Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Zuckerberg backs stronger Internet privacy and election laws: ‘We need a more active role for governments’ Spencer Kimball SUN, MAR 31 2019 • 3:09 AM EDT   KEY POINTS ·         Zuckerberg said new regulations are needed to protect society from harmful content, ensure election integrity, protect people’s privacy and to guarantee data portability. ·         The Facebook CEO also endorsed a global framework to protect people’s privacy along the lines of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. ·         Facebook has faced a torrent of public criticism over its handling of Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media and policies on hate speech that many governments and users consider too lax.   Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday called for governments to play a greater role in ...

This All-Terrain Robot “Teaches” Itself to Walk in a Revolutionary Way   DyRET shows just how far evolutionary robotics has come.     Leslie Nemo May 18th 2018 If it wasn’t for its lack of a head, a robot from a University of Oslo research group would seem  alarmingly  life-like as it stumbles across the floor. Named DyRET, this quadruped teaches itself how to walk on different terrains, and even learns from its mistakes. DyRET has gone through a few different designs since it first  hit the pavement  in 2015. But the latest version, as reported on by  WIRED , is the most adept at figuring out the leg and gait length necessary to cruise around on ice, rocks, or any other surface. With every shaky step DyRET makes, we’re that much closer to having truly all-terrain robots. Of course, DyRET doesn’t always look like it’s got things figured out. When its designers set it on a new surface, the robot starts shifting everywhere. All fo...

ROBOT ‘NATURAL SELECTION’ RECOMBINES INTO SOMETHING TOTALLY NEW AUTHOR: MATT SIMONMATT SIMON 03.26.19 06:00 AM BACTERIA DO IT. Viruses do it. Worms, mammals, even bees do it. Every living thing on earth replicates, whether that be asexually (boring) or sexually (fun). Robots do not do it: The machines are steely and very uninterested in reproduction. But perhaps they can learn. Scientists in a fascinating field known as evolutionary robotics are trying to get machines to adapt to the world, and eventually to reproduce on their own, just like biological organisms. As in, someday two robots that are particularly well-adapted to a certain environment could combine their genes (OK, code) to produce a 3D-printed baby robot combining the strengths of its two parents. If the approach works, it could lead to robots that design themselves, building beautifully adapted morphologies and behaviors that a human engineer could never dream up. Weird Legs and Robot Babies It soun...

Boston Dynamics’ latest robot is a mechanical ostrich that loads pallets The latest creation from Softbank's Boston Dynamics looks ready for actual work. RON AMADEO - 3/29/2019, 4:43 AM     Boston Dynamics has a new YouTube video showing off its newest robot design. This one is a reimagining of the "Handle" robot that the company originally showed off in 2017. Back then the robot could jump four feet in the air and do all kinds of tricks; now its purpose is to load pallets. Back in 2017 Handle was the company's first public "wheel-legged" robot—that is, the robot is a bipedal design that stands on two legs, but instead of feet at the bottom, the design opts for a set of wheels. Boston Dynamics described the design decision on its website, saying, "Wheels are fast and efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs, Handle has the best of both worlds." Wheel legs allowed the original Handl...

Brazil’s Top Election Court Catches Google Manipulating Search Results to Point to Negative Entries on Bolsonaro …Just Like They Do with Conservatives in America     by Jim Hoft   March 29, 2019 The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSA), Brazil’s top election court, fined Fernando Haddad (President Jair Bolsonaro’s leftist opponent) for  having a contract with Google  to manipulate search results during the election. Luiz Edson Fachin, of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), ruled that the PT candidate for the presidency, Fernando Haddad, paid Google to highlight negative content and manipulated searches to point to a website with negative coverage of Bolsonaro. Google wasn’t fined because they claimed that as soon as they were notified by the court of the irregularities they dishonored the contract. This is a common practice by Google in the United States. Google manipulates search results for conservatives and conservative publishers to point t...

AI can predict when someone will die with unsettling accuracy Do AI systems have a role to play in healthcare? By Mindy Weisberger, Live Science March 27, 2019, 12:13 PM PDT Medical researchers have unlocked an unsettling ability in artificial intelligence (AI): predicting a person's early death. Scientists recently trained an AI system to evaluate a decade of general health data submitted by more than half a million people in the United Kingdom. Then, they tasked the AI with predicting if individuals were at risk of dying prematurely — in other words, sooner than the average life expectancy — from chronic disease, they reported in a new study. The predictions of early death that were made by AI algorithms were "significantly more accurate" than predictions delivered by a model that did not use machine learning, lead study author Dr. Stephen Weng, an assistant professor of epidemiology and data science at the University of Nottingham (UN) in the U.K.,  said in ...

