Clearview AI’s offering to police forces of facial recognition using images scraped from social profiles and elsewhere across the web is either a dystopian vision of a surveillance state, or next generation policing tool, depending on your perspective. This story suggests the company’s pitch may be out of sync with the reality.
“Since 1950, the world has created 6.3 trillion kilograms of plastic waste — and 91 percent has never been recycled even once” This is one of many damning statistics quoted in this expose on the plastics industry.
Hillary Mantel displays her trademark historical insight, deftness of touch, and ability to create a sense of immediacy in this review of a 2017 book about the wealthy and influential 16th century noblewoman Margaret Pole.
A man seeking to help elite mountaineers deal with a sadly common occurrence in their line of work – the death of their friends and collaborators.
A look at the meeting of history and big data.
A major scandal in France, where a dealer purchased large quantities of rare manuscripts and letters, only to sell shares in them for a huge markup. His accusers suggest this approach was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, while he continues to maintain its legitimacy.
A piece on the arms race to develop the ultimate amusement park.
Jeanne Calment was 122 years of age when she died in France in 1997, and the oldest person in the world. It was only some years after her death that people started to question whether 1875 was in fact the year of her birth, and suggesting that the woman who claimed to be Jeanne Calment was in fact her daughter Yvonne. This is a fascinating story of gerontology (including such alarming nuggets as the the Gompertz law which states that “the mortality rate for adult humans roughly doubles with every additional eight years of age”) and social history.
The extraordinary allegations presented in this story suggest that two Twitter employees used privileged access to internal systems to identify private user information and share it with the Saudi state.