ZOOOOM! A delivery man drives super fast past us, giving us a sudden, heart-stopping     1     . Over the past few years, delivery drivers have been    2     , fined, and even arrested for breaking traffic laws across China. Delivery drivers often     3     red lights, take no notice of speed limits, and pay little attention to pedestrian crossings. But they also often pay the ultimate     4     . Each year, it seems like     5     injuries involving delivery drivers are increasing. However, given that delivery drivers are, generally speaking, poorly paid, how much blame do they really deserve for running against the clock?

Well, it turns out to be a complicated issue. Recently, an article titled “Delivery Drivers Stuck in the System” was     6     widely on social media. According to the article, competition between delivery services Ele. me and Meituan has caused each app to take increasingly extreme     7     to outdo (超过) the other. Over time, the platforms have only increased the pressure on drivers. As a result, drivers find themselves facing a difficult choice: break traffic laws or, in some cases, lose hundreds of yuan in earnings for late deliveries.

According to surveys online, few care much whether their deliveries are a few minutes late, with most believing that it is not worth risking someone’s life for. In response, Ele. me and Meituan have added a combination of features to extend delivery times for slow elevators or bad weather    8     Although these new features cannot solve the underlying problems of intense competition or the dangers of driving, they should, in some way,     9     some of the pressure on drivers. In the meantime, as consumers, we can help to make life for delivery riders safer and easier. For example, be a     10     person and care more about them. After all, they are putting their lives on the line just to deliver our food.

AI can distinguish between bots and humans based on Twitter activity

Artificial intelligence is being used to spot the difference between human users and fake accounts on Twitter.

Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California in the US, and his colleagues have trained an AI to detect bots on Twitter based on differences in     1     of activity between real and fake accounts.

The team analysed two separate datasets of Twitter users, which had been classified either manually or by a pre-existing algorithm as either bot or human.

The manually verified dataset     2     of 8.4 million tweets from 3500 human accounts, and 3.4 million tweets from 5000 bots.

The researchers found that human users replied four to five times more often to other tweets than bots did. Real users gradually become more interactive, with the fraction of replies increasing over the course of an hour-long session of Twitter use.

The length of tweets by human users also decreased as sessions     3    . “The amount of information that is exchanged diminishes,” says Ferrara. He believes that the change may result from a cognitive depletion over time, in which people become less likely to expend mental effort    4     original content.

Bots, on the other hand, show no changes in their interactivity or the length of information they tweet over time.

The team also analysed the amount of time between any two consecutive (连读的) tweets from a single user. When this     5     is plotted, bots showed spikes for certain time gaps, such as tweeting at 30-minute or 60-minute intervals.

The team then combined these     6     to train an existing bot-detection algorithm, called Botometer, on the difference in activity patterns. The AI was     7     more likely to accurately detect to fake accounts than when it was not taking into     8     the timing of posts.

The algorithm could be used to     9     other bot-detection tools that analyse the language within posts, says Ferrara.

One of the study’s     10     is that the Twitter data the team analysed is from three years ago. In that time, it’s possible that bots have become more human-like in their activity patterns.

NEW YORK (Reuters) — U.S. factories shrugged off weakness in the global economy in November as manufacturing activity rose to its highest level in five months, a fresh sign the     1     economy was accelerating.

Recent data on consumer spending and private-sector job creation has also boosted optimism on the pace of growth.

“The economy seems finally to be     2    real momentum,” said Ian Shepherdson, an economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York.

Also pointing to growth, automakers reported U.S. sales rose 13.9 percent in November from a year earlier, Autodata Corp said.

The Institute for Supply Management said on Thursday its index of national factory activity rose to 52.7 from 50.8 the month before, beating analysts’ expectations and showing the sector continues to     3    .

The added momentum, also apparent in the report’s details, reduces the chances the U.S. economy will slip into a new recession, even with an expected contraction in the euro zone.

Compared to a dismal first half of the year, the pace of U.S. growth more than     4    in the third quarter to a 2 percent     5     rate. While that remains subpar, economists believe activity will     6     even stronger in the final three months of the year.

The ISM     7     of new orders rose to its highest level since April, and the export index also improved, although modestly.

“That should keep some momentum going,” said Sean Incremona, an economist at 4Cast in New York. “It is good to see things are not getting worse now.”

Much of the     8     of the world, however, is getting worse, especially in Europe where policy-makers are fighting a raging sovereign debt crisis.