“In Japan, a robot may create a new way to mourn,” reports one Colorado news team:
This robot is supposed to sound like a loved one. Now imagine the same robot having a 3D-printed mask of their face. You will be able to stay with that robot for 49 days which is the period of mourning after the funeral in Japan. That is the concept of Digital Shaman project, which uses a humanoid.
Users will have an interview with the artist while they’re alive. Their physical characteristics and messages will be recorded then. After the user dies, the bereaved ones will be able to install the program into the robot. It mimics the deceased one’s personality, speech, and gestures. The robot can imitate hand and head movements the person was making during the interview…. As unreal as it may seem, the artist is planning to sell digital shaman to the public in the future.
People may wonder if the creator is planning to allow the deceased to live forever through the program. She’s not. “I think it will seriously hinder those left behind to move on.” We live in a digital world. And now a robot has brought together “IT technology” and “Death”.

It’s part of a larger research project on Japanese funeral rites, and one of a series of works on “digital shamanism” that “attempt to blend Japanese folk beliefs with technology.”
An artist’s statement calls it “a new mode of mourning in keeping with the technical advances of today.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Artist Proposes Small Robots with 3D-Printed Faces of Dead Relatives

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:
Every time Microsoft releases a Windows 10 feature update, it runs some efficiency tests to prove that its Edge browser is significantly faster than the competition, which includes Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Then the company posts the detailed results on its Windows blog and YouTube channel, boasting about the power efficiency of its browser. Even though the company still has run battery tests, it has remained strangely silent about them, posting about it on GitHub only. While many thought that Microsoft’s silence on the matter was due to Edge finally losing to the competition, it appears that this is not the case.

As spotted by Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has indeed run efficiency tests for Edge in Windows 10 version 1809, pitting it against the likes of Firefox and Chrome. Through these tests, the company has concluded that Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average.

“While Edge appears to have won these efficiency tests easily as well, it is likely that the company did not decide to promote this achievement — as it has always done previously — because of the planned abandonment of EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium,” the article concludes.
“It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft Edge is able to maintain its battery advantage once the switch to Chromium is complete.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from New York magazine:
In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered… Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites…. [B]ots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion….”
[N]ot even Facebook, the world’s greatest data-gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80âpercent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

On Twitter the author also shared a Twitter thread by the Washington Post’s director of advertising technology, who shares his own complaints about the ecosystem of online advertising. “The problem isn’t just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself… Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching….

“That’s not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Much Internet Traffic Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.

An anonymous reader quotes MIT’s Technology Review:
Silicon Valley loves the idea of universal basic income. Many in the tech elites tout it as the answer to job losses caused by automation, if only people would give it a chance…. Getting people on board with basic income requires data, which is what numerous tests have been trying to obtain. But this year, a number of experiments were cut short, delayed, or ended after a short time. That also means the possible data supply got cut off.
Back in June we declared, “Basic income could work — if you do it Canada style.” We talked to the people on the ground getting the checks in Ontario’s 4,000-person test and saw how it was changing the community. Then, just two months later, it was announced that the program is ending in the new year rather than running for three years. The last checks will be delivered to participants in March 2019.
The article complains that in addition, Finland’s test program ended this year after its initial trial period, while Y Combinator’s experiment “has also faced more delays, pushing the experiment into 2019,” saying these programs illustrate the three basic issues faced by basic income tests. First, there’s political disagreements. (“The Ontario program was shut down by the province’s newly installed Conservative government.”) Then there’s also concerns about funding — “As you might imagine, giving away free money is expensive” — and also fears about disrupting existing benefits “To avoid that, they’ve had to work with municipal and state agencies to get waivers for pilot recipients. But getting those waivers takes a lot of time and bureaucracy….

“The only way the idea can ever be embraced on any sort of large-scale, meaningful level is with more data and bigger tests. Without that, no matter how much support it gets from Silicon Valley, it seems unlikely that the public, at least in the US, will ever come around.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Is a Lack of Data Holding Back Universal Basic Income Programs?