Category: author_name|Andrew Tarantola
Hitting the Books: How the Silicon Valley mindset damages rural American communities
America has always been a nation segregated into haves and have-nots with rampant inequity a seemingly natural aspect of our social order — the motif impacting towns and cities just as starkly as the people who live in them. But it doesn't have to be this way, argue authors UC…
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Meta’s prototype moderation AI only needs a few examples of bad behavior to take action
Moderating content on today’s internet is akin to a round of Whack-A-Mole with human moderators continually forced to react in realtime to changing trends, such as vaccine mis- and disinformation or intentional bad actors probing for ways around established personal conduct policies. Machine learning systems can help alleviate some of…
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Hitting the Books: How the interplay of science and technology brought about iPhones
Scientific research and technological advancement have gone hand-in-hand since the invention of the wheel. Without research, we lack the knowledge base to advance the state of technology and, without technological advancement we lack the functional base for further scientific exploration. In their new book, The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions, Harvard…
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NASA backs Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef space station
Following October's news that Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin spaceflight company planned to build its own commercial space station in low Earth orbit, NASA announced on Thursday it has selected the program for funding through a Space Act Agreement to further develop the the station's design. The funding is part of…
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Hitting the Books: How Amazon laundered the ‘myth of the founder’ into a business empire
We've heard the fable of "the self-made billionaire" a thousand times: some unrecognized genius toiling away in a suburban garage stumbles upon The Next Big Thing, thereby single-handedly revolutionizing their industry and becoming insanely rich in the process — all while comfortably ignoring the fact that they'd received $300,000 in…
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Hitting the Books: An ode to the joy of antibiotics
The stress and uncertainty surrounding the COVID pandemic, along with misinformation about the life-saving vaccines developed in response have broken many a weak mind over the past two years, leading people to try everything from injecting themselves with bleach and inhaling nebulized hydrogen peroxide, to slugging down horse dewormer in…
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