ansible
ansible's JournalWorld's tallest statue unveiled in India
Source: ABC
The prime minister of India today unveiled the world’s largest statue, dedicated to Sardar Patel, a nationalist who helped unite modern India after its independence from Britain.
"We are doing everything possible to turn Sardar Patel's vision into a reality and ensure a good-quality life for our fellow Indians," Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted. The monument, called the Statue of Unity, stands at nearly 600 feet and cost a staggering $460 million to build.
That makes the mega statue almost 200 feet higher than the world’s next largest, the Spring Temple Buddha in China, which stands at about 420 feet. The new statue in India is also nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, which is 305 feet tall. The Statue of Unity, located in the western state of Gujarat, is expected to attract tens of thousands of tourists per day. The project has proved controversial, however.
Farmers in the state of Gujarat were reportedly bemused that millions of dollars were spent on the flagship project. The BBC reported that locals have expressed deep concern that they still lack basic irrigation facilities vital to the region’s economy while mass investment has been diverted to a largely-ceremonial project.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/International/worlds-tallest-statue-unveiled-india-600-feet-tall/story?id=58871306
How many miles do you walk a day? Coworkers acting like it's a big deal to walk a lot
One of my coworkers is getting a lot of crap at work for not driving to work and spending an hour walking about 4 miles a day to his home. Is this normal for people to react like this or am I just with a bunch of jerks?
YouTube Goes Offline For Users Worldwide
Source: CBS
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (CBSLA) – Google-owned YouTube went dark for users worldwide Tuesday evening.
The video streaming site – which has an estimated 1 billion active users every month – displayed an error message for some users indicating a “500 Internal Server Error”, while others saw pages with only partially loaded content.
The outage apparently also affected YouTube TV and YouTube Music access.
Messages posted to YouTube’s Twitter page indicated the company was aware of the issue and was “actively working” to resolve it.
Read more: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/10/16/youtube-down-offline-google/
Gas is almost $4 a gallon in California now
How are you holding up? It's hurting me pretty bad because I have to commute an hour to work.
Michelle Obama: George W. Bush is 'my partner in crime' and 'I love him to death'
Source: USATODAY
Former first lady Michelle Obama said Thursday that ex-President George W. Bush has become her "partner in crime" after years of sitting together at official events.
"President Bush and I are forever seatmates because of protocol – that's how we sit at all the official functions," Obama said on NBC's "Today" show. "So he is my partner in crime at every major thing where all the formers gather. I love him to death," Obama added. "He's a wonderful man. He's a funny man."
Obama expressed her affection for Bush after being asked about the moment when Bush handed her a cough drop at the Sept. 1 funeral of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain. The moment, which happened at the National Cathedral in Washington, went viral on social media. Bush was handing a cough drop to his wife, Laura, when Obama leaned over and asked him if she could have one too. She said she didn't realize that anyone was watching the "simple gesture."
"And I will add that they were old cough drops," Obama said, describing them as being in an official White House box. "And I was like, 'How long have you had these?' They said, 'A long time. We got a lot of these.' " Obama, a Democrat, said her friendship with Bush, a Republican, defies labels. "Party doesn't separate us," she said. "Color, gender, those sort of things don't separate us."
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/10/11/michelle-obama-george-w-bush-my-partner-crime/1603296002/
Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women. The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.
Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.
“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.” But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Jul 1, 2016, 03:42 PMNumber of posts: 1,718
