…Similar faults have seen voters expunged from electoral rolls without notice, small businesses labeled as ineligible for government contracts, and individuals mistakenly identified as “deadbeat†parents. In a notable example of the latter, 56-year-old mechanic Walter Vollmer was incorrectly targeted by the Federal Parent Locator Service and issued a child-support bill for the sum of $206,000. Vollmer’s wife of 32 years became suicidal in the aftermath, believing that her husband had been leading a secret life for much of their marriage.
Equally alarming is the possibility that an algorithm may falsely profile an individual as a terrorist: a fate that befalls roughly 1,500 unlucky airline travelers each week. Those fingered in the past as the result of data-matching errors include former Army majors, a four-year-old boy, and an American Airlines pilot—who was detained 80 times over the course of a single year.
Many of these problems are the result of the new roles algorithms play in law enforcement. As slashed budgets lead to increased staff cuts, automated systems have moved from simple administrative tools to become primary decision-makers.
Since that first simple Tweet over eight years ago, hundreds of billions of Tweets have captured everyday human experiences and major historical events. Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency. But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published.
This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences (#TEDGlobal), industry discussions (#MobilePayments), places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong,#Ferguson and many more. This change will be rolling out to users over the next few days.
Breathe in, breathe out. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is: ‘Vape.’
vape, verb: Inhale and exhale the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.
vape, noun: An electronic cigarette or similar device; an act of inhaling and exhaling the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.
According to Oxford Dictionaries editors, use of the word “vape†in 2014 has shot up to more than double its use in 2013. It arrived just in time to fill the gap left by the word “smoking†as many switched to electronic cigarettes, now a multi-million dollar industry. A “vaping lexicon†has sprung up around the word, with phrases like “vape pen†and “vape shop†also increasing in popularity.
In recent years, reporting the news has become an ever more dangerous activity. Between 2002 and 2012, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists(C.P.J.), five hundred and six journalists were killed worldwide, as opposed to three hundred and ninety in the previous decade.
