AI Data Training Jobs

AI Data Training Jobs — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Wumpus world

    Wumpus world

    Wumpus world is a simple world use in artificial intelligence for which to represent knowledge and to reason. Wumpus world was introduced by Michael Genesereth, and is discussed in the Russell-Norvig Artificial Intelligence book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Wumpus World is loosely inspired by the 1972 video game Hunt the Wumpus. == Problem description == In Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the wumpus world features a 4x4 grid, containing a monster called a wumpus, multiple bottomless pits and hidden gold. The agent starts at (1,1) and has to find the gold and return to the starting position. The agent loses 1 point for every move and gains 1000 points for bringing the gold to the starting position. The agent can sense pits by a breeze, stench indicates a wumpus, and sparkle indicates gold. The wumpus can be killed by an arrow but costs 10 points.

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  • Content management

    Content management

    Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referred to as digital content, or simply as content. Digital content may take the form of text (such as electronic documents), images, multimedia files (such as audio or video files), or any other file type that follows a content lifecycle requiring management. The process of content development and management is complex enough that various commercial software vendors (large and small), such as Interwoven and Microsoft, offer content management software to control and automate significant aspects of the content lifecycle. == Process == Content management practices and goals vary by mission and by organizational governance structure. News organizations, e-commerce websites, and educational institutions all use content management, but in different ways. This leads to differences in terminology and in the names and number of steps in the process. For example, some digital content is created by one or more authors. Over time that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight, approving the content for publication. Publishing may take many forms: it may be the act of "pushing" content out to others, or simply granting digital access rights to certain content to one or more individuals. Later that content may be superseded by another version of the content and thus retired or removed from use (as when this wiki page is modified). Content management is an inherently collaborative process. It often consists of the following basic roles and responsibilities: Creator – responsible for creating and editing content. Editor – responsible for tuning the content message and the style of delivery, including translation and localization. Publisher – responsible for releasing the content for use. Administrator – responsible for managing access permissions to folders, collections and files, usually accomplished by assigning access rights to user groups or roles. Admins may also assist and support users in various ways. Consumer, viewer or guest – the person who reads or otherwise consumes the content after it is published or shared. A critical aspect of content management is the ability to manage versions of content as it evolves (see also version control). Authors and editors often need to restore older versions of edited products due to a process failure or an undesirable series of edits. Time-sensitive content may also require updates as the subject matter evolves over time. Another equally important aspect of content management involves the creation, maintenance, and application of review standards. Each member of the content creation and review process has a unique role and set of responsibilities in the development or publication of the content. Each review team member requires clear and concise review standards. These must be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure the long-term consistency and health of the knowledge base. A content management system is a set of automated processes that may support the following features: Import and creation of documents and multimedia material Identification of all key users and their roles The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different instances of content categories or types Definition of workflow tasks often coupled with messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access The ability to personalize content based on a set of rules Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval. Content management systems take the following forms: Web content management system—software for web site management (often what content management implicitly means) Output of a newspaper editorial staff organization Workflow for article publication Document management systems Knowledge management software Single source content management system—content stored in chunks within a relational database Variant management system—where personnel tag source content (usually text and graphics) to represent variants stored as single source "master" content modules, resolved to the desired variant at publication (for example: automobile owners manual content for 12 model years stored as single master content files and "called" by model year as needed)—often used in concert with database chunk storage (see above) for large content objects == Governance structures == Content management expert Marc Feldman defines three primary content management governance structures: localized, centralized, and federated—each having its unique strengths and weaknesses. === Localized governance === By putting control in the hands of those closest to the content, the context experts, localized governance models empower and unleash creativity. These benefits come, however, at the cost of a partial-to-total loss of managerial control and oversight. === Centralized governance === When the levers of control are strongly centralized, content management systems are capable of delivering an exceptionally clear and unified brand message. Moreover, centralized content management governance structures allow for a large number of cost-savings opportunities in large enterprises, realized, for example, through (1) the avoidance of duplicated efforts in creating, editing, formatting, repurposing and archiving content; (2) process management and the streamlining of all content related labor; and/or (3) an orderly deployment or updating of the content management system. === Federated governance === Federated governance models potentially realize the benefits of both localized and centralized control while avoiding the weaknesses of both. While content management software systems are inherently structured to enable federated governance models, realizing these benefits can be difficult because it requires, for example, negotiating the boundaries of control with local managers and content creators. In the case of larger enterprises, in particular, the failure to fully implement or realize a federated governance structure equates to a failure to realize the full return on investment and cost savings that content management systems enable. == Implementation == Content management implementations must be able to manage content distributions and digital rights in content life cycle. Content management systems are usually involved with digital rights management in order to control user access and digital rights. In this step, the read-only structures of digital rights management systems force some limitations on content management, as they do not allow authors to change protected content in their life cycle. Creating new content using managed (protected) content is also an issue that gets protected contents out of management controlling systems. A few content management implementations cover all these issues.

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  • Story (social media)

    Story (social media)

    In social media, a story is a function in which the user tells a narrative or provides status messages and information in the form of short, time-limited clips in an automatically running sequence. == Definition == A story is a short sequence of images, videos, or other social media content, which can be accompanied by backgrounds, music, text, stickers, animations, filters or emojis. Social media platforms typically advance through the sequence automatically when presenting a story to a viewer. Although the sequential nature of stories can be used to tell a narrative, the pieces of a story can also be unrelated. Social media platforms that offer stories will typically have a primary story for each user which consists of everything the user posted to their story over a certain period of time, usually the most recent 24 hours. Most stories cannot be changed afterwards and are only available for a short time. Stories are almost exclusively created on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer and are usually displayed vertically. == History == In October 2013, Snapchat first introduced the story function as a series of Snaps that can together tell a narrative through a chronological order, with each Snap being viewable by all of the poster's friends and deleted after 24 hours. Stories soon surpassed private Snaps to become Snapchat's most-viewed type of post. After 2015, Snapchat introduced a feature allowing users to post private stories viewable by a chosen subset of their friends. Later other apps would copy this feature. In August 2016, Instagram introduced a stories function that deletes the content after 24 hours. Various commenters have accused the site of copying Snapchat. In February 2017, the instant messenger WhatsApp introduced the Now Status stories function in beta, which was later renamed Status. In March 2017, a story function was introduced in Facebook Messenger. In February 2018, Google launched AMP Stories, bringing a story-style format to certain Google search results on mobile devices. In August 2018, YouTube introduced a stories function that initially was limited to pictures, but was later expanded to support short video clips. The feature was shut down in June 2023. In August 2018, the GIF website Giphy introduced a story function. In March 2022, TikTok added a story feature which allowed users to create 15 second long videos that delete after 24 hours. In June 2023, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced stories for Telegram would be released in July 2023. In July 2023, the feature was released for premium users, and in August 2023 it was rolled out for all users. == User motivations == In 2022, a study performed by Jia-Dai (Evelyn) Lu and Jhih-Syuan (Elaine) Lin examined the various motivations for updating stories on Instagram. The researchers found a new configuration of motivations for using Instagram Stories: exploration, self-enhancement, perceived functionality, entertainment, social sharing, relationship building, novelty, and surveillance. The findings also highlighted that contribution and creation activities are likely to result in positive emotions, while creation alone predicts negative emotions while updating stories on Instagram. == Usage statistics == In 2019, around 1.5 billion people worldwide every day on average used the stories function in a social network or messenger. Younger people in particular use this function. More than 20% of people aged 18 to 24 use Instagram stories, while it is just under 2% of those over 55. In a Facebook survey of 18,000 participants from 12 countries, 68% said they used the stories function at least once a month. Stories in the areas of fashion and tourism are particularly popular. The website Fanpage Karma analyzed several Instagram accounts and determined the average reach of posts and stories per follower, concluding that posts have a higher reach than stories, which often have less than half the reach.

