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Study: Women More Likely to Say ‘Please’ to AI Assistants

Plus, the American Medical Association publishes statistics on cellphone-related deaths, “adversarial T-shirts” aim to fool facial recognition tech and Craigslist releases an app after 11 years online.

Alexa digital assistant
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62%

The Pew Research Center recently found that women are more likely than men to say “please” when speaking to an AI voice assistant such as Amazon’s Alexa. While 62 percent of women surveyed reported that they said “please” to their smart speaker at least occasionally, only 45 percent of men surveyed gave the same answer. Source: Pew Research Center

There’s an App for That

Craigslist, a mainstay of Internet commerce, has finally caught up with its users: after 11 years, there’s now a Craigslist app. It’s fully available on iOS and has a beta version running for Android, and it reportedly replicates the full website. No account is required, and users can sift through post categories and favorite items, save searches, and filter results. And just like the website, it’s all anonymous. Source: TechCrunch 

76,000

The estimated number of cellphone-related injuries that occurred in the U.S. between 1998 and 2017, according to a study published last month in a journal of the American Medical Association. These include mechanical injuries, like accidentally dropping your cellphone on your face, and use-associated injuries such as tripping on the curb while looking at your phone. The study also found that users above the age of 50 were more likely to incur use-associated injuries, while the majority of users under 13 (82 percent) were at a higher risk of mechanical injuries. Source: The Verge 

Can’t Fool Me

Quite a few online sellers have been introducing something called “adversarial T-shirts” that can supposedly fool facial recognition systems and make the wearer invisible to this technology. But before reaching for their credit cards, potential buyers may want to take a second look at the data. The most advanced adversarial T-shirt to date was developed by scientists at Northeastern University and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, but it only has a success rate of 57 percent. Source: Quartz


Kate is a senior copy editor in Northern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in professional writing from the University of California, Davis.