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[University Rankings]

The High Court of Australia dismissed an appeal by some major media companies and ruled that they were 'publishers' of comments made by third parties on the companies' Facebook pages:
High Court of Australia, Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller [2021] HCA 27, Nationwide News Pty Limited v Voller, Australian News Channel Pty Ltd v Voller, 8 Sep 2021, Case Number: S236/2020 S237/2020 S238/2020
". . .
Conclusion and orders
55  The Court of Appeal was correct to hold that the acts of the appellants in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments.
56  The appeals should be dismissed with costs. . . ."
— hcourt.gov.au [www][8/9/2021] #facebook #socialmedia #defamation #law #publication
(Dylan Voller wants to sue the companies as publishers of alleged defamatory comments by third parties on the companies' Facebook pages.)

Computer CPUs can do arithmetic on 32- and 64-bit integers, maybe more, but such integers are piddling and small, e.g., a googol 10¹⁰⁰ has more than 300 bits and even that is not really big. There are interesting algorithms to do arithmetic (+, −, ×, ÷) on arbitrarily large integers.

In the Federal Court of Australia, 'Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879', file 108 of 2021 (Beach J.),
"... 226 In summary, in my view, an inventor as recognised under the Act can be an artificial intelligence system or device. But such a non-human inventor can neither be an applicant for a patent nor a grantee of a patent. So to hold is consistent with the reality of the current technology. It is consistent with the Act. And it is consistent with promoting innovation. ..." — fedcourt.gov.au [www][30/7/2021]. #AI #Australia #UK #inventor #patent #law

In the UK, "Thaler -v- The Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks 3 August 2021 Court of Appeal ... case involves whether for an invention created by an AI system under circumstances in which the AI system is the sole and actual deviser of the invention, the AI system can and should be designated as the inventor, pursuant to Section 13(2)(a) of the Patents Act 1977 ..." — judiciary.uk [www][27/7/2021].   "No"; see [bbc][23/9/2021].

Also see [more].

There has been an outbreak of sanity at Utrecht University: 'Impact factor abandoned by Dutch university in hiring and promotion decisions', C. Woolston, Nature, 595, pp.462, 2021, "... By early 2022, every department at Utrecht U. in the Netherlands will judge its scholars by other standards, including their commitment to teamwork amp; their efforts to promote open science ..." —[www].  Also see 'Indicator frameworks for fostering open knowledge practices in science and scholarship' — EU [www]['21]. #academia #JIF #KPI

"Large-scale digital traces of university students show that morning classes are bad for attendance, sleep, and academic performance", S. C. Yeo et al, bioRxiv, May 2021 [www]. Anyone surprised?  Also see, "Evaluating students' evaluations of professors", M. Braga et al, Economics of Ed. Rev., vol.41, pp.71-88, 2014 [www], which includes "Our results show that students evaluate professors more negatively on rainy & cold days." So hope that the weather is fine when it is your turn for student evaluation of teaching and units. #learning #assessment #SETU

'Universal Architectural Concepts Underlying Protein Folding Patterns', in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, special issue 'A Journey Through 50 Years of Structural Bioinformatics in Memoriam of Cyrus Chothia', presents a dictionary of 1,493 concepts (substructures) that occur frequently enough and with sufficient fidelity to explain, in a certain sense, the topology of folded protein structures [more]. #bioinformatics #protein #folding #informationtheory

"Facebook: Smoking and alcohol ads 'target Australian children' ..." — BBC [www][28/4/2021]. #facebook See ...
"Profiling Children for Advertising: Facebook's Monetisation of Young People's Personal Data ... Facebook uses personal data collected about young people aged 13-18 to profile them across a range of categories. ... to create profiles of young people with harmful or risky interests such as 13-17 year olds interested in smoking, gambling, alcohol or extreme weight loss. This sort or profiling is part of Facebook's day-to-day business model. Reaching a thousand young people profiled as interested in alcohol will cost advertisers around $3.03, $38.46 for those interested in extreme weight loss, or $127.88 to those profiled as interested in smoking. ..." — Reset [www][4/2021].

"Scott Morrison [.au PM] tells Gold Coast Christian conference social media being used by 'evil one' [1] ... and revealed he used the Pentecostal practice of laying on of hands [2] while meeting people at disaster relief centres ..." — SMH [www][27/4/2021] (#socialmedia).
[1] Did he mean Mark Z (#facebook), or DJT, or maybe ... someone in his own government?
[2] #metoo ?

"Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence. The Commission is proposing the first ever legal framework on AI, which addresses the risks of AI and positions Europe to play a leading role globally. ..." — European Commission [www][21/4/2021].
"... ensure that AI systems placed on the Union market and used are safe and respect existing law on fundamental rights and Union values ...
AI systems used in education or vocational training, notably for determining access or assigning persons to educational and vocational training institutions or to evaluate persons on tests as part of or as a precondition for their education should be considered high-risk, since they may determine the educational and professional course of a person's life ...
AI systems used in employment ... notably for the recruitment and selection of persons, for making decisions on promotion and termination and for task allocation, monitoring or evaluation of persons in work-related contractual relationships, should also be classified as high-risk ..." — [doc_id=75788][21/4/2021]. #EU #EC #AI
Also see the [bbc][21/4/2021].

The Data Compression Conference (DCC21) was held online due to covid-19 and I would really have liked to travel to Snowbird. See L. Allison, A. S. Konagurthu, D. F. Schmidt, On universal codes for integers: Wallace Tree, Elias Omega and beyond, the Data Compression Conference (DCC), pp.313-322, IEEE, 22-26 March 2021. #compression #datacompression #informationtheory

The BBC reports that the Bank of England will issue a £50 note on 23 June 2021 that features Alan Turing.  See the bbc[25/3/2021].
And, "New Alan Turing £50 note enters circulation ..." — bbc[23/6/2021].

'... He had long itched to say that he simply did not believe in the utterances that so many organisations made their employees chant: the mission statements, the virtue signalling, the gobbledygook. Why should everybody believe the same thing, sign up to the same ideology? Why should people have to say "we are here to promote excellence", as they so often had to declare, when what they were doing was a straightforward job of adminstration? He had dared to say that it was all pious nonsense, and in so doing he had challenged the ideology. They would never accept that and they would be pleased to see the back of him. ...'  in 'A Time of Love and Tartan' (2017) by Alexander McCall Smith.
Ah yes, before he became a best-selling author McCall Smith was an academic. Of course.

"Marc Lackenby announces a new unknot recognition algorithm that runs in quasi-polynomial time ... determines whether a knot is the unknot in n^{c log(n)} steps, for some constant c, which is known as quasi-polynomial time. ..." — U. Oxford, Mathematical Inst., [www][2/'21].

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