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  • List of cryptosystems

    List of cryptosystems

    A cryptosystem is a set of cryptographic algorithms that map ciphertexts and plaintexts to each other. == Private-key cryptosystems == Private-key cryptosystems use the same key for encryption and decryption. Caesar cipher Substitution cipher Enigma machine Data Encryption Standard Twofish Serpent Camellia Salsa20 ChaCha20 Blowfish CAST5 Kuznyechik RC4 3DES Skipjack Safer IDEA Advanced Encryption Standard, also known as AES and Rijndael. == Public-key cryptosystems == Public-key cryptosystems use a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption. Diffie–Hellman key exchange RSA encryption Rabin cryptosystem Schnorr signature ElGamal encryption Elliptic-curve cryptography Lattice-based cryptography McEliece cryptosystem Multivariate cryptography Isogeny-based cryptography

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  • Color management

    Color management

    Color management is the process of ensuring consistent and accurate colors across various devices, such as monitors, printers, and cameras. It involves the use of color profiles, which are standardized descriptions of how colors should be displayed or reproduced. Color management is necessary because different devices have different color capabilities and characteristics. For example, a monitor may display colors differently than a printer can reproduce them. Without color management, the same image may appear differently on different devices, leading to inconsistencies and inaccuracies. To achieve color management, a color profile is created for each device involved in the color workflow. This profile describes the device's color capabilities and characteristics, such as its color gamut (range of colors it can display or reproduce) and color temperature. These profiles are then used to translate colors between devices, ensuring consistent and accurate color reproduction. Color management is particularly important in industries such as graphic design, photography, and printing, where accurate color representation is crucial. It helps to maintain color consistency throughout the entire workflow, from capturing an image to displaying or printing it. Parts of color management are implemented in the operating system (OS), helper libraries, the application, and devices. The type of color profile that is typically used is called an ICC profile. A cross-platform view of color management is the use of an ICC-compatible color management system. The International Color Consortium (ICC) is an industry consortium that has defined: an open standard for a Color Matching Module (CMM) at the OS level color profiles for: devices, including DeviceLink profiles that transform one device profile (color space) to another device profile without passing through an intermediate color space, such as LAB, more accurately preserving color working spaces, the color spaces in which color data is meant to be manipulated There are other approaches to color management besides using ICC profiles. This is partly due to history and partly because of other needs than the ICC standard covers. The film and broadcasting industries make use of some of the same concepts, but they frequently rely on more limited boutique solutions. The film industry, for instance, often uses 3D LUTs (lookup table) to represent a complete color transformation for a specific RGB encoding. At the consumer level, system wide color management is available in most of Apple's products (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS). Microsoft Windows lacks system wide color management and virtually all applications do not employ color management. Windows' media player API is not color space aware, and if applications want to color manage videos manually, they have to incur significant performance and power consumption penalties. Android supports system wide color management, but most devices ship with color management disabled. == Overview == Characterize. Every color-managed device requires a personalized table, or "color profile," which characterizes the color response of that particular device. Standardize. Each color profile describes these colors relative to a standardized set of reference colors (the "Profile Connection Space"). Translate. Color-managed software then uses these standardized profiles to translate color from one device to another. This is usually performed by a color management module (CMM). == Hardware == === Characterization === To describe the behavior of various output devices, they must be compared (measured) in relation to a standard color space. Often a step called linearization is performed first, to undo the effect of gamma correction that was done to get the most out of limited 8-bit color paths. Instruments used for measuring device colors include colorimeters and spectrophotometers. As an intermediate result, the device gamut is described in the form of scattered measurement data. The transformation of the scattered measurement data into a more regular form, usable by the application, is called profiling. Profiling is a complex process involving mathematics, intense computation, judgment, testing, and iteration. After the profiling is finished, an idealized color description of the device is created. This description is called a profile. === Calibration === Calibration is like characterization, except that it can include the adjustment of the device, as opposed to just the measurement of the device. Color management is sometimes sidestepped by calibrating devices to a common standard color space such as sRGB; when such calibration is done well enough, no color translations are needed to get all devices to handle colors consistently. This avoidance of the complexity of color management was one of the goals in the development of sRGB. == Color profiles == === Embedding === Image formats themselves (such as TIFF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, PDF, and SVG) may contain embedded color profiles but are not required to do so by the image format. The International Color Consortium standard was created to bring various developers and manufacturers together. The ICC standard permits the exchange of output device characteristics and color spaces in the form of metadata. This allows the embedding of color profiles into images as well as storing them in a database or a profile directory. === Working spaces === Working spaces, such as sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto are color spaces that facilitate good results while editing. For instance, pixels with equal values of R,G,B should appear neutral. Using a large (gamut) working space will lead to posterization, while using a small working space will lead to clipping. This trade-off is a consideration for the critical image editor. == Color transformation == Color transformation, or color space conversion, is the transformation of the representation of a color from one color space to another. This calculation is required whenever data is exchanged inside a color-managed chain and carried out by a Color Matching Module. Transforming profiled color information to different output devices is achieved by referencing the profile data into a standard color space. It makes it easier to convert colors from one device to a selected standard color space and from that to the colors of another device. By ensuring that the reference color space covers the many possible colors that humans can see, this concept allows one to exchange colors between many different color output devices. Color transformations can be represented by two profiles (source profile and target profile) or by a devicelink profile. In this process there are approximations involved which make sure that the image keeps its important color qualities and also gives an opportunity to control on how the colors are being changed. === Profile connection space === In the terminology of the International Color Consortium, a translation between two color spaces can go through a profile connection space (PCS): Color Space 1 → PCS (CIELAB or CIEXYZ) → Color space 2; conversions into and out of the PCS are each specified by a profile. === Gamut mapping === In nearly every translation process, we have to deal with the fact that the color gamut of different devices vary in range which makes an accurate reproduction impossible. They therefore need some rearrangement near the borders of the gamut. Some colors must be shifted to the inside of the gamut, as they otherwise cannot be represented on the output device and would simply be clipped. This so-called gamut mismatch occurs for example, when we translate from the RGB color space with a wider gamut into the CMYK color space with a narrower gamut range. In this example, the dark highly saturated purplish-blue color of a typical computer monitor's "blue" primary is impossible to print on paper with a typical CMYK printer. The nearest approximation within the printer's gamut will be much less saturated. Conversely, an inkjet printer's "cyan" primary, a saturated mid-brightness blue, is outside the gamut of a typical computer monitor. The color management system can utilize various methods to achieve desired results and give experienced users control of the gamut mapping behavior. ==== Rendering intent ==== When the gamut of source color space exceeds that of the destination, saturated colors are liable to become clipped (inaccurately represented), or more formally burned. The color management module can deal with this problem in several ways. The ICC specification includes four different rendering intents, listed below. Before the actual rendering intent is carried out, one can temporarily simulate the rendering by soft proofing. It is a useful tool as it predicts the outcome of the colors and is available as an application in many color management systems: Absolute colorimetric Absolute colorimetry and relative colorimetry actually use the same table but differ in the adjust

