An Oregon man falsely posing as a professional football player and his young accomplice scammed roughly $1.3 million out of at least 26 women across four states, the FBI alleges. The duo’s efforts to bolster the con online eventually got sucked into Google’s misinformation-plagued AI Overviews feature, which parroted it back as fact — a…
Cory Doctorow shares my fascination with statistics and the information it can reveal that would likely otherwise remain hidden. I credit regression analysis and obsessive data collection with helping me survive a debilitating bout of ulcerative colitis twenty years ago, and preventing a recurrence. He recently pointed readers to another data analysis geek, blogger Lauren…
It’s no secret that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular around the world, as the tech’s garbled output has become impossible for the average person to avoid. For a rising cohort of workers, AI is also becoming inescapable on the job. According to one piece of research, staffers aren’t exactly thrilled with that reality. The new…
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~William Bruce Cameron I noticed it halfway through the conversation. We were outside a café on a warm Saturday, close enough to the next table that I could hear someone laughing behind me. The person across from me was telling…
Why robot safety assurance must account for attacks that can change how a machine sees, decides, and acts. Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can it remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing…
Robotics Australia Group and HowToRobot are offering AI to help businesses get automation. Source: HowToRobot Australia lags behind most other industrialized countries in terms of robot adoption, with a robot density of 134 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, according to the International Federation of Robotics, or IFR. The world average is 162. HowToRobot and Robotics…
This week in stories we’re tracking here at The Debrief: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope was launched on Sunday, and experts think this could be one of its most important discoveries in the years ahead. Meanwhile, scientists have discovered a magnetic “clock” in ancient pottery that could help museums distinguish real artifacts from modern fakes….
New research suggests ancient pottery may contain a magnetic “clock,” providing researchers with a lasting record of how long ago ceramic artifacts were created. According to scientists at the University of California, San Diego, the newly-developed method allows this lingering magnetic signal to help distinguish genuinely ancient clay artifacts from modern forgeries. In experiments, clay…
High in the Peruvian Andes, archaeologists working at an ancient pre-Hispanic settlement nearly 3,400 meters above sea level might not have expected to uncover evidence of sophisticated ancient technology. However, that is precisely what was unearthed during excavations at the Wancasanga archaeological site, a location first identified more than three decades ago that is only…
Now that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is on its way toward its Lagrange Point 2 (L2) destination, more of its mission goals are coming into focus, including the possibility that it could detect an Earth-like planet orbiting a star like our own Sun using gravitational microlensing. The Roman team said such a detection…
