Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 12-18 August, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Apple Watch soon to surpass other products in revenue
• Samsung shows a 108MegaPixel sensor
• Cray award $600Million supercomputing contract
• Pentagon's IG investigates cloud computing contract

Monday 12 August 2019

Sometimes a touchscreen is a bad idea, like when controlling large physical objects like ships. Our Navy is going back to mechanical controls are investigation into a ship collision.

The Apple Watch—long deemed a failure—is succeeding and will surpass their traditional computers, tablets, and just about everything else they do.

Our FBI wants more tools to monitor social media and predict crime. ooops, our Dept of Justice and FCC just made a deal with Facebook that brought a $5Billion fine or settlement and terms of that collide with this and that and where is the left hand going while the right hand is going some other way and all that?

Lidar or cameras with visual cues? The self-driving car makers are taking different directions. I hope the engineers will decide instead of the celebrity CEOs.

Amazon and child labor in China. American companies have failed to check on many facets of working in the People's Republic.

Want to relax? Apple has put a series of quiet videos on its YouTube channels that are not ads but quiet inviting pretty.

Hearing loss and the onset of dementia. The numbers show a correlation. Wearing hearing aids is supposed to reverse this.

Tuesday 13 August 2019

Regulating social media moderation: yet another example of something the social media outlets should have done for themselves, but didn't and now...and the next President will use the precedent to swing in another direction.

Google's Chrome browser is supposed to defeat paywalls in incognito mode. The paywall outlets (New York Times in particular) are breaking through all that.

Samsung shows a 108MegaPixel sensor for cameras in smartphones and the like.

Despite claims to privacy, several popular dating apps reveal users' precise locations.

IBM joins the governance council of Hedera Hashgraph and its blockchain technology.

Tumblr was sold to Wordpress. The "value" has dropped from $1,100Million in 2013 to $3Million today. Let's see if new management improves that.

Several of our elected representatives believe that a business should explain how it recommends products that it sells. Folly.

We want to believe in the unusual and we hate it when data shows us wrong. Many 110-year-olds aren't that old. They simply don' thave birth certificates to show their actual age.

Microsoft pushes into the growing Indian cloud computing market with a partnership with Reliance Jio.

Wednesday 14 August 2019

When a company engages in politics, it engages in politics. Tread carefully. See, for example, Google. Friends do favors for friends. Friends don't do many favors for others.

Our Dept of Energy awards Cray $600million to build a super duper computer.

Our Dept of Defense is investigating itself for possibly behaving badly (illegally) in the competition for the $10Billion cloud computing prize.

Nvidia breaks some technical barriers and records in understanding speech and having a conversation with a human.

Sometimes, "The only way to do well is to refuse to play."—Seth Godin

Our FAA is banning some Apple computers from flights due to fear of exploding batteries. Some? What could possibly go wrong at the airport?

Somewhere along the line, someone added facial recognition to the list of evil machines. Little is said about the persons using such technology.

Thursday 15 August 2019

Huawei has helped African politicians in office spy on political opponents. Further proof that this "company" is an arm of the Chinese government. 

How do you train an "AI" assistant? Have lots of low-paid people do the tedious work. See, as one example, Microsoft.

The government of India blocked all Internet and cell phone data from Kashmir. This is in the tenth day.

oooops, in the UK a security database containing personal information of a million persons was found in an unsecure database attached to the Internet. Will we ever learn?

Worried about AI taking over the world? Leading edge facial recognition software flops again in a real test.

Worried about AI taking over the world? Wear these clothes and the computers mistake you for...get ready for this...a car.

Friday 16 August 2019

Trouble at Alphabet (Google (YouTube)): former Google employee alleges racism.

Trouble at Alphabet (Google (YouTube)): LGBTQ creators accuse YouTube of discrimination.

UPS has been delivering mail in self-driving trucks. No specifics given as to whether a human sat in the truck etc.

We enter the age of the soft exoskeleton. These will be a miracle for those of us whose muscles have ceased working. Stoke victims and many others.

oooops, inexcusable that this database of building security measures is found unsecured on the Internet. What is there about the instructions, "Don't connect this to the Internet!" that are hard to understand?

I used to grade university engineering writing assignments. I like this one from Google: Originality Reports. It helps students learn how to cite others' work and separate it from their own.

More machine learning follies (foolishness) (see my post): hate speech identifiers are biased against slang used by some groups.

Nvidia had better-than-expected sales and profits.

Saturday 17 August 2019

Walmart's online sales are growing faster than the average with much due to growth in grocery items. People trust Walmart groceries and like the idea that they can go over and talk with someone in person.

A scooter that drives itself to a charging station. This is one of the oldest "tricks in the book" in robotics—having the robot find the electric outlet.

what3words and finding any spot anywhere on the planet. Finding those lost in the woods or without a street address is now possible.

Why do restaurants choose the most uncomfortable chairs?

Skills that appear to be in demand in the fuzzy area called Data Science.

Peter Fonda is dead at 79. Easy Rider. 'nough said.

Sunday 18 August 2019

Ikea makes a big push into "smarthome" technology and interior decorating.

Watching the flow of money from celebrity tech CEOs to Presidential candidates. I mere trickle so far.

Shortcut to making a small city a big name: build an esports arena. They are relatively inexpensive and place you on the map of a growing "in crowd."

I love this Seth Godin piece. "My biggest takeaway is that the key leap wasn’t in discovering that the sounds came from a radiator. The lesson is that acting like it comes from a radiator completely solves the problem."

Yes, they are out there: hundreds of free computer programming courses (and lots of courses about other things, too).

France experimented with a road covered with solar panels. The experiment was a success in that it provided information showing that the technology we have now doesn't work for this.

Given that taxpayers pay much of the cost (aren't we nice?), wind power is cheaper in the US than natural gas. When the two sources of energy compete equally, the answer changes.

What one writer does to write faster.

In depth tips on memoir and other nonfiction writing.

A few ways to make money with a blog.

Something I have not learned at all...making money with writing on Medium.

I like these writing tips. Definitely different.