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  • Social search

    Social search

    Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc. Social search may not be demonstrably better than algorithm-driven search. In the algorithmic ranking model that search engines used in the past, relevance of a site is determined after analyzing the text and content on the page and link structure of the document. In contrast, search results with social search highlight content that was created or touched by other users who are in the Social Graph of the person conducting a search. It is a personalized search technology with online community filtering to produce highly personalized results. Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms. Depending on the feature-set of a particular search engine, these results may then be saved and added to community search results, further improving the relevance of results for future searches of that keyword. The principle behind social search is that human network oriented results would be more meaningful and relevant for the user, instead of computer algorithms deciding the results for specific queries. == Research and implementations == Over the years, there have been different studies, researches and some implementations of Social Search. In 2008, there were a few startup companies that focused on ranking search results according to one's social graph on social networks. Companies in the social search space include Sproose, Mahalo, Jumper 2.0, Scour, Wink, Eurekster, and Delver. Former efforts include Wikia Search. In 2008, a story on TechCrunch showed Google potentially adding in a voting mechanism to search results similar to Digg's methodology. This suggests growing interest in how social groups can influence and potentially enhance the ability of algorithms to find meaningful data for end users. There are also other services like Sentiment that turn search personal by searching within the users' social circles. In 2009, a startup project called HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com) developed a web browser plugin "HayStaks". HeyStaks applies social search through collaboration in web search as a way that leads to better search results. The main motivation for HeyStaks to work on this idea is to provide the user with features that search engines didn't provide at that time. For instance, different searches have indicated that about 70% of the time when user search for something, a friend or a coworker have found it already. Also, studies have shown that approximately, 30% of people who use online search, search for something that they have found before. The startup believe that they help avoid these kind of issues by providing a shared and rich search experience through a list of recommendations that get generated based on search results. In October 2009, Google rolled out its "Social Search"; after a time in beta, the feature was expanded to multiple languages in May 2011. Before the expansion however in 2010 Bing and Google were already taking into account re-tweets and Likes when providing search results. However, after a search deal with Twitter ended without renewal, Google began to retool its Social Search. In January 2012, Google released "Search plus Your World", a further development of Social Search. The feature, which is integrated into Google's regular search as an opt-out feature, pulls references to results from Google+ profiles. The goal was to deliver better, more relevant and personalized search results with this integration. This integration however had some problems in which Google+ still is not wildly adopted or has much usage among many users. Later on, Google was criticized by Twitter for the perceived potential impact of "Search plus Your World" upon web publishers, describing the feature's release to the public as a "bad day for the web", while Google replied that Twitter refused to allow deep search crawling by Google of Twitter's content. By Google integrating Google+, the company was encouraging users to switch to Google's social networking site in order to improve search results. One famous example occurred when Google showed a link to Mark Zuckerberg's dormant Google+ account rather than the active Facebook profile. In November 2014 these accusations started to die down because Google's Knowledge Graph started to finally show links to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. In December 2008, Twitter had re-introduced their people search feature. While the interface had since changed significantly, it allows you to search either full names or usernames in a straight-forward search engine. In January 2013, Facebook announced a new search engine called Graph Search still in the beta stages. The goal was to allow users to prioritize results that were popular with their social circle over the general internet. Facebook's Graph search utilized Facebook's user generated content to target users. Although there have been different researches and studies in social search, social media networks have not vested enough interest in working with search engines. LinkedIn for example has taken steps to improve its own individual search functions in order to stray users from external search engines. Even Microsoft started working with Twitter in order to integrate some tweets into Bing's search results in November 2013. Yet Twitter has its own search engine which points out how much value their data has and why they would like to keep it in house. In the end though social search will never be truly comprehensive of the subjects that matter to people unless users opt to be completely public with their information. == Social discovery == Social discovery is the use of social preferences and personal information to predict what content will be desirable to the user. Technology is used to discover new people and sometimes new experiences shopping, meeting friends or even traveling. The discovery of new people is often in real-time, enabled by mobile apps. However, social discovery is not limited to meeting people in real-time, it also leads to sales and revenue for companies via social media. An example of retail would be the addition of social sharing with music, through the iTunes music store. There is a social component to discovering new music Social discovery is at the basis of Facebook's profitability, generating ad revenue by targeting the ads to users using the social connections to enhance the commercial appeal. == Social search engines == A social search engine in an aspect can be thought of as a search engine that provides an answer for a question from another answer by identifying a person in the answer. That can happen by retrieving a user submitted query and determining that the query is related to the question; and provides an answer, including the link to the resource, as part of search results that are responsive to the query. Few social search engines depend only on online communities. Depending on the feature-set of a particular search engine, these results may then be saved and added to community search results, further improving the relevance of results for future searches of that keyword. Social search engines are considered a part of Web 2.0 because they use the collective filtering of online communities to elevate particularly interesting or relevant content using tagging. These descriptive tags add to the meta data embedded in Web pages, theoretically improving the results for particular keywords over time. A user will generally see suggested tags for a particular search term, indicating tags that have previously been added. An implementation of a social search engine is Aardvark. Aardvark is a social search engine that is based on the "village paradigm" which is about connecting the user who has a question with friends or friends of friends whom can answer his or her question. In Aadvark, a user ask a question in different ways that mostly involves online ways such as instant messaging, email, web input or other non-online ways such as text message or voice. The Aar

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  • Social media and identity

