Your Daily Steps for 08/19/14
News on Big Data, Artificial Cells, & Robot Labor.
X-Rays for Big Data
Ever wonder why you get ads on spiritualism and subprime mortgages in your Gmail account. Well researchers at Columbia have developed XRay, a new tool that reveals which data in a web account are being used to target which outputs, such as ads, recommended products, or prices. The researchers found that:
(1) It is definitely possible to target sensitive topics in users’ inboxes, including cancer, depression, or pregnancy. (2) For many ads, targeting was extremely obscure and non-obvious to end-users, which opens them up to abuses. (3) The researchers have already seen signs of such abuses, for instance, a number of subprime loan ads for used cars targeting debt in users’ inboxes.
The XRay prototype is available for auditors at http://xray.cs.columbia.edu.
Like the Real Thing
Scientists developed artificial cells that are capable of mimicking the dynamic behavior of protein synthesis. The artificial system is comprised of multiple compartments on a biochip. This discovery can be used to advance the synthesis of fuel and pharmaceuticals. According to Roy Bar-Ziv, professor at Weizmann Institute’s Materials and Interfaces Department,
“Genes are like Lego in which you can mix and match various components to produce different outcomes; you can take a regulatory element from E. coli that naturally controls gene X, and produce a known protein; or you can take the same regulatory element but connect it to gene Y instead to get different functions that do not naturally occur in nature.”
Humans Need Not Apply
Here is a video showing how the advances in automation will impact potentially half of the labor force in the near future.
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