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

·         British employees are deliberately sabotaging workplace robots over fears the machines will take their jobs, new study claims Manual workers have found their own way of stopping the robot's rise, sabotage  Study by De Montfort University compared UK's use of robots to Norway It found that UK workers are particularly adverse to the introduction of the intelligent machines into the work place By  MILLY VINCENT FOR MAILONLINE PUBLISHED:  04:15 EDT, 29 September 2019  |  UPDATED:  04:33 EDT, 29 September 2019 ·           UK workers are sabotaging and assaulting workplace robots in an attempt to stop them taking their jobs, finds study. It's a common science fiction depiction of the future, artificial intelligence overthrows the human race. But for some manual workers they have found their own ways of stopping the robots' rise to wor...

Microphones in Amazon's new smart glasses that give wearer access to Alexa on-the-go could secretly listen in to all conversations within earshot Amazon released its $180 pair of Alexa-powered smart glasses yesterday Microphones are built into the frames that give users access to Alexa Consumers fear the personal assistant can use device to listen in on them  By  STACY LIBERATORE PUBLISHED:  15:14 EDT, 26 September 2019  |  UPDATED:  15:15 EDT, 26 September 2019 ·           Amazon unveiled a slew of new devices at an event this week, with one sparking  fears of an ‘Orwellian’ world. Called Echo Frames, these Alexa powered smart glasses have tiny microphones built into the frame that allow the wearer to hear the personal assistant and it hear them. Consumers have voiced their fears of this ‘terrifying spyware’, suggesting it is a threat to privacy as Alexa can hear and record wh...

Facebook will test hiding ‘Likes’ on its own site The test will be limited to people in Australia for now. Edgar Alvarez ,  09.26.19 in  Internet   As rumors suggested, Facebook is getting ready to  start hiding "Likes" on its own site . The company has now officially started a test that will remove public visibility of Like, reaction and video view counts from people's posts and ads across Facebook. This is going to be happening only in Australia, though, and Facebook told Engadget it has not decided whether the test will expand to other places in the future. Facebook said it wants to get some initial results from Australia, before eventually deciding which steps to take next. If you're a Facebook user in Australia, this means that while your friends and family will still be able to like and add emoji reactions to your posts, they won't be able to see how many others interacted with it. The same goes if you want to see how many people liked a post from ...

Lawmakers warn about threat of political deepfakes by creating one Cat Zakrzewski, The Washington Post  Published 9:51 am EDT, Friday, September 27, 2019 WASHINGTON - Rep. Michael Waltz wants Navy to beat Army in this year's football game, according to a newly released political deepfake - a video doctored with artificial intelligence. But it the content wasn't true, as Waltz is a former Army Green Beret. But Waltz teamed up with Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., to craft the mock deepfake for the House Science subcommittee to illustrate just how realistic this kind of disinformation can be. The SUNY-Albany and University of Chicago researchers took a recorded video statement from Beyer and transposed it onto Waltz's image - designed to be a jarring sight for subcommittee chair and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherill, D-N.J. The resulting video is a warning for lawmakers - and the public - that bad actors could abuse this technology for much more nefarious purposes than havi...

New blood test could detect more than 20 types of cancer·       The breakthrough could be used to improve screening for cancer   Laura Donnelly, 28 september 2019 • 9:08am A new blood test could detect more than 20 types of cancer, allowing cases to be identified and treated far earlier. Experts said the breakthrough - which spots changes in the genes, as disease develops - could be used to improve screening for cancer, allowing treatment much sooner, when it is more likely to succeed. Crucially, 99.4 per cent cases identified as cancer were correctly spotted - meaning just 0.6 per cent of cases were misdiagnoses of healthy patients. The test was able to detect one third of patients with stage one disease, and three quarters of those with stage two disease. Ministers have pledged to speed diagnosis, so that by 2028 three quarters of cancer patients are diagnosed at these two stages. Currently just half of patients can expe...

A study finds nearly half of jobs are vulnerable to automation That could free people to pursue more interesting careers A WAVE of automation anxiety has hit the West. Just try typing “Will machines…” into Google. An algorithm offers to complete the sentence with differing degrees of disquiet: “...take my job?”; “...take all jobs?”; “...replace humans?”; “...take over the world?” Job-grabbing robots are no longer science fiction. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University used—what else?—a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily 702 different kinds of job in America could be automated. They concluded that fully 47% could be done by machines “over the next decade or two”. A new  working paper  by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, employs a similar approach, looking at other developed economies. Its technique differs from Mr Frey and Mr Osborne’s study by assessing the automatability of each task within a given job, based on...

Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? The internet is so saturated with 5-Star praise—some genuine, much paid for—that it’s difficult to know which sites you can trust By Rebecca Dolan Sept. 27, 2019 1:49 pm ET   YES TRY TO SHOP  for toothpaste on Amazon and dozens of brands pop up with identical 4.5-star ratings. Crest? Colgate? Tom’s? Does it matter? Even if you try to differentiate based on reviews, you face thousands to comb through—and odds are a good number of those are fake. Chris McCabe, who evaluated seller performance while employed at Amazon and who now runs a consulting firm for its retailers, estimates the number of inauthentic reviews on the site to be around 30%. Amazon estimates it at less than 1% and said it spent more than $400 million last year alone to protect customers from reviews abuse, fraud and misconduct, leading to action against more than 5 million reviewers. Even so, “Amazon doesn’t have the right defenses,” Mr. McCabe said. Amazon...

'It's going to create a revolution': how AI is transforming the NHS Artificial intelligence (AI) Technology is making impressive inroads into cancer treatment, saving lives and money Ian Sample  Science editor Last modified on Wed 4 Jul 2018  08.32 EDT   The tumour is hard to miss on the scan. The size of a golf ball, it sits bold and white on the brain stem, a part of the organ that sends messages back and forth between body and brain. In many ways it is the master controller: from the top of the spinal cord, the brain stem conducts every heartbeat, every swallow, every breath. For this young man, the cancer came to light in dramatic fashion. The growing tumour blocked fluid draining from his brain, triggering a huge seizure. Now doctors must work out the best way to treat him. Raj Jena, a neuro-oncologist at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, has pulled up the image to explain how doctors plan radiotherapy for patients. For a case like this he ...

Robots made famous on YouTube could be headed to circus Updated 4:56 pm CDT, Thursday, September 26, 2019   BOSTON (AP) — Animal-like robots that started out as a military-funded research project might be shipped off to the circus instead of the battlefield. Cirque du Soleil says it's in talks with robot maker Boston Dynamics about using the four-legged Spot robot in its live shows. The agile robots walk, climb stairs and open doors. They have become famous on YouTube but haven't been applied commercially since the company was founded in 1992. That's changing this fall. The Waltham, Massachusetts, robotics firm revealed in a YouTube post this week that Spot is now in mass production and shipping to select customers for such uses as monitoring construction sites or inspecting energy facilities. https://www.thetelegraph.com/business/technology/article/Robots-made-famous-on-YouTube-could-be-headed-to-14471022.php