    Social media and identity

    Social media can have both positive and negative impacts on a user's identity. Scholars within the fields of psychology and communication study the relationship between social media and identity in order to understand individual behavior, psychological impacts, and social patterns. Communication within political or social groups online can result in practice application, real-world implementation of a concept, of those found identities or the adoption of them as a whole. Young people, defined as emerging adults in or entering college, are especially found to have their identities shaped through social media. Sometimes it seems as though social media is taking over and changing us for the worse. Social media is always changing and can be hard to keep up with. Platforms come and go trends change everyday. What was cool yesterday is lame today. The biggest change from recent years that users are still adjusting to is the name change of Twitter now called X. Since Elon Musk purchased the platform he changed the name but nothing else about the app. Users now feel the need to explain when talking about X. Now it is often referred to as ‘X(Twitter)’ to clarify. == Social Media Usage and Demographics == We know what social media is and how it is used but who uses it? The Pew Research center conducted a 10 year study from 2005-2015 about the demographics of social media usage. While this article is 10 years old the statistics in it are from a very formative time in social media. This is when most people joined and were consistently using social media. Age: While it is no surprise that 90% of young adults use social media they are the main demographic of users. Older adults (65 and older) really hit a boom on social media. In 2005 only 2% of older adults used any form of social media. By 2015 35% of older adults used social media. We can infer that that percentage has grown even more since 2015. Gender: It is known that women tend to use social media more than men. In 2015 it was noted that 65% of women used social media. Men were not far behind, 62% of men were reported to use social media. There are no notable differences of users from various races and ethnicities. The research also shows that more suburban and urban residents use social media over those who live in rural areas. == Young adults == Young adults are especially influenced by social media, where they find social groups to belong to. Research shows that nearly half of teens believe social media platforms has a negative impact on people their age. Psychologists believe that at a time when young adults are coming into adolescence, they are more likely to be influenced by what they see on sites like Instagram or Twitter. Most young adults will widely share, with varying degrees of accuracy, honesty, and openness, information that in the past would have been private or reserved for select individuals. Key questions include whether they accurately portray their identities online and whether the use of social media might impact young adults' identity development. Media Imagery, in particular, is said to be a major influence on the minds of young men and women. Studies have shown that it is even more relevant when it comes to the issue of body image. Social media, in part, has been created to host a safe haven for those who do not claim a solid identity in the material world, but past identities are not easy to escape from since the Internet preserves much of the information that was shared. Social media is an essential part of the social lives of young adults. They rely on it to maintain relationships, create new relationships, and stay up to date with the world around them. Adolescents find social media to be extremely helpful when changing environments, like moving off to university for example. Social media provides students, especially first year students, the opportunity to create the identity they want the world to see. However, it has been seen that these students create online personas that may not reflect their true selves bringing up the issues of impression management. Social media provides young adults with the opportunity to present themselves as something other than their authentic self. Social media providers can help build relationships and community on their platforms. This is something that will create a more positive impact from social media. When young adults interact with each other using social media they are creating something called a social self-identity. Social self identity is what individuals create when they assimilate to being in a group. Social media has gained the reputation of being isolating. If these platforms encourage community then they can help grow users' social self-identity. == Media literacy == The definition of media literacy has evolved over time to encompass a range of experiences that can occur in social media or other digital spaces. The definition of media literacy is also broad and wide ranging in its context. Currently, media literacy is the idea that one is able to analyze, evaluate, and interact with media content in a meaningful way. Educators teach media literacy skills because of the vulnerable relationship that young adults can have with social media. Some examples of media literacy practices, particularly on Twitter, include using hashtags, live tweeting, and sharing information. One of the overall goals of media literacy within the context of social media is to keep young adults aware of potentially violent, graphic, or dangerous content that they may come across on the internet, and how to determine if the content is credible while engaging responsibly with it. In order to be considered media-literate, a person must be able to take in media from online and social platforms and have the correct competencies and context to be able to organize the information. In order to be considered media-literate, the digital information must be given to the user in a way that it can be put into the correct perspective and analyzed, deducted and synthesized.Teenagers and young adults can be vulnerable to specific content online outside of their age-range. Media literacy campaigns and education research shows that targeting those who fall into this age category would be the best way to understand and target their needs as young online users. There are multiple individual studies investigating social media identity relating to media literacy online, however there is a need for much more conclusive information that analyzes multiple studies at a time. Social media literacy is still considered an under-researched topic. Many scholars in media literacy research emphasize the impact of training young adults to consume media in a safe way is the major solution for furthering internet education in children and young adults. The more information the young adults are given on media literacy, the better prepared they are to enter the digital world confidently. One scientific model that has been proposed, known as The Social Media Literacy (SMILE) model is a framework that hypothesizes that at the core of this model it is helping young adults truly know the meaning and display the actions of media literacy online. SMILE is also meant to inspire more research on the subject of media literacy as it relates to social media effects and young adult learning abilities. The model was applied through the lens of a social media positivity bias among adolescents and puts forth five different assumptions about social media and media literacy; Social media literacy as a moderator (what is seen on social media) Social media literacy as a predictor (what is seen for specific individuals on social media) Media literacy within social media is a reciprocal process The development of social media literacy depends on a conditional process of variables affecting other variables Media literacy within social media is a differential learning process, and who teaches it is highly affective of the outcome This model also stresses that human beings learn media literacy (and social media literacy) naturally as they go through life. Research suggests that having young adults taught media literacy from an educator may make them less interested (and therefore less careful) of threats on social media. == Self Presentation == People create images of themselves to present to the public, a process called self presentation. Depending on the demographic, presenting oneself as authentic can result in identity clarity. Methods of self presentation can also be influenced by geography. The framework for this relationship between a user's location and their social media presentation is called the spatial self. Users depict their spatial self in order to include their physical space as a part of their self presentation to an audience. According to a 2018 research paper, patients of plastic surgeons have gone in and asked for specific snapchat "filter" features. This led to a theory of Snap

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  • Initialization vector

    Initialization vector

    In cryptography, an initialization vector (IV) or starting variable is an input to a cryptographic primitive being used to provide the initial state. The IV is typically required to be random or pseudorandom, but sometimes an IV only needs to be unpredictable or unique. Randomization is crucial for some encryption schemes to achieve semantic security, a property whereby repeated usage of the scheme under the same key does not allow an attacker to infer relationships between (potentially similar) segments of the encrypted message. For block ciphers, the use of an IV is described by the modes of operation. Some cryptographic primitives require the IV only to be non-repeating, and the required randomness is derived internally. In this case, the IV is commonly called a nonce (a number used only once), and the primitives (e.g. CBC) are considered stateful rather than randomized. This is because an IV need not be explicitly forwarded to a recipient but may be derived from a common state updated at both sender and receiver side. (In practice, a short nonce is still transmitted along with the message to consider message loss.) An example of stateful encryption schemes is the counter mode of operation, which has a sequence number for a nonce. The IV size depends on the cryptographic primitive used; for block ciphers it is generally the cipher's block-size. In encryption schemes, the unpredictable part of the IV has at best the same size as the key to compensate for time/memory/data tradeoff attacks. When the IV is chosen at random, the probability of collisions due to the birthday problem must be taken into account. Traditional stream ciphers such as RC4 do not support an explicit IV as input, and a custom solution for incorporating an IV into the cipher's key or internal state is needed. Some designs realized in practice are known to be insecure; the WEP protocol is a notable example, and is prone to related-IV attacks. == Motivation == A block cipher is one of the most basic primitives in cryptography, and frequently used for data encryption. However, by itself, it can only be used to encode a data block of a predefined size, called the block size. For example, a single invocation of the AES algorithm transforms a 128-bit plaintext block into a ciphertext block of 128 bits in size. The key, which is given as one input to the cipher, defines the mapping between plaintext and ciphertext. If data of arbitrary length is to be encrypted, a simple strategy is to split the data into blocks each matching the cipher's block size, and encrypt each block separately using the same key. This method is not secure as equal plaintext blocks get transformed into equal ciphertexts, and a third party observing the encrypted data may easily determine its content even when not knowing the encryption key. To hide patterns in encrypted data while avoiding the re-issuing of a new key after each block cipher invocation, a method is needed to randomize the input data. In 1980, the NIST published a national standard document designated Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) PUB 81, which specified four so-called block cipher modes of operation, each describing a different solution for encrypting a set of input blocks. The first mode implements the simple strategy described above, and was specified as the electronic codebook (ECB) mode. In contrast, each of the other modes describe a process where ciphertext from one block encryption step gets intermixed with the data from the next encryption step. To initiate this process, an additional input value is required to be mixed with the first block, and which is referred to as an initialization vector. For example, the cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode requires an unpredictable value, of size equal to the cipher's block size, as additional input. This unpredictable value is added to the first plaintext block before subsequent encryption. In turn, the ciphertext produced in the first encryption step is added to the second plaintext block, and so on. The ultimate goal for encryption schemes is to provide semantic security: by this property, it is practically impossible for an attacker to draw any knowledge from observed ciphertext. It can be shown that each of the three additional modes specified by the NIST are semantically secure under so-called chosen-plaintext attacks. == Properties == Properties of an IV depend on the cryptographic scheme used. A basic requirement is uniqueness, which means that no IV may be reused under the same key. For block ciphers, repeated IV values devolve the encryption scheme into electronic codebook mode: equal IV and equal plaintext result in equal ciphertext. In stream cipher encryption uniqueness is crucially important as plaintext may be trivially recovered otherwise. Example: Stream ciphers encrypt plaintext P to ciphertext C by deriving a key stream K from a given key and IV and computing C as C = P xor K. Assume that an attacker has observed two messages C1 and C2 both encrypted with the same key and IV. Then knowledge of either P1 or P2 reveals the other plaintext since C1 xor C2 = (P1 xor K) xor (P2 xor K) = P1 xor P2. Many schemes require the IV to be unpredictable by an adversary. This is effected by selecting the IV at random or pseudo-randomly. In such schemes, the chance of a duplicate IV is negligible, but the effect of the birthday problem must be considered. As for the uniqueness requirement, a predictable IV may allow recovery of (partial) plaintext. Example: Consider a scenario where a legitimate party called Alice encrypts messages using the cipher-block chaining mode. Consider further that there is an adversary called Eve that can observe these encryptions and is able to forward plaintext messages to Alice for encryption (in other words, Eve is capable of a chosen-plaintext attack). Now assume that Alice has sent a message consisting of an initialization vector IV1 and starting with a ciphertext block CAlice. Let further PAlice denote the first plaintext block of Alice's message, let E denote encryption, and let PEve be Eve's guess for the first plaintext block. Now, if Eve can determine the initialization vector IV2 of the next message she will be able to test her guess by forwarding a plaintext message to Alice starting with (IV2 xor IV1 xor PEve); if her guess was correct this plaintext block will get encrypted to CAlice by Alice. This is because of the following simple observation: CAlice = E(IV1 xor PAlice) = E(IV2 xor (IV2 xor IV1 xor PAlice)). Depending on whether the IV for a cryptographic scheme must be random or only unique the scheme is either called randomized or stateful. While randomized schemes always require the IV chosen by a sender to be forwarded to receivers, stateful schemes allow sender and receiver to share a common IV state, which is updated in a predefined way at both sides. == Block ciphers == Block cipher processing of data is usually described as a mode of operation. Modes are primarily defined for encryption as well as authentication, though newer designs exist that combine both security solutions in so-called authenticated encryption modes. While encryption and authenticated encryption modes usually take an IV matching the cipher's block size, authentication modes are commonly realized as deterministic algorithms, and the IV is set to zero or some other fixed value. == Stream ciphers == In stream ciphers, IVs are loaded into the keyed internal secret state of the cipher, after which a number of cipher rounds are executed prior to releasing the first bit of output. For performance reasons, designers of stream ciphers try to keep that number of rounds as small as possible, but because determining the minimal secure number of rounds for stream ciphers is not a trivial task, and considering other issues such as entropy loss, unique to each cipher construction, related-IVs and other IV-related attacks are a known security issue for stream ciphers, which makes IV loading in stream ciphers a serious concern and a subject of ongoing research. == WEP IV == The 802.11 encryption algorithm called WEP (short for Wired Equivalent Privacy) used a short, 24-bit IV, leading to reused IVs with the same key, which led to it being easily cracked. Packet injection allowed for WEP to be cracked in times as short as several seconds. This ultimately led to the deprecation of WEP. == SSL 2.0 IV == In cipher-block chaining mode (CBC mode), the IV need not be secret, but must be unpredictable (In particular, for any given plaintext, it must not be possible to predict the IV that will be associated to the plaintext in advance of the generation of the IV.) at encryption time. Additionally for the output feedback mode (OFB mode), the IV must be unique. In particular, the (previously) common practice of re-using the last ciphertext block of a message as the IV for the next message is insecure (for example, this method was used by SSL 2.0). If an attacker knows

