pewinternet:

By and large, the public views these examples of algorithmic decision-making as unfair to the people the computer-based systems are evaluating. Most notably, only around one-third of Americans think that the video job interview and personal finance score algorithms would be fair to job applicants and consumers.

Public Attitudes Toward Computer Algorithms

motherboardtv:

300,000 Animal Selfies Are Being Used by Ecologists to Study the Serengeti

kreuzaderny:

Astronomers Creep Up to the Edge of the Milky Way’s Black Hole

For the first time, scientists have spotted something wobbling around the black hole at the core of our galaxy. Their measurements suggest that this stuff — perhaps made of blobs of plasma — is spinning not far from the innermost orbit allowed by the laws of physics. If so, this affords astronomers their closest look yet at the funhouse-mirrored space-time that surrounds a black hole. And in time, additional observations will indicate whether those known laws of physics truly describe what’s going on at the edge of where space-time breaks down.

Astronomers already knew that the Milky Way hosts a central black hole, weighing some four million suns. From Earth, this black hole is a dense, tiny thing in the constellation Sagittarius, only as big on the sky as a strawberry seed in Los Angeles when viewed from New York. But interstellar gas glows as it swirls into the black hole, marking the dark heart of the galaxy with a single, faint point of infrared light in astronomical images. Astronomers call it Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”).

For 15 years researchers have watched that point flicker — and wondered why. Occasionally, it flares up 30 times brighter in infrared light and then subsides, all within just a few minutes. Now, though, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, has measured not just this speck’s brightness but its position with staggering precision. When it flares, it also moves clockwise on the sky, tracing out a tiny circle, they find.

(via scienceetfiction)

pewinternet:

#MeToo hashtag first went viral on Twitter a year ago this month. Although the social movement of the same name existed beforehand, the hashtag was popularized on Oct. 15, 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano urged victims of sexual abuse to share their stories on Twitter in the wake of accusations of misconduct against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. The #MeToo hashtag has been used more than 19 million times on Twitter from the date of Milano’s initial tweet through Sept. 30 of this year.

How social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #MeToo went viral

borislavkiprin:

This Is What Happens In an Internet Minute in 2018 #infographic

(via socialmediadaily)