(Tue Sep 11 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Recently many Conservative politicians and the Conservative-friendly news outlets have been beating the war drums against Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al, because of supposed censorship of Conservative viewpoints. The evidence is weak on this, because the culprit is the algorithms for presenting search results. The irony is rich to learn that a Conservative news outlet, a designated Facebook fact checking organization, have labeled news from a Liberal-leaning news outlet as "false". Meaning that Liberal-leaning news is being downgraded by Facebook, when the actual news piece is entirely factual, solely on the say-so of a Conservative-leaning news outlet that has a long history of printing mistruths.
(Wed Sep 05 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) Following a rage-tweeting incidents where Donald Trump attacked Twitter, Facebook, et al, over supposedly stifling of Conservative voices, and describing it as a serious situation, and threatening that it "will be addressed", the US Department of Justice is starting to put some oomph behind that threat. While representatives of Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared before a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Department of Justice issued a statement that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will convene a meeting with several US State Attorneys General to discuss "a growing concern that these companies may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms".
(Tue Sep 04 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)) The upgraded Large Hadron Collider is expected to produce 1 billion particle collisions every second, of which only a fraction are the collisions that physicists want to study. To weed out the collisions of interest will require a big data software system on a massive scale to essentially find the needle in the haystack. That is, the interesting collisions in a flood of humdrum everyday collisions. When the LHC is fully operational in 2026 scientists will be completely buried in data unless they develop better tools. To that end the NSF is funding a new institute explicitly for that purpose.