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  • Smart object

    Smart object

    A smart object is an object that enhances the interaction with not only people but also with other smart objects. Also known as smart connected products or smart connected things (SCoT), they are products, assets and other things embedded with processors, sensors, software and connectivity that allow data to be exchanged between the product and its environment, manufacturer, operator/user, and other products and systems. Connectivity also enables some capabilities of the product to exist outside the physical device, in what is known as the product cloud. The data collected from these products can be then analysed to inform decision-making, enable operational efficiencies and continuously improve the performance of the product. It can not only refer to interaction with physical world objects but also to interaction with virtual (computing environment) objects. A smart physical object may be created either as an artifact or manufactured product or by embedding electronic tags such as RFID tags or sensors into non-smart physical objects. Smart virtual objects are created as software objects that are intrinsic when creating and operating a virtual or cyber world simulation or game. The concept of a smart object has several origins and uses, see History. There are also several overlapping terms, see also smart device, tangible object or tangible user interface and Thing as in the Internet of things. == History == In the early 1990s, Mark Weiser, from whom the term ubiquitous computing originated, referred to a vision "When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial", Although Weiser did not specifically refer to an object as being smart, his early work did imply that smart physical objects are smart in the sense that they act as digital information sources. Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer refer to tangible objects in terms of tangibles bits or tangible user interfaces that enable users to "grasp & manipulate" bits in the center of users' attention by coupling the bits with everyday physical objects and architectural surfaces. The smart object concept was introduced by Marcelo Kallman and Daniel Thalmann as an object that can describe its own possible interactions. The main focus here is to model interactions of smart virtual objects with virtual humans, agents, in virtual worlds. The opposite approach to smart objects is 'plain' objects that do not provide this information. The additional information provided by this concept enables far more general interaction schemes, and can greatly simplify the planner of an artificial intelligence agent. In contrast to smart virtual objects used in virtual worlds, Lev Manovich focuses on physical space filled with electronic and visual information. Here, "smart objects" are described as "objects connected to the Net; objects that can sense their users and display smart behaviour". More recently in the early 2010s, smart objects are being proposed as a key enabler for the vision of the Internet of things. The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as near field communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors enables everyday objects to be transformed into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of things and enable novel computing applications. In 2018, one of the world's first smart houses was built in Klaukkala, Finland in the form of a five-floor apartment block, using the Kone Residential Flow solution created by KONE, allowing even a smartphone to act as a home key. == Characteristics == Although we can view interaction with physical smart object in the physical world as distinct from interaction with virtual smart objects in a virtual simulated world, these can be related. Poslad considers the progression of: how humans use models of smart objects situated in the physical world to enhance human to physical world interaction; versus how smart physical objects situated in the physical world can model human interaction in order to lessen the need for human to physical world interaction; versus how virtual smart objects by modelling both physical world objects and modelling humans as objects and their subsequent interactions can form a predominantly smart virtual object environment. === Smart physical objects === The concept smart for a smart physical object simply means that it is active, digital, networked, can operate to some extent autonomously, is reconfigurable and has local control of the resources it needs such as energy, data storage, etc. Note, a smart object does not necessarily need to be intelligent as in exhibiting a strong essence of artificial intelligence—although it can be designed to also be intelligent. Physical world smart objects can be described in terms of three properties: Awareness: is a smart object's ability to understand (that is, sense, interpret, and react to) events and human activities occurring in the physical world. Representation: refers to a smart object's application and programming model—in particular, programming abstractions. Interaction: denotes the object's ability to converse with the user in terms of input, output, control, and feedback. Based upon these properties, these have been classified into three types: Activity-Aware Smart Objects: Are objects that can record information about work activities and its own use. Policy-Aware Smart Objects: Are objects that are activity-aware Objects can interpret events and activities with respect to predefined organizational policies. Process-Aware Smart Objects: Processes play a fundamental role in industrial work management and operation. A process is a collection of related activities or tasks that are ordered according to their position in time and space. === Smart virtual objects === For the virtual object in a virtual world case, an object is called smart when it has the ability to describe its possible interactions. This focuses on constructing a virtual world using only virtual objects that contain their own interaction information. There are four basic elements to constructing such a smart virtual object framework. Object properties: physical properties and a text description Interaction information: position of handles, buttons, grips, and the like Object behavior: different behaviors based on state variables Agent behaviors: description of the behavior an agent should follow when using the object Some versions of smart objects also include animation information in the object information, but this is not considered to be an efficient approach, since this can make objects inappropriately oversized. === Categorization === The terms smart, connected product or smart product can be confusing as it is used to cover a broad range of different products, ranging from smart home appliances (e.g., smart bathroom scales or smart light bulbs) to smart cars (e.g., Tesla). While these products share certain similarities, they often differ substantially in their capabilities. Raff et al. developed a conceptual framework that distinguishes different smart products based on their capabilities, which features 4 types of smart product archetypes (in ascending order of "smartness"). Digital Connected Responsive Intelligent == Advantages == Smart, connected products have three primary components: Physical – made up of the product's mechanical and electrical parts. Smart – made up of sensors, microprocessors, data storage, controls, software, and an embedded operating system with enhanced user interface. Connectivity – made up of ports, antennae, and protocols enabling wired/wireless connections that serve two purposes, it allows data to be exchanged with the product and enables some functions of the product to exist outside the physical device. Each component expands the capabilities of one another resulting in "a virtuous cycle of value improvement". First, the smart components of a product amplify the value and capabilities of the physical components. Then, connectivity amplifies the value and capabilities of the smart components. These improvements include: Monitoring of the product's conditions, its external environment, and its operations and usage. Control of various product functions to better respond to changes in its environment, as well as to personalize the user experience. Optimization of the product's overall operations based on actual performance data, and reduction of downtimes through predictive maintenance and remote service. Autonomous product operation, including learning from their environment, adapting to users' preferences and self-diagnosing and service. === The Internet of things (IoT) === The Internet of things is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment. The phrase "Internet of things" reflects the gro

