2017 - itbusinessdirect

Robot automation will take 800 million jobs by 2030

November 30, 2017November 30, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Up to 800 million global workers will lose their jobs by 2030 and be replaced by robotic automation, a new report from a consultancy has found. The study of 46 countries and 800 occupations by the McKinsey Global Institute found that up to one-fifth of the global work force will be affected. It said one-third of the workforce in richer nations like Germany and the US may need to retrain for other jobs. Machine operators and food workers will be hit hardest, the report says. Poorer countries that have less…

Coinbase ordered to give the IRS data on users trading more than $20,000

November 30, 2017November 30, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Most digital currencies exist in a sort of twilight state just beyond the grasp of federal regulators, but the U.S. tax authority is starting to get savvy to this whole bitcoin thing. On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Coinbase must supply the IRS with identifying information on users who had more than $20,000 in annual transactions on its platform between 2013 and 2015. After noticing that the number of tax returns claiming gains from virtual currency didn’t line up with the emerging popularity of digital currencies like…

Google Can Tell if Someone is Peeping at Your Phone

November 29, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Your days of peeking at someone else’s text conversations on the train might be numbered. At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, California, next week, Google researchers Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff will present a project they’re calling an electronic screen protector, where a Google Pixel phone uses its front-facing camera and eye-detecting artificial intelligence to detect whether more than one person is looking at the screen. An unlisted, but public video by Ryu shows the software interrupting a Google messaging app to display a camera…

Flitto’s language data helps machine translation systems get more accurate

November 27, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Artificial intelligence-powered translation is becoming an increasingly crowded category, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all working on their own services. But tech still isn’t a match for professional human translations and machine-generated results are often hit-and-miss. One online translation service, Flitto, is now focused on providing other companies with the language data they need to train their machine translation programs. Headquartered in Seoul, Flitto launched in 2012 as a translation crowdsourcing platform. It still provides translation services, ranging from a mobile app to professional translators, for about 7.5 million…

UK drone users to sit safety tests under new law

November 27, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Drone users in the UK may have to take safety awareness tests under legislation planned by the government. Drones weighing more than 250g could also be banned from flying near airports, or above 400 ft, in a crackdown on unsafe flying. Police will also be given new powers to seize and ground drones which may have been used in criminal activity. The bill has been welcomed by the pilots’ union, which has warned of near misses involving drones and aircraft. Balpa said there had been 81 incidents so far this…

Schillinger’s substitute phone helps overcome smartphone addiction

November 27, 2017

We’ve all been there: fiddling with your smartphone because it’s there, or reaching for it when you hear a text message notification. Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger created the Substitute Phone as a way to help smartphone addicts cope in its absence. Schillinger says that more and more, phones are becoming an addicting object in our lives. Users constantly play with them, even if they’re not looking for a message or expecting a call, and he was inspired to design “a tool that would help stop this ‘checking’ behaviour.” Schillinger designed…

People Playing Pokemon Go caused Millions in damages in 148 days in an Indiana County

November 27, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

For a brief, shining period last summer, Pokémon Go reigned supreme. It brought obsession, joy, and, according to a new paper, injuries and death. This working paper, appropriately and evocatively titled “Death by Pokemon Go,” shows the darker side of the massively popular augmented reality game. Purdue University economists Mara Faccio and John McConnell combed through accident reports from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, in the first 148 days after the game was released in July 2016. In that county alone, the total value from injuries, damage, and the two lives lost…

The Unfortunate Side Effect of LED Lighting

November 24, 2017

Light pollution has increased worldwide because of the prevalence of energy saving LED lights. However, the problem isn’t with the lights themselves — but the fact that the world is getting brighter because LEDs are illuminating places we didn’t bother to light before. And that has its own environmental cost. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances, and found that artificially lit outdoor surfaces grew at a pace of 2.2 percent each year between 2012 and 2016. “With few exceptions, growth in lighting occurred throughout South America, Africa,…

There are growing concerns that AltSchool is failing students

November 24, 2017 Dianne Jacobs

Business Insider recently reported that numerous families have grown frustrated with the education their children are receiving at AltSchool, an ambitious San Francisco-based edtech company that four years ago began opening physical grade schools and promising a personalized learning approach that would far surpass the standardized education most kids receive. It’s not just parents who have growing concerns about AltSchool, however. Educators also question whether AltSchool is the next best thing in education, or whether instead the for-profit company could hamper the prospects of the children with whom it works,…