Daily Archives: May 21, 2015

The Internet as a mirror for human nature

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From the Guardian today:

Hot_tech

I gave a lecture recently in Trinity College, Dublin, in which I said, en passant that the Net holds a mirror up to human nature and what we see in it is pretty unedifying. Items 1, 2 and 4 of this list of what the Guardian team regard as “hot tech stories” makes that point rather well, don’t you think?

Robotic reporting

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robotic_reporting

This follows on from our seminar on the implications of advanced robotics for employment. Here are two reports based on wire-service reports of a company’s results. One was written by a bot, the other by a human.

It begs two questions:

  1. Which was which? (Easy, I think).
  2. More difficult: which is better? More accurate? Good enough?

HT to Andrea Vance for the link.