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  • Radical trust

    Radical trust

    Radical trust is the confidence that any structured organization, such as a government, library, business, religion, or museum, has in collaboration and empowerment within online communities. Specifically, it pertains to the use of blogs, wiki and online social networking platforms by organizations to cultivate relationships with an online community that then can provide feedback and direction for the organization's interest. The organization 'trusts' and uses that input in its management. One of the first appearances of the notion of radical trust appears in an info graphic outlining the base principles of web 2.0 in Tim O'Reilly's weblog post "What is Web 2.0". Radical Trust is listed as the guiding example of trusting the validity of consumer generated media. This concept is considered to be an underlying assumption of Library 2.0. The adoption of radical trust by a library would require its management let go of some of its control over the library and building an organization without an end result in mind. The direction a library would take would be based on input provided by people through online communities. These changes in the organization may merely be anecdotal in nature, making this method of organization management dramatically distinct from data-based or evidence based management. In marketing, Collin Douma further describes the notion of radical trust as a key mindset required for marketers and advertisers to enter the social media marketing space. Conventional marketing dictates and maintains control of messages to cause the greatest persuasion in consumer decisions, but Douma argued that in the social media space, brands would need to cede that control in order to build brand loyalty.

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  • Data

    Data

    Data ( DAY-tə, US also DAT-ə, India: DEE-tə) is a collection of discrete or continuous values that conveys information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A data point or datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data is usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and may itself be used as data in larger structures. Data may be used as variables in a computational process. Data may represent abstract ideas or concrete measurements. Data is commonly used in scientific research, economics, and virtually every other form of human organizational activity. Examples of data sets include price indices (such as the consumer price index), unemployment rates, literacy rates, and census data. In this context, data represents the raw facts and figures from which useful information can be extracted. Data is collected using techniques such as measurement, observation, query, or analysis, and is typically represented as numbers or characters that may be further processed. Field data is data that is collected in an uncontrolled, in-situ environment. Experimental data is data that is generated in the course of a controlled scientific experiment. Data is analyzed using techniques such as calculation, reasoning, discussion, presentation, visualization, or other forms of post-analysis. Prior to analysis, raw data (or unprocessed data) is typically cleaned: Outliers are removed, and obvious instrument or data entry errors are corrected. Data can be seen as the smallest unit of factual information that can be used as a basis for calculation, reasoning, or discussion. Data can range from abstract ideas to concrete measurements, including, but not limited to, statistics. Thematically connected data presented in some relevant context can be viewed as information. Contextually connected pieces of information can then be described as data insights or intelligence. The stock of insights and intelligence that accumulate over time, resulting from the synthesis of data into information, can then be described as knowledge. Data has been described as "the new oil of the digital economy". Data, as a general concept, refers to the fact that some existing information or knowledge is represented or coded in some form suitable for better usage or processing. Advances in computing technologies have led to the advent of big data, which generally refers to very large quantities of data, typically at the petabyte scale. If restricted to traditional data analysis methods and computing, working with such large (and growing) datasets is difficult, even impossible. In response, the relatively new field of data science uses machine learning (and other artificial intelligence) methods that allow for efficient applications of analytic methods to big data. == Etymology and terminology == The Latin word data is the plural of datum, "(thing) given," and the neuter past participle of dare, "to give". The first English use of the word "data" is from the 1640s. The word "data" was first used to mean "transmissible and storable computer information" in 1946. The expression "data processing" was first used in 1954. When "data" is used more generally as a synonym for "information", it is treated as a mass noun in singular form. This usage is common in everyday language and in technical and scientific fields such as software development and computer science. One example of this usage is the term "big data". When used more specifically to refer to the processing and analysis of sets of data, the term retains its plural form. This usage is common in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, software development and computer science, and grew in popularity in the 20th and 21st centuries. Some style guides do not recognize the different meanings of the term and simply recommend the form that best suits the target audience of the guide. For example, APA style as of the 7th edition requires "data" to be treated as a plural form. == Meaning == Data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are closely related concepts, but each has its role concerning the other, and each term has its meaning. According to a common view, data is collected and analyzed; data only becomes information suitable for making decisions once it has been analyzed in some fashion. One can say that the extent to which a set of data is informative to someone depends on the extent to which it is unexpected by that person. The amount of information contained in a data stream may be characterized by its Shannon entropy. Knowledge is the awareness of its environment that some entity possesses, whereas data merely communicates that knowledge. For example, the entry in a database specifying the height of Mount Everest is a datum that communicates a precisely measured value. This measurement may be included in a book along with other data on Mount Everest to describe the mountain in a manner useful for those who wish to decide on the best method to climb it. Awareness of the characteristics represented by this data is knowledge. Data are often assumed to be the least abstract concept, information the next least, and knowledge the most abstract. In this view, data becomes information by interpretation; e.g., the height of Mount Everest is generally considered "data", a book on Mount Everest geological characteristics may be considered "information", and a climber's guidebook containing practical information on the best way to reach Mount Everest's peak may be considered "knowledge". "Information" bears a diversity of meanings that range from everyday usage to technical use. This view, however, has also been argued to reverse how data emerges from information, and information from knowledge. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation. Beynon-Davies uses the concept of a sign to differentiate between data and information; data is a series of symbols, while information occurs when the symbols are used to refer to something. Before the development of computing devices and machines, people had to manually collect data and impose patterns on it. With the development of computing devices and machines, these devices can also collect data. In the 2010s, computers were widely used in many fields to collect data and sort or process it, in disciplines ranging from marketing, analysis of social service usage by citizens to scientific research. These patterns in the data are seen as information that can be used to enhance knowledge. These patterns may be interpreted as "truth" (though "truth" can be a subjective concept) and may be authorized as aesthetic and ethical criteria in some disciplines or cultures. Events that leave behind perceivable physical or virtual remains can be traced back through data. Marks are no longer considered data once the link between the mark and observation is broken. Mechanical computing devices are classified according to how they represent data. An analog computer represents a datum as a voltage, distance, position, or other physical quantity. A digital computer represents a piece of data as a sequence of symbols drawn from a fixed alphabet. The most common digital computers use a binary alphabet, that is, an alphabet of two characters typically denoted "0" and "1". More familiar representations, such as numbers or letters, are then constructed from the binary alphabet. Some special forms of data are distinguished. A computer program is a collection of data, that can be interpreted as instructions. Most computer languages make a distinction between programs and the other data on which programs operate, but in some languages, notably Lisp and similar languages, programs are essentially indistinguishable from other data. It is also useful to distinguish metadata, that is, a description of other data. A similar yet earlier term for metadata is "ancillary data." The prototypical example of metadata is the library catalog, which is a description of the contents of books. == Data sources == With respect to ownership of data collected in the course of marketing or other corporate collection, data has been characterized according to party depending on how close the data is to the source or if it has been generated through additional processing. "Zero-party data" refers to data that customers "intentionally and proactively shares". This kind of data can come from a variety of sources, including: subscriptions, preference centers, quizzes, surveys, pop-up forms, and interactive digital experiences. "First-party data" may be collected by a company directly from its customers. The secure exchange of first-party data among companies can be done using data clean rooms. "S

