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tv   Shift  Deutsche Welle  January 26, 2020 3:15pm-3:30pm CET

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stay tuned for shift living in the digital age for a special on the increasing power of algorithms in our. latest news website. and. more news from the top of the hour. to.
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discover who. subscribe to the documentary. to. this special edition of shift we explore how algorithms influence our minds. algorithms have been around for a long time but at the age of big data and digitalisation they're becoming ever more important. are we letting algorithms think for us. algorithms. that's actually quite simple an algorithm is a clear process or set of rules to follow to solve a problem assembly instructions. for example step by step they tell us what to do
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if we follow them we should achieve the desired result assuming the instructions are good but that's another story. probably existed for as long as people could think. the algorithm for computing square roots known as herons method was known to the babylonians. so mathematical algorithms were ancient times one famous example is. it states that in a right angled triangle the square of the hotness is equal to the sum of the squares of the other 2 sides in other words a squared plus b. squared equals c. squared. so if you know the length of 2 sides you can work out the length of the other. but where does the word algorithm come from it's named after me a persian scholar. he taught people how to perform written calculations using
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arabic numerals. these algorithms are still the ones we learned in school today as long as calculators don't put an end to mental math. computers use algorithms. basically every computer program is an algorithm which tells the processor precisely how to utilize the incoming stream of data. and now algorithms are even capable of learning. conducts research on machine learning algorithms and think society needs to regulate their implementation. what we should hope to achieve is having certain standards. that are free of discrimination. that is something that we. must be prepared to fight for. work on the internet. facebook.
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to collect masses of data.
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we have a choice. but
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catherine jar moules says algorithms aren't solely to blame because they're programmed and fed by humans algorithm learns because we train it using machine learning so either whether it's deep learning with a neural network so to speak or it's shallow machine learning where feeding it data and were asking it to form an opinion and of course when that opinion is based on data that has unfair treatment of groups then the algorithm or very much learned this like translation software that the millions of texts that teach it mention more female than male kindergarten teachers the algorithm learns and remembers that . picture recognition learns from large image databases here you find more pictures of women in the kitchen than men and so the algorithm learns to associate women
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with kitchens changing that is tough and time consuming. the coding is often top secret so it's difficult to prove an algorithm is prejudiced the theme is program can check for discrimination. it simulates fake accounts that are identical in everything but gender. accountability transparency and fairness are really the future of machine learning and we need to make them trustworthy and we need to you know allow people to ask questions of how they work and allow people to see how they're operating and how they're trained. to eliminate prejudice and algorithms it will take more social awareness and human intervention . for a long time it was considered an impossible task sequencing the wheat genome but now an international research team has done just that with the help of algorithms. that. over 200 researchers from 20 countries work together to discover bread wheats
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d.n.a. in science magazine they reported how they were able to sequence over 100000 genes has 5 times more genes than humans so the researchers developed special algorithms to help them. myal informative manuel took part in the project. in recent years new algorithms were developed specially to piece together the different fragments of the genomes they really helped us to create a coherent sequence out of this huge while the puzzle pieces stands according to researchers hope this will help them breathe new week for ideas that are more resistant to climate change. and possibly have to make it more adaptable to different climatic conditions for example longer periods of drought and possibly longer periods of heavy rain as well. along with the rice we disconcert of the world's most important foodstuffs experts warn that we must increase if
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we're to satisfy the hunger of the earth's growing population. the sequencing of the bread we genome is a major step in that direction. algorithms predict the next best seller. a startup hopes to use its software to help publishers fish out the most promising manuscripts in a matter of seconds. what novels will fly off the bookstore shelves and which ones won't. a piece of software named qualification is supposed to be able to predict which manuscript will become the next best seller. the idea came from hearing from many publishers and authors too that much of the huge amount of material that submitted each year in germany doesn't even get read. simply because it would take too many people to do so. the ai software rates
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stories according to their sales potential using 100000 books on their sales figures the program learned to recognize a best seller sentence by sentence test readers fed it with successful novels and rated them. the criteria including sentence length suspense book happy larry and emotions. in the can we take a books and divide it into its literary components explore what kind of themes the work uses a 100 what is its dramatic arc what style of language or constellation of characters is employed going from home and using all these characteristics we make a final rating. several publishers are currently testing the software including small hamburg based publisher. its director and one editor regularly wade through mountains of manuscripts and say we get sent 100 manuscripts you can be pretty sure that a lot of these can be filtered out because they're not suitable for
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a formal reason say. if the software manages to filter out that 10 to 20 percent and that would be a great help. but after that separating the wheat from the chaff is really all about the little details. ror says people will always be needed to work closely with the authors. many in the publishing business are critical of the software including kissed and primus who's worked as a book editor for 25 years. then feel if. if lots of publishers start using it i fear there will be more mass market literature released more things that cater to the mass market. i must not under that's happening already but i'm afraid it will only get worse and that really innovative different and surprising works will fall by the wayside. also the founder say
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fears that the book market could become less diversified are unfounded. and getting tired especially think the opposite is true it will likely lead to more diversity because publishers have the opportunity to assess whether something might really succeed as it contains many elements that are really new and work well sent on quote fulton and. christiane good into moonlight says a writer of dark fantasy novels and sees the software as an opportunity for authors like himself. it could help him learn how to better reach his target audience and tell him if it's worth investing in marketing. going to send his latest work to quali fiction for analysis. this is fun so listen to see it's a bit darker than normal. this is the average at best you're a bit more intense. here you can see that you manage to maintain the suspense but over time you get more and more extreme. no takes. in almost every respect to meet
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the target groups expectations of. the algorithm thinks christan going to his novel has a 23 percent chance of becoming a bestseller. that's the sort of asked in that's just the facts and you need to look at it from the view of a publisher looking to appeal to a mass audience and that and for that it's a pretty good rating yet no question. not bad for an unknown writer. of fiction was designed to help publishers who lack the time to read all of the manuscripts they received but authors also appreciate the software's been back for all its apparent prejudices at least we can say that ai doesn't judge a book by its cover.
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rebuilding jewish life in poland. celebrations schools communities. when michael should drink arrived in poland and so none of this was there the new york rabbi moved to warsaw in the 99 days decades after the holocaust and changed america. next w. . dominance influence. in the future. the global impact of china is becoming ever present and the reactions of the us tough. to see what does that mean for other countries and what do experts think about china the new world power in 45 minutes on t w. a there i'm
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david and this is climate change brags it's sex. happiness in 3 books. this is the book for. you'll get smarter free books on you to. cool. the jewish service of morning prayer shari titian and warsaw's main synagogue led by the chief rabbi of poland in a minute michael should rick.

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