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    • Study: WhatsApp helps Nigerian women get their voices heard

    Mobile phones have become widespread all over the world, including in rural and low-income communities. As research shows, these devices have the potential to bring about significant societal change – a fact acknowledged in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. While the promising role that mobile phones and other Information and Communication Technologies could play in empowering women

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    • Leaked memo: Foxconn aims to cut $2.9B from expenses in 2019 and eliminate ~10% of non-technical staff, as it faces "a very difficult and competitive year" (Bloomberg)

    Bloomberg: Leaked memo: Foxconn aims to cut $2.9B from expenses in 2019 and eliminate ~10% of non-technical staff, as it faces “a very difficult and competitive year”  —  Foxconn Technology Group, the biggest assembler of Apple Inc. iPhones, aims to cut 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) … Leaked memo: Foxconn aims to cut .9B from

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    • Berlin-based e-scooter rental service Wind Mobility, which operates in various cities in Spain, France, and the US, raises $22M in seed funding (Steve O'Hear/TechCrunch)

    Steve O’Hear / TechCrunch: Berlin-based e-scooter rental service Wind Mobility, which operates in various cities in Spain, France, and the US, raises $22M in seed funding  —  Wind Mobility, a Berlin-based mobility startup that offers “dockless” e-scooter (and electric bicycle) rentals, has raised $22 million in seed funding … Berlin-based e-scooter rental service Wind Mobility,

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    • Analysis of 14M tweets from May 2016 and March 2017 found bots accounted for 34% of shares of articles from low-credibility sources but were only 6% of accounts (Daniel Funke/Poynter)

    Daniel Funke / Poynter: Analysis of 14M tweets from May 2016 and March 2017 found bots accounted for 34% of shares of articles from low-credibility sources but were only 6% of accounts  —  Since the 2016 American election, there has been a lot of speculation about the role that bots played in spreading online misinformation.

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    Jittery Back Off to Speed Up

    In systems where there are multiple participants who need to interact with a shared resource some sort of concurrency protection is usually appropriate. The obvious technique is to use locking (and fun words like “mutex”) but this adds a constant performance hit as every participant needs to spend time interacting with the lock regardless of

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    • Amazon is using "neural text-to-speech" (NTTS) tech to develop new speaking styles for Alexa, will launch a newscaster style to read articles in a few weeks (James Vincent/The Verge)

    James Vincent / The Verge: Amazon is using “neural text-to-speech” (NTTS) tech to develop new speaking styles for Alexa, will launch a newscaster style to read articles in a few weeks  —  Amazon is using AI to develop new speaking styles for Alexa, including a newscaster voice for reading articles Amazon is using "neural text-to-speech"

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    Simulating A Speaker

    Speakers are one of those components that are simple to use, but difficult to simulate. Most of us have used a simple resistor to do the job. But a speaker’s response is much more complex, and while that might be enough for a simple simulation the fidelity is nowhere near close. [Sourav Gupta] recently shared

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