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  • Upworthy

    Upworthy

    Upworthy is a media brand that focuses on positive storytelling. It was started in March 2012 by Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn, and Peter Koechley, the former managing editor of The Onion. One of Facebook's co-founders, Chris Hughes, was an early investor. At its peak between 2012 and 2014, it reached up to 100 million people a month. In 2017, the company was acquired by Good Worldwide. == History == Upworthy was launched in 2012 with a focus on aggregating positive content, which aligned with Facebook's algorithm. Originally, Upworthy curators searched the internet for existing content to feature on the site. Once selected as an option, curators brainstormed different headlines and shareable images for the content, and tested it with a small sample of Upworthy's visitors before sharing it on the site. The site popularized a clickbait style of two-phrase headlines. The company simplifies issues that are controversial by nature, which are presented from a politically liberal point of view and are heavily fact-checked for accuracy. In June 2013, an article in Fast Company called Upworthy "the fastest growing media site of all time". It had 8.7 million unique monthly visitors in the first six months, and in November 2013, had a high of 87 million unique visitors in a single month. In 2013, Facebook changed its algorithm, leading to a significant decline in readers from that platform. Upworthy fired one round of writers in 2015, and another in 2016, after an unionization effort by some of the staff. The union involved, the Writers Guild of America, East, has organized several online "viral" news publishers. In January 2017, Upworthy was acquired by media company GOOD Worldwide. The newsrooms of the two organizations would merge as part of the acquisition. About 20 staffers were laid off as part of the merger. In March 2020, Upworthy saw a 65% increase in Instagram followers and a 47% increased interest in positive content on-site page views as a result of increased interest in positive content during the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2023, National Geographic Books bought Good People: Stories From the Best of Humanity from Upworthy, with a publication date of September 3, 2024. The book is described as "a heartwarming collection of first-person tales that will provide comfort and inspiration to anyone who could use a little dose of joy right now". It was created by two senior Upworthy team members, Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell, and features 101 stories from Upworthy's audience. The co-creators encouraged Upworthy followers to connect with the brand through questions on their posts, opening the door for organic and personal stories to be shared in the comment sections. The book debuted on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on September 22, 2024, and remained on the list for two weeks. The book is seen in the top 10 on Publishers Weekly Fall 2024 Adult Preview: Lifestyle and on The Washington Post's "5 feel-good books".

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  • Natural language processing

    Natural language processing

    Natural language processing (NLP) is the processing of natural language information by a computer. NLP is a subfield of computer science and is closely associated with artificial intelligence. NLP is also related to information retrieval, knowledge representation, computational linguistics, and linguistics more broadly. Major processing tasks in an NLP system include: speech recognition, text classification, natural language understanding, and natural language generation. == History == Natural language processing has its roots in the 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, though at the time that was not articulated as a problem separate from artificial intelligence. The proposed test includes a task that involves the automated interpretation and generation of natural language. === Symbolic NLP (1950s – early 1990s) === The premise of symbolic NLP is often illustrated using John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment: Given a collection of rules (e.g., a Chinese phrasebook, with questions and matching answers), the computer emulates natural language understanding (or other NLP tasks) by applying those rules to the data it confronts. 1950s: The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation would be a solved problem. However, real progress was much slower, and after the ALPAC report in 1966, which found that ten years of research had failed to fulfill the expectations, funding for machine translation was dramatically reduced. Little further research in machine translation was conducted in America (though some research continued elsewhere, such as Japan and Europe) until the late 1980s when the first statistical machine translation systems were developed. 1960s: Some notably successful natural language processing systems developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language system working in restricted "blocks worlds" with restricted vocabularies, and ELIZA, a simulation of Rogerian psychotherapy, written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966. Despite using minimal information about human thought or emotion, ELIZA was able to produce interactions that appeared human-like. When the "patient" exceeded the very small knowledge base, ELIZA might provide a generic response, for example, responding to "My head hurts" with "Why do you say your head hurts?". Ross Quillian's successful work on natural language was demonstrated with a vocabulary of only twenty words, because that was all that would fit in a computer memory at the time. 1970s: During the 1970s, many programmers began to write "conceptual ontologies", which structured real-world information into computer-understandable data. Examples are MARGIE (Schank, 1975), SAM (Cullingford, 1978), PAM (Wilensky, 1978), TaleSpin (Meehan, 1976), QUALM (Lehnert, 1977), Politics (Carbonell, 1979), and Plot Units (Lehnert 1981). During this time, the first chatterbots were written (e.g., PARRY). 1980s: The 1980s and early 1990s mark the heyday of symbolic methods in NLP. Focus areas of the time included research on rule-based parsing (e.g., the development of HPSG as a computational operationalization of generative grammar), morphology (e.g., two-level morphology), semantics (e.g., Lesk algorithm), reference (e.g., within Centering Theory) and other areas of natural language understanding (e.g., in the Rhetorical Structure Theory). Other lines of research were continued, e.g., the development of chatterbots with Racter and Jabberwacky. An important development (that eventually led to the statistical turn in the 1990s) was the rising importance of quantitative evaluation in this period. === Statistical NLP (1990s–present) === Up until the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules. Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This shift was influenced by increasing computational power (see Moore's law) and a decline in the dominance of Chomskyan linguistic theories (e.g. transformational grammar), whose theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing. 1990s: Many of the notable early successes in statistical methods in NLP occurred in the field of machine translation, due especially to work at IBM Research, such as IBM alignment models. These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual textual corpora that had been produced by the Parliament of Canada and the European Union as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government. However, many systems relied on corpora that were specifically developed for the tasks they were designed to perform. This reliance has been a major limitation to their broader effectiveness and continues to affect similar systems. Consequently, significant research has focused on methods for learning effectively from limited amounts of data. 2000s: With the growth of the web, increasing amounts of raw (unannotated) language data have become available since the mid-1990s. Research has thus increasingly focused on unsupervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms. Such algorithms can learn from data that has not been hand-annotated with the desired answers or using a combination of annotated and non-annotated data. Generally, this task is much more difficult than supervised learning, and typically produces less accurate results for a given amount of input data. However, large quantities of non-annotated data are available (including, among other things, the entire content of the World Wide Web), which can often make up for the worse efficiency if the algorithm used has a low enough time complexity to be practical. 2003: word n-gram model, at the time the best statistical algorithm, is outperformed by a multi-layer perceptron (with a single hidden layer and context length of several words, trained on up to 14 million words, by Bengio et al.) 2010: Tomáš Mikolov (then a PhD student at Brno University of Technology) with co-authors applied a simple recurrent neural network with a single hidden layer to language modeling, and in the following years he went on to develop Word2vec. In the 2010s, representation learning and deep neural network-style (featuring many hidden layers) machine learning methods became widespread in natural language processing. This shift gained momentum due to results showing that such techniques can achieve state-of-the-art results in many natural language tasks, e.g., in language modeling and parsing. This is increasingly important in medicine and healthcare, where NLP helps analyze notes and text in electronic health records that would otherwise be inaccessible for study when seeking to improve care or protect patient privacy. == Approaches: Symbolic, statistical, neural networks == Symbolic approach, i.e., the hand-coding of a set of rules for manipulating symbols, coupled with a dictionary lookup, was historically the first approach used both by AI in general and by NLP in particular: such as by writing grammars or devising heuristic rules for stemming. Machine learning approaches, which include both statistical and neural networks, on the other hand, have many advantages over the symbolic approach: both statistical and neural network methods tend to focus more on the most common cases extracted from a corpus of texts, whereas the rule-based approach needs to provide rules for both rare and common cases equally. language models, produced by either statistical or neural networks methods, are more robust to both unfamiliar (e.g. containing words or structures that have not been seen before) and erroneous input (e.g. with misspelled words or words accidentally omitted) in comparison to the rule-based systems, which are also more costly to produce. the larger such a (probabilistic) language model is, the more accurate it becomes, in contrast to rule-based systems that can gain accuracy only by increasing the amount and complexity of the rules leading to intractability problems. Rule-based systems are commonly used: when the amount of training data is insufficient to successfully apply machine learning methods, e.g., for the machine translation of low-resource languages such as provided by the Apertium system, for preprocessing in NLP pipelines, e.g., tokenization, or for post-processing and transforming the output of NLP pipelines, e.g., for knowledge extraction from syntactic parses. === Statistical approach === In the late 1980s and mid-1990s, the statistical approach ended a peri

