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Trolls, propaganda & fear stoke Bukele’s media machine in El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR A Salvadoran twenty-something had been looking for work when an unexpected invitation arrived to sit down with a government official. It was 2019, and the communications specialist was well-versed in social media. Talks with the official led to a $600-a-month job in the capital of San Salvador working for the communications team of President Nayib Bukele, according to the employment contract seen by Reuters. It was decent money in this poor Central American nation. “I didn’t know it when I signed the contract, but I made a pact with the devil,” the communications specialist said. “I became a pro-Bukele troll.” Bukele, founder of the fledgling Nuevas Ideas party, had…
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Wiggling toward bio-inspired machine intelligence | MIT News
Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica is a indigenous of Spain, where by octopus is a typical menu merchandise. Even so, Arbelaiz appreciates octopus and comparable creatures in a various way, with her exploration into smooth-robotics principle. Much more than fifty percent of an octopus’ nerves are dispersed through its eight arms, every of which has some degree of autonomy. This dispersed sensing and details processing procedure intrigued Arbelaiz, who is studying how to design decentralized intelligence for human-produced techniques with embedded sensing and computation. At MIT, Arbelaiz is an used math college student who is operating on the fundamentals of optimum distributed manage and estimation in the ultimate weeks before finishing her…