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      New analysis suggests human ancestors nearly died out

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 1 September, 2023 - 18:56 · 1 minute

    Image of an excavation of a human skeleton.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

    Multiple lines of evidence indicate that modern humans evolved within the last 200,000 years and spread out of Africa starting about 60,000 years ago. Before that, however, the details get a bit complicated. We're still arguing about which ancestral population might have given rise to our lineage. Somewhere about 600,000 years ago, that lineage split off Neanderthals and Denisovans, and both of those lineages later interbred with modern humans after some of them left Africa.

    Figuring out as much as we currently know has required a mix of fossils, ancient DNA, and modern genomes. A new study argues there is another complicating event in humanity's past: a near-extinction period where almost 99 percent of our ancestral lineage died. However, the finding is based on a completely new approach to analyzing modern genomes, and so it may be difficult to validate.

    Tracing diversity

    Unless a population is small and inbred, they will have genetic diversity: a collection of differences in their DNA ranging from individual bases up to large rearrangements of chromosomes. These differences are tracked when testing services estimate where your ancestors were likely to originate. Some genetic differences arose recently, while others have been floating around our lineage since before modern humans existed.

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      Damning probes find Instagram is key link connecting pedophile rings

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 8 June, 2023 - 15:22

    Damning probes find Instagram is key link connecting pedophile rings

    Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

    Instagram has emerged as the most important platform for buyers and sellers of underage sex content, according to investigations from the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Internet Observatory, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) Rescue Lab.

    While other platforms play a role in processing payments and delivering content, Instagram is where hundreds of thousands—and perhaps millions—of users search explicit hashtags to uncover illegal "menus" of content that can then be commissioned. Content on offer includes disturbing imagery of children self-harming, "incest toddlers," and minors performing sex acts with animals, as well as opportunities for buyers to arrange illicit meetups with children, the Journal reported.

    Because the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) itself is not hosted on Instagram, platform owner Meta has a harder time detecting and removing these users. Researchers found that even when Meta's trust and safety team does ban users, their efforts are "directly undercut" by Instagram's recommendation system—which allows the networks to quickly reassemble under "backup" accounts that are usually listed in the bios of original accounts for just that purpose of surviving bans.

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      Twitter posts the code it claims determines which tweets people see, and why

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 31 March, 2023 - 22:24

    Section of Twitter's source code, displayed at an angle

    Enlarge / Twitter has posted what it states is the code used by its algorithm to recommend tweets to its users.

    Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk's many promises , posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub .

    The code, posted under a GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 , contains numerous insights as to what factors make a tweet more or less likely to show up in users' timelines.

    In a blog post accompanying the code release , Twitter's engineering team (under no particular byline) notes that the system for determining which "top Tweets that ultimately show up on your device's For You timeline" is "composed of many interconnected services and jobs." Each time a Twitter home screen is refreshed, Twitter pulls "the best 1,500 Tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions," the post states.

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      Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 17 October, 2022 - 14:04

    Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why

    Enlarge (credit: Busa Photography )

    ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox .

    On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

    “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

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      Hurricane Ian destroyed their homes. Algorithms sent them money

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 11 October, 2022 - 13:36

    Hurricane Ian destroyed their homes. Algorithms sent them money

    Enlarge (credit: Joe Raedle / Getty)

    When Hurricane Ian churned over Florida in late September, it left a trail of destruction from high winds and flooding. But a week after the storm passed, some people in three of the worst-hit counties saw an unexpected beacon of hope.

    Nearly 3,500 residents of Collier, Charlotte, and Lee Counties received a push notification on their smartphones offering $700 cash assistance, no questions asked. A Google algorithm deployed in partnership with nonprofit GiveDirectly had estimated from satellite images that those people lived in badly damaged neighborhoods and needed some help.

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      Mathias Poujol-Rost ✅ · Sunday, 6 February, 2022 - 17:14

      Contact publication

    FediTips (@feditips@mstdn.social)
    • FediTips (@feditips@mstdn.social)

      Mastodon and most other Fediverse platforms display posts chronologically, without any algorithms. On your feed you will see all the posts from all the people you follow, in the order they posted them. Because of this, if you post something important you may want to boost it again later in the day so that people in different time zones have a better chance of seeing it. #MastoTips #FediTips #Mastodon #Fediverse #TimeZones

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