OLDaily

After 30% uplift in subscriptions, publishers roll out ‘Subscribe with Google’
Monojoy Bhattacharjee, What's New in Publishing, 2019/08/23

This is similar to the 'book flights with Google' service I referenced yesterday. According to this report, "Earlier this year, Google announced it is testing Subscribe with Google with The Guardian, which has managed to turn memberships into a bigger source of revenue than advertising." It's having an impact. "To date, almost 50 publishers from all across the world have begun integrating the product into their operations." How long before MOOC companies, newsletters, and sites like mine all have their own 'subscribe with Google' buttons?

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Statistical foundations of virtual democracy
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2019/08/23

Nobody can vote on everything. We simply don't have the time or inclination. But what if an AI could analyze us and predict how we would vote on an issue, and then cast the vote for us? That's the premise of the article Statiscal foundations of virtual democracy by Kahng et al. and summarized here by Adrian Colyer. The paper looks at some different prediction algorithms an settles on something called the Borda count as the best approximation of voter intentions.

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New Research Alliance Cements Split on AI Ethics
David Matthews, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/08/23

I reiterate a point I've made in the past, specifically, that a lot of literature on ethics in AI (and in our field generally) presumes that we have some agreement on what is ethical. But we don't. This article makes that clear. "Germany, France and Japan have joined forces to fund research into 'human-centered' artificial intelligence that aims to respect privacy and transparency, in the latest sign of a global split with the U.S. and China over the ethics of AI."

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