johnny lieu

It's the final episode of Start Up! Johnny Lieu is moving on after coming in every week to talk tech, and Lucy Smith is wrapping up as host of Up For It after two stellar years behind the mic. In their final chat, Johnny and Lucy discussed the launch of a brand new app called Taxify that is set to compete with Uber, as well as the acquisition of everyone's favourite music-identification app Shazam by tech giant Apple.

Johnny Lieu joined Lucy Smith to chat about how Instagram is chock full of animal pictures, but now the social network is cracking down on selfies that might be considered exploitation. 25 years ago the first text message was sent, so Johnny and Lucy also discussed how, since then, the ways we’ve chatted using our phones have changed quite a bit.

Lucy and Johnny talked about the furore over 'pay to win' games, which have people so mad that the government is considering labelling them as gambling. They also looked at net neutrality debates in the USA, and what they could mean for Australia.

A software engineer at Google by the name of James Damore, penned a 10 page manifesto against diversity at the company and sent it around to colleagues. He argued, without much citation, that women show higher interest in people and men in things — and it’s why men are more biologically suited to software engineering, and women to creative or artistic things. He also said Google was biased against white men and was too left wing, too politically correct and not accepting of conservative viewpoints. In a new study published in EPJ Data Science, two researchers accessed the Instagram accounts of 166 volunteers and then applied machine learning to their collective 43,950 images in order to identify and predict depression. By comparing those predictions to each individual's clinical diagnosis, the researchers discovered that their model outperformed the average rate of physicians accurately diagnosing depression in patients. In other words, an Instagram account may have the potential to reveal whether you're experiencing depression. The right algorithm might just be better at making that prediction than a trained physician.