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Moderating content tougher amid COVID-19 | Mississauga.com – mississauga.com

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“Some of them may not be able to work on certain things that they would work on in the office,” Kevin Chan, Facebook Canada’s head of public policy, told The Canadian Press.

“They’re looking at potentially private, and sensitive things that have been reported to them and we need to make sure….that these things can be treated in the secure and private manner that they deserve.”

Full-time Facebook employees have stepped up and are taking on some of the moderating work, including from contractors who can’t have proprietary and sensitive content at home. These workers are dealing with content related to “real-world harm” like child safety and suicide and self-injury.


“There is no question this is going to pose challenges to the degree to which we can be as responsive,’ Chan said.

To deal with the situation, Facebook has rolled out measures meant to curb the flow of COVID-19 misinformation and is focused on weeding out and removing content around terrorism and anything inciting violence or linking to “dangerous” individuals and organizations.

At Twitter, machine learning and automation is being used to help the company review reports most likely to cause harm first and to help rank content or “challenge” accounts automatically.

“While we work to ensure our systems are consistent, they can sometimes lack the context that our teams bring, and this may result in us making mistakes,” Twitter said in a blog. “As a result, we will not permanently suspend any accounts based solely on our automated enforcement systems.”

Google has also upped its reliance on machine-based systems to reduce the need for people to work from the office and said the increase in automation has many downsides, including a potential increase in content classified for removal and slower turnaround times for appeals.

“They are not always as accurate or granular in their analysis of content as human reviewers,” added a Google blog released in March.

This is a sentiment Priebe has encountered many times, but he has a counter-argument: “AI is not perfect but…humans are also not perfect.”

He gives the example of a child playing a game at home during the pandemic, when pedophiles might be more active online and trying to contact young people.

“You have three different humans look at the same conversation and they’re not going to give you the same answer. Some of them are going to call it grooming and some of them aren’t,” said Priebe.

Priebe believes an ideal system blends humans and AI because the latter is good at knowing what to do with obvious cases like when a user’s content is flagged almost a dozen times in a short period of time or when someone gets a message that only reads hello and hits report just to see what the button does.

“You don’t need a human to have to be looking at their screen and looking at this absolutely sexual content in front of potentially their children who snuck up behind them because artificial intelligence is going to win every time on that,” he said.

“Let humans do what humans do well, which is deal with that middle category of stuff that is subjective, difficult or hard to understand, that the AI is not confident about.”

Regardless of how the moderation gets done, some things will always slip through the cracks, especially in a pandemic, said Dunn.

“No system is perfect.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 7, 2020.

By Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

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Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”

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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

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How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.

New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.

“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.

It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.

Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.

Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.

The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.

The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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