In 2013, Russia's parliament unanimously passed a law forbidding "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations", essentially making it illegal to distribute any material on gay relationships or gay rights via the internet or any other kind of media, or to hold gay pride marches or rallies. The move led to an immediate rise in homophobic hate crime. So far, targets have included Ikea (for the crime of including gay couples in its catalogue), sports events run by LGBT-friendly organisations, and perhaps most famously, the Sochi Olympics. This week, Russian MPs took aim at what might seem like an unlikely target: EA Sports' Fifa 17, the latest entry in an annual series of football games that routinely sells over 20m copies year. What's so gay about Fifa, you might ask?

I was recently interviewed at the Robotic Process Automation and Artificual Intelligence in Summit in December 2016 in London. Here's a discussion on how organizations worldwide are building their Digital Workforce. Organizations worldwide are building their Digital Workforce. The countdown has begun and we foresee 3 Million Digital Workers by 2020. We believe that Human workers, alongside the Digital bots, creates a hyper productive workforce and building a Digital Workforce is about talent augmentation, not talent replacement.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

Employers: do the ladies on your payroll have any "female weaknesses" that would make them mentally or physically unfit for the job? The question comes to you courtesy of the year 1943. It was posed in a guide to hiring women, written for the flummoxed male supervisors at Transportation Magazine tasked with integrating a new female workforce during a wartime shortage of manpower. Back then, you wouldn't be surprised to see logical reasoning like "Men are to programmers as women are to homemakers". Or "Men are to surgeons what women are to nurses".

JPL and National Cancer Institute Renew Big Data Partnership Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries. The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia is developing artificial intelligence technology to help with cyber security, fraud detection and regulatory compliance, in a sign banks are attempting to put the power of big data to use in reducing risk. CBA's chief information officer David Whiteing told The Australian Financial Review that so-called machine learning technology will be used to help the bank make sense of large sets of "noisy" data and alert management to areas requiring their attention. The work will come alongside a broader program of innovative projects investigating the possibilities of technologies such as the internet of things, quantum computing and the blockchain. "When you have a large data set and people can't see the signal for the noise, machine learning capability will sift out and provide you with the top five things that are worthy of further investigation," Mr Whiteing said.

British defence company BAE Systems is developing a pilotless plane Engineers have launched a series of test flights which use computers The plane is controlled by an infra-ref'electronic eye' camera in a cockpit The plane is controlled by an infra-ref'electronic eye' camera in a cockpit The remote-control passenger plane will have a cockpit-mounted camera which acts as'electronic eye' Incredible NASA photographs from space show how New Zealand... New Zealand rocked by'severe' magnitude 5.5 earthquake -... Incredible NASA photographs from space show how New Zealand... New Zealand rocked by'severe' magnitude 5.5 earthquake -... Man punches kangaroo in the face to save dog being strangled Mob storm police station and lynch suspected paedophile Boy shows amazing talent impersonating Winifred from Hocus Pocus Watch the original 1972 trailer for'Last Tango in Paris' Amazon staff work tirelessly to get parcels out to customers 73-year-old ex-Marine punches bear in the face to save his dogs Moment judge gets slapped in the face at 2016 IFBB Diamond Cup The hunt for Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live 100 special police agents protect suspected paedophile from mob Can you spot something odd about The Apprentice'walk of shame'? Can you spot something odd about The Apprentice'walk of shame'? Desperate families and friends of party-goers missing after... 'Roo want a piece of me? Kangaroo grabs a dog in a headlock... Pictured: Twelve victims identified as firefighters recover... Is Europe's Brexit revolution over? Gloating left-wing... Teenage Afghan immigrant is arrested in Germany after the... 'Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impression just... Fury at the man behind illegal artist enclave where up to 33... Uber can now track passengers' locations after they are... EXCLUSIVE: The'arrogant' man behind illegal artist enclave...

This is the 2-part blog version of a talk I've given at DOAG Conference this week. I've also uploaded the slides (no ppt; just pretty R presentation;-)) to the articles section, but if you'd like a little text I'm encouraging you to read on. That is, if you're in the target group for this post/talk. For this post, let me assume you're a SQL girl (or guy). With SQL you're comfortable (an expert, probably), you know how to get and manipulate your data, no nesting of subselects has you scared;-).

The human mind constantly seeks patterns in the raw data which comes in from the senses. Most of the times, those patterns add up to useful information which guides our behaviour. In other instances, the patterns might be there, but the interpretation of them can lead us astray. When Jesus appears in a piece of toast, for example, a false positive has been produced which relies to an extent on the framework within which the disciple interprets the image. The faithful see Jesus and ascribe meaning to the apparition.

NEW DELHI: In a first for Indian carriers, Air India is rationing the number of alcoholic drinks being served to its premium international passengers at airport lounges across India. The AI move follows a recent plea by several Indian airlines to aviation authorities to restrict passengers' access to liquor at departure terminals to check increasing incidents of unruly behaviour by tipsy flyers. Tagged In Artificial Intelligence India Airport Beer Kolkata Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Air India Indira Gandhi International Airport Wine Gin Rum Chennai International Airport Indian (airline) Go Air Indi Go Airport Lounge Rajiv Gandhi International Airport Recently actually had the time to visit a very controversial exhibition in Palazzo Strozzi, by Chinese artist Ai WeiWei. Apple has given its clearest indication yet that it's working on a self-driving car – or at least working with car manufacturers to make the plans a reality. Tagged In The Wall Street Journal Wired (magazine) Apple Inc Washington, D C Minivan Mc Laren Machine Learning National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Victoria (australia) Financial Times Mc Laren Technology Group Paul Krugman would stand in line to meet Charlie Stross.