I don't always agree with South Park's politics but this joke/commentary is amazing. In their new game the skin color of your character changes when you change the difficulty. As you up the difficulty you'll get less money for completing quests and other characters will treat you differently.
via Ewanbb on Reddit
This whole Russia interfering in the election thing has gone from fascinating to terrifying to trying. I can only assume that by the next revelation it'll circle back but the start.
As for the news now, Facebook has revealed that it sold $100K worth of ad space to a Russian company linked to the Kremlin. The ads weren't tied to candidates but instead played on divisive issues, which really just a proxy for the candidates. The Washington Post reports,
“Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that it has discovered it sold ads during the U.S. presidential election to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.
Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said.”
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A study out of Cardiff University has shown that Twitter can be used to predict events like riots and that it can be done faster than by police reports. Using the 2011 London Riots as a dataset, they fed 1.6 million tweets through their machine learning algorithm and it identified incidents faster than traditional methods. In each case their system was faster than police receiving on the ground reports.
This isn't quite the Oracle of Delphi yet but one can imagine that a behavioral analysis placed on top of this detection system could have some real predictive power.
via The Verge
Over at FiveThiryEight, Trevor Martin has used semantic analysis to break down subreddits and find similarities between communities.
“We’ve adapted a technique that’s used in machine learning research — called latent semantic analysis — to characterize 50,323 active subreddits based on 1.4 billion comments posted from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2016, in a way that allows us to quantify how similar in essence one subreddit is to another. At its heart, the analysis is based on commenter overlap: Two subreddits are deemed more similar if many commenters have posted often to both. This also makes it possible to do what we call “subreddit algebra”: adding one subreddit to another and seeing if the result resembles some third subreddit, or subtracting out a component of one subreddit’s character and seeing what’s left.”
So what does that mean? It means you can add and subtract subreddits to show a commonality among the users. So for example, if you add r/minnesota and r/nba together you get r/timberwolves (their local basketball team). The article spends most of its time looking at r/the_donald. It turns out that if you subtract r/politics from he mix you get a bunch of hate subreddits.
You can do your own math here.