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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 28, 2020

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Steve Palmer
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Smithsonian Institute puts 2.8 million images into the public domain; Coinbase Child pays for parent (CPFP) technique supports zero-fee BTC transactions in its custody product; The US Department of Defense has adopted principles for ethical adoption of artificial intelligence; A summary of a recent Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference on ethical artificial intelligence; and a Steem post that describes a biodegradable coffee cup that can be used to plant trees

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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.

CC0 license, public domain: source.

  1. Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain - The Smithsonian Institute has launched an open access site for online public domain access to 2.8 million 2D and 3D images from its collection. The photo of Buffalo Bill accompanying this article comes from the site. The institute has plans to add another 200,000 images through the rest of 2020 and to continue digitizing its 155 million items in the future. Similar efforts have been undertaken by 200 museums around the world, but this Smithsonian effort is, by far, the largest in scale.

    Here is a video:

    -h/t Instapundit


  2. Reliable fee-less Bitcoin transactions in Custody with Child-Pays-for-Parent - The coinbase blog describes their technique, Child pays for parent (CPFP), saying that it provides:
    zero-fee transactions with reliable confirmation times, all while keeping the fundamental property of secure Cold Storage — using each private key strictly once.
    In short, the technique sidesteps volatility in a way that estimates the current fee for a transaction and sets aside 10x that amount. Then it builds the transaction, re-estimates the fee and broadcasts the transaction, returning any excess from the first, set aside, fee estimate. In this manner, withdrawal from cold storage of possible, and the fees are transparent to the customer.

  3. DOD Adopts Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence - The US Department of Defense (DoD) spent 15 months in consultation with experts in the artificial intelligence (AI) field and came up with five ethical principles for the use of AI. The principles were recommended in October and approved on February 24. Principles are intended to assist the military by ensuring ethical and legal use of AI in military and non-military uses, and they fall in five categories: (i) Responsible; (ii) Equitable; (iii) Traceable; (iv) Reliable; and (v) Governable. -h/t Communications of the ACM: Artificial Intelligence

  4. How Do We Make AI More Ethical? - Earlier this month, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held its third annual AAAI/ACM conference on AI, Ethics and Society (AIES). This article includes coverage of some of the topics that the conference covered. Keynote topoics included:
    • planning for "a Just AI Future,"
    • development of ethical guidelines for algorithmic accountability
    • socialization of AI and its impacts on society
    • the conflicting ethical considerations and governance approaches related to AI
    And shorter presentations covered topics that included
    • airness/the elimination of bias in AI
    • developing algorithmic transparency/having AI explain the rationale behind its decisions
    • the impact of AI on the future of work
    • Incentives for software vendors to fix bugs

    On the last topic, the article argues that for most software products, markets drive the vendors to fix bugs, but for government uses (like criminal sentencing software), market incentives are insufficient, and other incentives need to be provided. In particular, it suggests that "the purchasing agency should require internal documents like risk assessments and design documents" and that "There's no reason why all of these vendors couldn't provide a scriptable interface. They should be designed to be much more reasonably comparable, and that would be a great role for organizations like NIST."

  5. Steem @janton: Plantable Coffee Cups Are A Great Idea But Will They Make A Difference? - In this post, the author introduces us to the plantable coffee cup. These cups are manufactured by the firm, Reduce. Reuse. Grow. Apparently, the cup is biodegradable and it has plant seeds stored inside its material, safely away from contact with the coffee. When the customer finishes their drink, they can unroll a map to find a suggested location where they can dispose of their cup and have a plant grow out of it.

    Here is a YouTube video from 2016 that exhibits the product.

    The post's author worries, however, that people won't take the time to visit the intended planting location and argues for a common sense solution, saying

    The best thing to do is just take your own coffee mug or tumbler with you. In fact, Starbucks supports this idea and will give you a 10 cent discount if you bring in your own mug.

    (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @janton.)


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