The second weekly FIR Zoom Chat hosted by Shel and Neville includes a robust discussion with a group of FIR listeners of criticism leveled at the increasingly popular videoconferencing tool, Zoom, and the response from the company’s CEO. Links: A Message to Our Users from Zoom founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, April 1.The Zoom Privacy Backlash Is Only Getting Started - Wired, April 1.Everybody seems to be using Zoom. But its security flaws could leave users at risk. - Washington Post, April … [Read more...] about FIR ZoomChat 2: Zoom and Privacy
Trends
FIR ZoomChat 1: The post-pandemic Future of Work
While many of us are under jurisdictional orders to remain in our homes, we can still get together socially. That’s just what Neville, Shel, and more than a dozen FIR listeners did on Thursday, March 26, using Zoom. This roughly 30-minute discussion focused mainly on how work will change in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. We are planning to host conversations via Zoom every Thursday at 1pm EDT / 6pm BST / 7pm CET. Watch this space (or follow us on Twitter or Facebook) for the URL and … [Read more...] about FIR ZoomChat 1: The post-pandemic Future of Work
Hybrid stepping stone
Report: Just days after the UK's ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was brought forward to 2035 from 2040, there has now been a suggestion that it could be brought forward even further to 2032 – just 12 years from now. ...The move would also ban the sale of hybrid vehicles, which sold more than 13,000 units last month. All-electric cars meanwhile accounted for 4,054 UK sales in the first month of 2020.InsideEVs https://insideevs.com/news/399114/uk-ban-gas-diesel/ Including … [Read more...] about Hybrid stepping stone
FIR 190: Digital vs analogue behaviour in the UK general election
For the December edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report - aka episode 190 of the For Immediate Release podcast - Shel and I picked an eclectic list of topics to talk about. As a European and, specifically, a Brit, my hot one was about the result of the General Election that took place here in the UK on December 12 - the result was a landslide win for Boris Johnson and the Conservative party - and the role social media played in influencing voters. Did social media influence voters to … [Read more...] about FIR 190: Digital vs analogue behaviour in the UK general election
The time of the AI writer
Developments in artificial intelligence that can write authentic-looking stories took a big leap forward earlier this year with the release of GPT-2, a predictive text-creation algorithm that can create a coherent, realistic-sounding continuation of a text input as short as one or two sentences. In other words, the software looks at a text you write and predicts the next words and phrases. It uses a huge data set as its training source: 8 million web pages which have been curated or filtered … [Read more...] about The time of the AI writer