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Hackaday Links: November 18, 2018

The greatest bit of consumer electronics is shipping and the reviews are out: Amazon’s Alexa-enabled microwave is a capable microwave, but befuddling to the voice-controlled-everything neophyte. Voice controlled everything is the last hope we have for technological innovation; it’s the last gasp of the consumer electronics industry. This is Amazon’s first thing with a built-in voice assistant,

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    • AI is transforming wildlife research by automating some tasks typically done manually by researchers, like identifying individual animals from photos (Anne Casselman/National Geographic)

    Anne Casselman / National Geographic: AI is transforming wildlife research by automating some tasks typically done manually by researchers, like identifying individual animals from photos  —  From analyzing animal photos to combing through YouTube, new software is harnessing data never before accessible to scientists. AI is transforming wildlife research by automating some tasks typically done

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    • Swedish scooter-sharing startup VOI Technology raises $50M Series A led by Balderton Capital with Spencer Rascoff, Justin Mateen, Jeff Wilkes among investors (Steve O'Hear/TechCrunch)

    Steve O’Hear / TechCrunch: Swedish scooter-sharing startup VOI Technology raises $50M Series A led by Balderton Capital with Spencer Rascoff, Justin Mateen, Jeff Wilkes among investors  —  VOI Technology, an e-scooter startup headquartered in Sweden but with pan-European ambitions, has raised $50 million in Series A funding, confirming our earlier scoop. Swedish scooter-sharing startup VOI

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    • Sources: this June, Zuckerberg told ~50 execs that Facebook was at war and he'd act more decisively, leading to reorgs, key departures, tension with Sandberg (Deepa Seetharaman/Wall Street Journal)

    Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: Sources: this June, Zuckerberg told ~50 execs that Facebook was at war and he’d act more decisively, leading to reorgs, key departures, tension with Sandberg  —  New approach causes turmoil, driving several key executives from the company and creating tensions with longtime Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg Sources: this

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    • Bitcoin Cash has forked, with Bitcoin Cash ABC as an apparent early winner, but Bitcoin Cash SV camp is still threatening 51% attacks, spam, and more (Aaron van Wirdum/Bitcoin Magazine)

    Aaron van Wirdum / Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin Cash has forked, with Bitcoin Cash ABC as an apparent early winner, but Bitcoin Cash SV camp is still threatening 51% attacks, spam, and more  —  Bitcoin Cash, the “big block” project that forked away from the Bitcoin blockchain in August 2017, “hard forked” (split) into two different

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    • Tumblr says it is working to resolve an issue with iOS app after it disappeared from the App Store amid speculation it was removed due to inappropriate content (Andrew Liptak/The Verge)

    Andrew Liptak / The Verge: Tumblr says it is working to resolve an issue with iOS app after it disappeared from the App Store amid speculation it was removed due to inappropriate content  —  The company says that it’s working to resolve ‘an issue’ with the app  —  Tumblr’s iOS app is missing from Apple’s

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    • Profile of Mike Dickison, New Zealand's first Wikipedian-at-Large, who wants to boost the country's representation on the site by pushing New Zealanders to edit (Charlotte Graham-McLay/New York Times)

    Charlotte Graham-McLay / New York Times: Profile of Mike Dickison, New Zealand’s first Wikipedian-at-Large, who wants to boost the country’s representation on the site by pushing New Zealanders to edit  —  AUCKLAND, New Zealand — In the grand library of the Auckland War Memorial Museum on a Saturday morning in August … Profile of Mike

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    • Survey: majority of US adults say it is unacceptable to use algorithms for criminal risk assessments, resume and job interview analysis, personal finance scores (Pew Research Center)

    Pew Research Center: Survey: majority of US adults say it is unacceptable to use algorithms for criminal risk assessments, resume and job interview analysis, personal finance scores  —  Real-world examples of the scenarios in this survey  —  All four of the concepts discussed in the survey are based … Survey: majority of US adults say

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    The (UV) Writing’s On The Wall

    [Michael Karliner]’s Belshazzar, named for the Biblical character upon whose wall the writing appeared, is a unique light painting machine, that tracks an array of UV LEDs across a glow-in-the-dark background to paint transient dot-matrix letters in light. It was one of many cyberpunk-themed art pieces in Null Sector at the 2018 Electromagnetic Field hacker

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    • Google's VP of News points to 2014 shutdown of Google News in Spain, says "We would not like to see that happen in Europe", due to the proposed EU "link tax" (Jim Waterson/The Guardian)

    Jim Waterson / The Guardian: Google’s VP of News points to 2014 shutdown of Google News in Spain, says “We would not like to see that happen in Europe”, due to the proposed EU “link tax”  —  Search engine is lobbying hard to stop proposed tax, aimed at compensating news publishers Google's VP of News

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    • Profile of former chief AI scientist at Google Cloud Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and co-founder of AI4All nonprofit, which aims to make AI more inclusive (Jessi Hempel/Wired)

    Jessi Hempel / Wired: Profile of former chief AI scientist at Google Cloud Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and co-founder of AI4All nonprofit, which aims to make AI more inclusive  —  SOMETIME AROUND 1 am on a warm night last June, Fei-Fei Li was sitting in her pajamas in a Washington, DC, hotel room, practicing

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