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Meta in row after sacking workers who say they saw smart glasses users having sex

BBC News

Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya-based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses. In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet and having sex . Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant. Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out.


AMassive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical English

Neural Information Processing Systems

A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators.


Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. news wire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model.


The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies

Popular Science

Project Acoustic Kitty went about as well as you'd expect. The CIA tried to train cat spies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Here's the scene: A man wearing a trench coat and a fedora sits on a park bench, looking up frequently from his newspaper to cast furtive glances at passersby. A stray cat wanders by.







Controversial Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams dies aged 68

BBC News

Scott Adams, the US cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the comic strip Dilbert, has died of cancer at the age of 68. His ex-wife Shelly Miles announced his death on Tuesday during a live stream of his podcast, Real Coffee with Scott Adams. The satirical cartoon strip - about a competent but frustrated engineer and his dysfunctional workplace environment - was first published in 1989, and went on to feature in more than 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries. The character also later appeared in books, an animated TV series and video game. But in 2023, his comic strip was cancelled by newspapers including the Washington Post after Adams was accused of making racist comments about black people.