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  • Chunked transfer encoding

    Chunked transfer encoding

    Chunked transfer encoding is a streaming data transfer mechanism available in Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) version 1.1, defined in RFC 9112 §7.1. In chunked transfer encoding, the data stream is divided into a series of non-overlapping "chunks". The chunks are sent out and received independently of one another. At any given time, no knowledge of the data stream outside the currently-being-processed chunk is necessary for either the sender or the receiver. Each chunk is preceded by its size in bytes and transmission ends when a zero-length chunk is received. The chunked keyword in the Transfer-Encoding header is used to indicate chunked transfer. Chunked transfer encoding is not supported in HTTP/2, which provides its own mechanisms for data streaming. == Rationale == The introduction of chunked encoding provided various benefits: Chunked transfer encoding allows a server to maintain an HTTP persistent connection for dynamically generated content. In this case, the HTTP Content-Length header cannot be used to delimit the content and the next HTTP request/response, as the content size is not yet known. Chunked encoding has the benefit that it is not necessary to generate the full content before writing the header, as it allows streaming of content as chunks and explicitly signaling the end of the content, making the connection available for the next HTTP request/response. Chunked encoding allows the sender to send additional header fields after the message body. This is important in cases where values of a field cannot be known until the content has been produced, such as when the content of the message must be digitally signed. Without chunked encoding, the sender would have to buffer the content until it was complete in order to calculate a field value and send it before the content. == Applicability == For version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, the chunked transfer mechanism is considered to be always and anyway acceptable, even if not listed in the Transfer-Encoding (TE) request header field, and when used with other transfer mechanisms, should always be applied last to the transferred data and never more than one time. This transfer encoding method also allows additional entity header fields to be sent after the last chunk if the client specified the "trailers" parameter as an argument of the TE request field. The origin server of the response can also decide to send additional entity trailers even if the client did not specify the "trailers" parameter, but only if the metadata is optional (i.e. the client can use the received entity without them). Whenever the trailers are used, the server should list their names in the Trailer header field; three header field types are specifically prohibited from appearing as a trailer field: Content-Length, Trailer, and Transfer-Encoding. == Format == If a Transfer-Encoding field with a value of "chunked" is specified in an HTTP message (either a request sent by a client or the response from the server), the body of the message consists of one or more chunks and one terminating chunk with an optional trailer before the final ␍␊ sequence (i.e. carriage return followed by line feed). Each chunk starts with the number of octets of the data it embeds expressed as a hexadecimal number in ASCII followed by optional parameters (chunk extension) and a terminating ␍␊ sequence, followed by the chunk data. The chunk is terminated by ␍␊. If chunk extensions are provided, the chunk size is terminated by a semicolon and followed by the parameters, each also delimited by semicolons. Each parameter is encoded as an extension name followed by an optional equal sign and value. These parameters could be used for a running message digest or digital signature, or to indicate an estimated transfer progress, for instance. The terminating chunk is a special chunk of zero length. It may contain a trailer, which consists of a (possibly empty) sequence of entity header fields. Normally, such header fields would be sent in the message's header; however, it may be more efficient to determine them after processing the entire message entity. In that case, it is useful to send those headers in the trailer. Header fields that regulate the use of trailers are Transfer-Encoding with the "trailers" parameter (used in requests) and Trailer (used in responses). == Use with compression == HTTP servers often use compression to optimize transmission, for example with Content-Encoding: gzip or Content-Encoding: deflate. If both compression and chunked encoding are enabled, then the content stream is first compressed, then chunked; so the chunk encoding itself is not compressed, and the data in each chunk is compressed holistically (i.e. based on the whole content). The remote endpoint then decodes the stream by concatenating the chunks and uncompressing the result. == Example == === Encoded data === The following example contains three chunks of size 4, 7, and 11 (hexadecimal "B") octets of data. 4␍␊Wiki␍␊7␍␊pedia i␍␊B␍␊n ␍␊chunks.␍␊0␍␊␍␊ Below is an annotated version of the encoded data. 4␍␊ (chunk size is four octets) Wiki (four octets of data) ␍␊ (end of chunk) 7␍␊ (chunk size is seven octets) pedia i (seven octets of data) ␍␊ (end of chunk) B␍␊ (chunk size is eleven octets) n ␍␊chunks. (eleven octets of data) ␍␊ (end of chunk) 0␍␊ (chunk size is zero octets, no more chunks) ␍␊ (end of final chunk with zero data octets) Note: Each chunk's size excludes the two ␍␊ bytes that terminate the data of each chunk. === Decoded data === Decoding the above example produces the following octets: Wikipedia in ␍␊chunks. The bytes above are typically displayed as Wikipedia in chunks.

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  • Key Transparency

    Key Transparency

    Key Transparency allows communicating parties to verify public keys used in end-to-end encryption. In many end-to-end encryption services, to initiate communication a user will reach out to a central server and request the public keys of the user with which they wish to communicate. If the central server is malicious or becomes compromised, a man-in-the-middle attack can be launched through the issuance of incorrect public keys. The communications can then be intercepted and manipulated. Additionally, legal pressure could be applied by surveillance agencies to manipulate public keys and read messages. With Key Transparency, public keys are posted to a public log that can be universally audited. Communicating parties can verify public keys used are accurate.

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