Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Libby.
1. Chimpanthree
Twitter was ripped in two this week and last when confuesed aliebn and Twitter icon, jomny sun announced the results of his poll:
seriouse question!!!
???
— jomny sun (@jonnysun) May 9, 2016
There will be few of us who are unfamiliar with the three wise monkeys who symbolise the proverbial “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”, and it’s this that lead to 47% of responses believing the emojis are three different monkeys.
Alas, despite the historical evidence, the public has spoken and team #ONEMONKEY prevailed. Jonny Sun, aka Jonathan Sun, offered the following insight as to why:
“The one-monkey team I think is more interesting because they speak on the side of how these emoji are interpreted and used in day-to-day life…Their arguments are in usage and interpretation. My favorite argument is that the cat emoji is the same cat going through different emotions—why would it be different for the monkey? It goes back to how people project themselves as that character when they use emoji.” – via dailydot.com
So… the reason it’s one monkey is because when we use it, we become the monkey?
This fun and fascinating debate was picked up by many including Tech Insider, The Telegraph and National Public Radio, but I don’t think any of us (including Jonny!) were prepared for Twitter itself to wade in:
No monkeying around, @jonnysun — there’s a lot riding on the results of this Twitter poll. ?? https://t.co/oBcia2XZl5
— Twitter (@twitter) May 12, 2016
2. Come with me if you want to learn
Google has released new artificial intelligence language software that uses sophisticated machine learning to analyse the linguistic structure of language… plus it totally takes the p*ss out of that whole boat thing.
Parsey McParseface is a computer program designed to help machines understand written English and is part of SyntaxNet, a larger system that breaks down sentences and analyses every word’s role in that sentence. The hope is that the technology can be applied to improve the technology used in virtual assistants, language translation, and even medical research:
“Parsey McParseface is built on powerful machine learning algorithms that learn to analyze the linguistic structure of language, and that can explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence. Because Parsey McParseface is the most accurate such model in the world, we hope that it will be useful to developers and researchers interested in automatic extraction of information, translation, and other core applications of NLU.” – via googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk
Yes, SyntaxNet is open source software, meaning AI developers and researchers can use it for free and further modify it in order to try and get computers to truly understand language.
3. Twitter to (sort of) increase character limit (again)?
According to a report from Bloomberg, Twitter will no longer count photos and links as part of the 140 character limit for tweets.
Back in January, Twitter’s CEO Jack Doresy confirmed that they would be “building more utility and power into Twitter” and that the company would explore any possibility of doing that so long as it was in line with what users want to do. And it seems users want to include media in their tweets. What will you do with those extra 23/24 characters?
4. When Peace attacks
On Wednesday, LinkedIn announced that they had become aware of over 100 million members’ email addresses and passwords being posted online due to the well-reported data breach back in 2012.
According to motherboard.vice.com, the hacker, known as “Peace”, is selling the data on the dark web with LeakedSource (paid hacked data search engine) also claiming to be in possession of it.
LinkedIn is taking action by emailing anyone with an account who’s not changed their password since the breach in 2012, and requesting they do so:
Users are also being encouraged to use two-factor authentication.
5. Poker face: strong. Grimace game: stronger
This video via dailydigest.com has done the rounds in the office this week, so I thought I’d share it to make you guys smile too:
How does he even do that with his face?!
