Questõesde FUVEST sobre Inglês

    Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.

    That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion molecules of DNA.  

    If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.

    “Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an information‐storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology.”

    How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.

Wired, June, 2018. Disponível em https://www.wired.com/. Adaptado.

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

    Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.

    That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion molecules of DNA.  

    If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.

    “Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an information‐storage density several orders of magnitude higher than any other known storage technology.”

    How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.

Wired, June, 2018. Disponível em https://www.wired.com/. Adaptado.

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

   It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

   Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away. 

   Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

  There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

  To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

   Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado.

   It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

   Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away. 

   Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

  There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

  To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

   Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado.

   It’s a perilous time to be a statue. Not that it has ever been a particularly secure occupation, exposed as statues are to the elements, bird droppings and political winds.

   Just ask Queen Victoria, whose rounded frame perches atop hundreds of plinths across the Commonwealth, with an air of solemn, severe solidity. But in 1963 in Quebec, members of a separatist paramilitary group stuck dynamite under the dress of her local statue. It exploded with a force so great that her head was found 100 yards away. 

   Today, the head is on display in a museum, with her body preserved in a room some miles away. The art historian Vincent Giguère said that “the fact it’s damaged is what makes it so important.”

  There’s another reason to conserve the beheaded Victoria. Statues of women, standing alone and demanding attention in a public space, are extremely rare.

  To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York.

   Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria.

Julia Baird, The New York Times. September 4, 2017. Adaptado.

TIME, August 23, 2018. Adaptado.

TIME, August 23, 2018. Adaptado.

TIME, August 23, 2018. Adaptado.

TIME, August 23, 2018. Adaptado.

Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

Scientific American, October 24, 2014. Adaptado.

     A study carried out by Lauren Sherman of the University of California and her colleagues investigated how use of the “like” button in social media affects the brains of teenagers lying in body scanners.

    Thirty-two teens who had Instagram accounts were asked to lie down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. This let Dr. Sherman monitor their brain activity while they were perusing both their own Instagram photos and photos that they were told had been added by other teenagers in the experiment. In reality, Dr. Sherman had collected all the other photos, which included neutral images of food and friends as well as many depicting risky behaviours like drinking, smoking and drug use, from other peoples’ Instagram accounts. The researchers told participants they were viewing photographs that 50 other teenagers had already seen and endorsed with a “like” in the laboratory.

     The participants were more likely themselves to “like” photos already depicted as having been “liked” a lot than they were photos depicted with fewer previous “likes”. When she looked at the fMRI results, Dr. Sherman found that activity in the nucleus accumbens, a hub of reward circuitry in the brain, increased with the number of “likes” that a photo had.

The Economist, June 13, 2016. Adaptado.