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America’s social-media addiction is getting worse

(Sources: Pew Research Centre; e Marketer)

   A survey in January and February 2019 from the Pew Research Centre, a think tank, found that 69% of American adults use Facebook; of these users, more than half visit the site “several times a day”. YouTube is even more popular, with 73% of adults saying they watch videos on the platform. For those aged 18 to 24, the figure is 90%. Instagram, a photo-sharing app, is used by 37% of adults. When Pew first conducted the survey in 2012, only a slim majority of Americans used Facebook. Fewer than one in ten had an Instagram account.

    Americans are also spending more time than ever on social-media sites like Facebook. There is evidence that limiting such services might yield health benefits. A paper published last year by Melissa Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson and Jordyn Young, all of the University of Pennsylvania, found that limiting social-media usage to 10 minutes a day led to reductions in loneliness, depression, anxiety and fear. Another paper from 2014 identified a link between heavy social-media usage and depression, largely due to a “social comparison” phenomenon, whereby users compare themselves to others and come away with lower evaluations of themselves. 

(www.economist.com, 08.08.2019. Adaptado.)

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(https://condenaststore.com)

    Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.

    That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion molecules of DNA.  

    If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.

    “Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an information‐storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology.”

    How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.

Wired, June, 2018. Disponível em https://www.wired.com/. Adaptado.

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

Adapted from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47722427