The US Military Is Creating the Future of Employee Monitoring U.S. Air Force cyber security technicians with the 355th Communications Squadron review work orders at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base Ariz., Sept. 26, 2018. BY PATRICK TUCKER MARCH 26, 2019 A new AI-enabled pilot project aims to sense “micro changes” in the behavior of people with top-secret clearances. If it works, it could be the future of corporate HR. The U.S. military has the hardest job in human resources: evaluating hundreds of thousands of people for their ability to protect the nation’s secrets. Central to that task is a question at the heart of all labor relations: how do you know when to extend trust or take it away? The office of the Defense Security Service, or DSS, believes artificial intelligence and machine learning can help. Its new pilot project aims to sift and apply massive amounts of data on people who hold or are seeking security clearances. The goal is not just to detect employees w...

Facebook charged with racial discrimination in targeted housing ads Akanksha Rana MARCH 28, 2019 / 5:00 AM (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged Facebook Inc on Thursday with violating the Fair Housing Act, alleging that the company’s targeted advertising discriminated on the basis of race and color. Seeking damages and unspecified appropriate relief for the harm caused, HUD said in its civil charge that Facebook also restricted who could see housing-related ads based on national origin, religion, familial status, sex and disability. Facebook said it had been working with HUD on the issue and was surprised by the department’s decision to issue the charge, having taken significant steps to prevent ads that discriminate across its platforms. The social media giant said last week it would create a new advertising portal for ads linked to housing and employment that would limit targeting options for advertisers and pledged to b...

Twitter considering labeling Trump tweets that violate rules BY EMILY BIRNBAUM - 03/28/19 09:15 AM EDT    A Twitter executive on Wednesday said the company is considering a new feature that will label tweets from politicians, including President Trump, when they violate Twitter rules. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's head of legal, policy, and trust and safety, at a Washington Post event on Wednesday said the company might start annotating offensive tweets from public figures with a message about why they remain up. Twitter has long held that some posts from public figures should remain up because they are "newsworthy," even when they violate Twitter guidelines. "One of the things we’re working really closely on with our product and engineering folks is, ‘How can we label that?’" Gadde said during the Post event. “How can we put some context around it so people are aware that that content is actually a violation of our rules and it is serving a part...

There is mysterious ‘undocumented technology’ hidden on Intel computer chips, researchers say Jasper Hamill Thursday 28 Mar 2019 3:06 pm Computer experts have claimed that the chips which power most of the computers in the world are hiding mysterious and ‘undocumented’ technology. Analysts from Positive Technologies alleged that Intel chips and processors contain an enigmatic ‘logic signal analyser’ capable of reading ‘almost all data on a computer’. The claims are likely to alarm conspiracy theorists, even though the research does not prove long-standing rumours that the NSA has hidden ‘back doors’ on computer chips which are used to spy on billions of people. Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov revealed their findings at the Black Hat Conference, a gathering of hackers and cybersecurity specialists in Singapore. The analyser was discovered in the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) on Intel motherboards as well as the main processor itself. Together, these parts of th...

Kliff Kingsbury installing phone breaks at Cardinals meetings 'to get that social media fix' Jason OwensYahoo Sports Mar 26, 2019, 8:29 PM Most Americans can relate to concerns over cellphone and social media addiction. For many, their phones are the last thing they see before going to sleep and the first thing they look at when they wake up. In between, they’re faced with the constant urge to check the computers in their pockets for Twitter updates, scores, news or whatever it is that feeds their need. The tendency has prompted concerns over the impact devices have on users’ mental well-being and led to apps and tactics intended to dissuade that urge to stare at a screen. This does not appear to be a concern for Arizona Cardinals rookie head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Kingsbury told reporters at Tuesday’s owners meetings in Phoenix that he plans to implement “cellphone breaks” at team meetings to feed his players’ addictions. "They're itc...

GOOGLE IS CONDUCTING A SECRET “PERFORMANCE REVIEW” OF ITS CENSORED CHINA SEARCH PROJECT Ryan Gallagher March 27 2019, 9:13 a.m. GOOGLE EXECUTIVES ARE  carrying out a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China, The Intercept has learned. A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a “performance review” of the controversial effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. Performance reviews at Google are undertaken annually to evaluate employees’ output and development. They are usually carried out in an open, peer review-style process: Workers grade each other’s projects and the results are then assessed by management, who can reward employees with promotion if they are deemed ready to progress at the company. In the case of Dragonfly, however, the peer review aspect has been removed, subvertin...