The Computer That Mastered Go

Go is often viewed as a game computers could never play. Now AlphaGo has proven the naysayers wrong, beating a world-class Go player for the first time. 

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

John Markoff New York Times
These computers are not programmed instead, connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values. That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

labor

Charters Get Kids Cubicle Ready

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
From Silicon Valley, the Rocketship chain of charter schools is hoping to expand across the country. It’s backed by some of the biggest names in the tech world and claims high test scores. But what are these schools preparing kids for? And what are the real costs of Rocketship's low-cost model?

Media Bits & Bytes - New Stuff edition

Portside
Toddlers and Tablets; Rebooting Internet Governance; 60 Minutes Disabuses the Disabled; Glenn Greenwald breaking bad; New Ventures in Journalism; Infographic - New TV Media Giants

Media Bits & Bytes - Three Card Monte Edition

Portside
Palestinians Blocked from Getting Smartphone Service; NSA Technology Simply Too Old to Search; Who Owns Your Data When You Die?; New Computing Physics Soon to Emerge from NASA-Google Partnership; GED Gets a Digital Makeover and Faces Competition

The Cloudy Skies Corporations Want to Sell You

Alfredo Lopez portside
It's the nature of the shallow, consumer-driven, dream-drunken culture our society tries to impose on us that we popularly adopt terms without knowing what they mean and, more often than not, they don't mean much of anything. Such is the case with "the Cloud".
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