral-millenial-selfie-photo/
