Month: November 2024

Humans who think they can multitask while sitting at the wheel of a moving car continue to be a problem—one that claimed more than 3,300 lives in 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The problem is almost entirely down to our smartphones—while we know they're distracting, too many drivers just can't help checking that email when they shouldn't. Now a new online tool provides an easy way to grasp just how much of the road we can miss while playing with that phone.

The distracted driving tool was developed by Quanta, a "context-based insurance provider," which wants to raise awareness of the problem. "Quanata’s technology aims to create a future where risk-informed choices enable safer drivers and better lives. We recognize that a lot of the danger on our roads is caused by distracted driving and we want to help minimize that," said Jim Ryan, SVP of business development at Quanta.

The tests include preparing a text message while your car drives at 70 mph and then a comparison of reaction times at 70 mph when concentrating on the task of driving versus trying to assemble an order in a fast food app.

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Anyone familiar with HR practices probably knows of the decades of studies showing that résumé with Black- and/or female-presenting names at the top get fewer callbacks and interviews than those with white- and/or male-presenting names—even if the rest of the résumé is identical. A new study shows those same kinds of biases also show up when large language models are used to evaluate résumés instead of humans.

In a new paper published during last month's AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society, two University of Washington researchers ran hundreds of publicly available résumés and job descriptions through three different Massive Text Embedding (MTE) models. These models—based on the Mistal-7B LLM—had each been fine-tuned with slightly different sets of data to improve on the base LLM's abilities in "representational tasks including document retrieval, classification, and clustering," according to the researchers, and had achieved "state-of-the-art performance" in the MTEB benchmark.

Rather than asking for precise term matches from the job description or evaluating via a prompt (e.g., "does this résumé fit the job description?"), the researchers used the MTEs to generate embedded relevance scores for each résumé and job description pairing. To measure potential bias, the résuméwere first run through the MTEs without any names (to check for reliability) and were then run again with various names that achieved high racial and gender "distinctiveness scores" based on their actual use across groups in the general population. The top 10 percent of résumés that the MTEs judged as most similar for each job description were then analyzed to see if the names for any race or gender groups were chosen at higher or lower rates than expected.

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Carl Pei von Nothing kann sich vorstellen, dass sein Unternehmen ein eigenes mobiles Betriebssystem entwickelt. Wirkliche Details gibt es aber nicht. (Nothing, Smartphone)

Amazon hat einen komfortablen Rucksack-Trolley mit großem Volumen und Laptopfach für Geschäftsreisen und Wochenendtrips im Angebot. (Technik/Hardware)

Anke Domscheit-Berg nennt Blockchain eine "Hype-Technologie". Geförderte Blockchain-Projekte der Regierung werden nicht auf Überlebensfähigkeit geprüft. (Blockchain, Politik)

Eine Kombination aus technischem und menschlichem Versagen war die Ursache. Hohe Strahlung ließ das Material wohl ermüden. (Astronomie, Studien)

When Microsoft launched its Copilot+ AI PC initiative over the summer, one of the flagship features was Recall, a feature that would log months' worth of your PC usage, with the stated goal of helping you remember things you did and find them again. But if you've heard of Recall, it's probably because of the problems that surfaced in preview builds of Windows before the feature could launch: It stored all of its data in plaintext, and it was relatively trivial for other users on the PC (or for malicious software) to access the database and screenshots, potentially exposing huge amounts of user data.

Microsoft was supposed to launch Recall over the summer but delayed the feature to rework it. The company went into detail on the new version of Recall's security protections in late September, declaring that a preview would be ready in time for Windows Insider Program testers in October. Now that we're past October, Microsoft has officially announced that the Recall preview is being delayed yet again and that it will begin rolling out to testers in December.

“We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders,” said Microsoft Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement provided to The Verge.

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Mit den Soundcore-Kopfhörern von Anker lassen sich Musik und Podcasts flexibel genießen. Die Kopfhörer sind jetzt bei Amazon im Angebot. (Technik/Hardware, Bluetooth)

Auf der Erde ist klar, wie grüne Verfärbungen in Felsgestein entstehen. Auf dem Mars wurde so etwas bisher nicht gefunden. Bis jetzt. (Perseverance, Nasa)

Amazon bietet zurzeit eine faltbare MagSafe Ladestation an, die iPhone, Apple Watch und Airpods gleichzeitig induktiv aufladen kann. (Technik/Hardware, Apple)