This story explores how the four industry-leading female voice assistants are programmed to respond to verbal sexual harassment and what impact this has on reaching gender equality. According to a recent report by UNESCO titled “I’d blush if I could,” Siri’s response to verbal sexual harassment is often depicted as “obliging and eager to please.” Despite the underrepresentation of women in AI development, voice assistants are almost female by default with feminine names and voices, thereby fueling gender bias....

But what you’ll hear less is the darker implications of the current direction of AI research. Currently, advances in AI are mostly tied to scaling deep learning models and creating neural networks with more layers and parameters. According to artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI, “since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time.” This means that in seven years, the metric has grown by a factor of 300,000....

Switching from traditional full-time employment to contract work can be a bit of a transition — especially if you’re also throwing in remote work at the same time. A lot is happening in the world right now and for many, going into contract work may offer more from a financial standpoint than sticking to full-time employment. For starters, you can command higher rates based on the type of contract, and negotiate higher returns for your hours based on project size and the type of work....

Picture this: You’re at your friend’s house for a party, and you want to play a song. You’ll ask them to add that song to a queue or connect your phone to their music system. Spotify has rolled out a feature called Group Sessions to end all this cumbersome process. Group Sessions will let you and your friends join a session to queue up songs. There’s no limit on how many people can join this session....

Signal is considered one of the most privacy-focused chat apps out there with end-to-end encryption protection. A lot of journalists and activists use it to talk to people without fear of snooping. However, you have to currently give your phone number to someone to talk to them on the app. For extra precautions, you might want a secondary number for Signal. Until now, if you wanted to change your number on Signal, you had to create a new account because your identity was tied to it....

So… you want to delete yourself from TikTok, huh? Here’s how you do it. I can think of multiple reasons why you might not want to have a TikTok account anymore. Maybe you don’t approve of the parent company ByteDance’s questionable rules with regards to disabled content creators. Maybe you’re leery of the app’s reputation for being “spyware.” Or maybe you’re just not interested in TikTok content, your curiosity has been sated, and you’re ready to be done with the back....

Scheduling meetings through emails is not an as easy task. You’ll have to ask for the person’s free time slots, and match their slot with yours. Plus, if you live in different time zones, you need to coordinate that too. I face this issue a lot, so I thought there must be an easier way. And I found some nifty tools to schedule a meeting in a few clicks. Check them out below...

Receiving a salary package that includes shares can be a flattering indication of a company’s desire to work with you or fill you with exciting dreams of the future where you have a chunk of equity in the next big thing. But it can also be confusing, particularly when you try to understand how your shares change your salary package over the long-term. Are they basically a guarantee for fistfuls of cash to come?...

But at the risk of sounding like a clickbait generator, there’s one thing piano makers probably don’t want you to know: You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to get amazing sound and solid playability out of a digital piano. As I wrote a few months ago, even the most basic keyboards can achieve a sound that would fool listeners into thinking they’re listening to the real thing. The trick is you don’t use the sounds built into your digital piano....

“Everything in its right place.” – Radiohead Productivity doesn’t just happen. It comes from a conscientious pursuit of completed tasks. And the only way productivity continues over the long term is with a system. That system eliminates wasted time spent hunting for that particular paper or that important notation. With a system, everything is in its right place — and your entire work pace gets streamlined and kicked into overdrive....

The manager of a Standard Chartered branch, a private bank in India, has been arrested for running a cryptocurrency scam in which he promised unrealistic returns on a digital coin, Business Standard reports. The main perpetrator has been named as Sandeep Singh Dua. He confessed to the crimes during interrogation, according to Live Mint. Seven others have been arrested in connection with the scheme. The perpetrator admitted that he was part of a gang of racketeers that used fake shell companies to transfer money and avoid income tax as they peddled their fake cryptocurrency called Kashhcoin, according to authorities....

Envo Drive, a Canadian company that specializes in making electric propulsion kits for bikes and kayaks, is taking pre-orders for its “electric snowbike kit.” In short, the kit is pretty simple. You take a bike, replace its rear wheel with the kit’s electrically-powered snow track, and replace the front wheel with a snowboard that attaches to the forks and allows the rider to steer. The battery is attached where a bottle cage would typically mount in the middle of the frame....

It’s no doubt been overwhelming. Every one of us is having to manage the anxieties and confusion triggered by living through a global pandemic. If ever a time called for radical empathy on a massive scale, this is it. At frog, my colleagues and I practice human-centered design approach built on deep empathy for user needs and aspirations. But this empathy can’t extend to customers alone. Now more than ever, from wherever we are, we need to be there for our colleagues and partners, too....

The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state. But treating China as a “villain” in this way is both overly simplistic and potentially costly. While there are undoubtedly aspects of the Chinese government’s approach to AI that are highly concerning and rightly should be condemned, it’s important that this does not cloud all analysis of China’s AI innovation....

And then, in early 2016, Instagram announced it was getting rid of the chronological feed in favor of algorithmic sorting, something no one asked for. The idea was to ostensibly sort content based on what’s most interesting to you. But pretty much no one was happy about it, and it yielded real ethical and political concerns beyond general annoyance. After six years of darkness, Instagram has finally seen the light....

The app is camera-first, meaning your own face is likely to be the first thing you see upon entering the app. You can quickly take a picture and shoot it off to a friend. Users have access to Instagram’s suite of photo- and video-editing features, so it’s pretty much the same as sending a DM on Instagram itself. Users can also share one-word statuses accompanied by an emoji — which used to be a big thing on Facebook before it kind of fizzled out....

The company said appeals will be available for posts that are removed under violation of nudity and pornography, bullying and harassment, hate speech, drug sales, and counter-terrorism policies. But it’ll expand the category list in coming months. Instagram’s been involved in plenty of controversies when it banned content from Rihanna and other celebrities as a violation of its nudity policy. Now, users will at least have a chance to appeal before the post is taken down....

Versatility. It’s become a new measuring stick for most employees in this changing professional world. While there’s always room for specialists, the true value these days comes from being able to slide into a host of different positions and roles to make your expertise crucial to all aspects of your company’s fortunes. However, knowing what you need to know is key to all that versatility. Access to a vast stockpile of available training and information can give any learner the chance to get up to speed on whatever they need to know to advance their career....

As a business owner, it’s frustrating when you learn that a customer hasn’t paid their bill on time. What should be even more frustrating is that more often than not, the reason they haven’t paid might actually be your own fault. According to the Credit Research Foundation, 61 percent of late payments appear to be due to problems with the invoice, including incorrect totals or an invoice coming in too late to get processed in time....

“One of the more curious behaviors of Apple’s new iPhone 11 Pro is that it intermittently seeks the user’s location information even when all applications and system services on the phone are individually set to never request this data,” Krebs writes in a blog post. Apple lets you easily turn off your handset’s location services with one swipe from settings (Settings > Privacy > Location Services, and then switching Location Services off)....