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: 25 November-1 December, 2019

Summary of this week:

• It is Thanksgiving week in the US
• Leaked Chinese documents show internment camps and surveillance state
• HPE has a bad financial quarter
• HP Inc has a good financial quarter
• Yet again, online shopping is breaking all records this year

Monday 25 November 2019

Uber has a major boo boo in London with uninsured drivers. Hence, it loses its license to operate.

Internal documents owned by the governors of China are leaked. This is a Snowden-like find that details how the surveillance state operates and how detention camps for the disliked are run.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee writes the Contract for the Web which requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.

Our Army is investigating TikTok to determine if service members should use this. In question is the security of data.

Xerox tries to buy HP. HP rejects the offer. A hostile takeover is the next step.

 AMD announces Threadripper (great name) processors with more and more cores.

Tuesday 26 November 2019

HPE falters in this last financial quarter.

In California, and many other states, the Dept of Motor Vehicles "generates revenue" by selling drivers' names, addresses, etc, to commercial companies.

The Seattle City Council raises the minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers and raises the taxes on rides.

This year's holiday ad (short, heart-touching movie) from Apple.

One researcher finds a way to remove the haze in underwater video.

Seth Godin on Thanksgiving: When in doubt, default to gratitude.

Boston Dynamics has loaned one of its "robot dogs" to Massachusetts State Police for evaluation on the bomb squad. Put a machine in harm's way instead of a person.

Once again, questions surface about the working conditions at Amazon warehouses.

The computing workforce is younger than the rest of the workforce. Not surprising, but the gap appears to be growing.

You think the climate is changing? Harken back to the year 536.

Here comes 5G (?) to always-connected PCs in 2021.

Linux 5.4 is released.

Offloading processing to the cloud, Amazon is bringing Alexa to smaller, less-expensive Internet-of-Things devices. Yes, we may soon be able to talk to our toasters.

Wednesday 27 November 2019

How Texas Instruments won the education market. What is surprising is that TI has not advanced their calculators. Also surprising is that schools aren't using calculator emulators on the tablets they already own.

Zuckerburg held thoughtful discussions about the future of tech this year. Those with whom he met, however, seemed to be mirror images of himself. Amazing how smart persons can act so stupid.

Facebook buys one of the biggest players in the VR marketplace.

HP Inc. had a better-than-expected financial quarter.

Alexa now responds to emotion with emotion, well sort of.

Another tech company backs away from criticism of the Communist Party of China.

A clever Raspberry Pi built into a Pelican case for .... emergencies or the just plain fun of building.

Thursday 28 November 2019

There have been several stories this week that the man-made climate change has gone past the point of no return. We are doomed. I guess we might as well stop spending money on this now. 

We have already spent $50Billion in online shopping this November. We will break all prior records. I guess the economy is pretty good even though we are saddled with "the worst president in our history."

India's Vikram lander made it to the moon, had a rough "landing," but its scientific instruments are functioning and sending home data.

TikTok apologizes for blocking anti-Chinese comments regarding their internment or education camps.

A South Korean crypto exchange admits to losing $49Million in crypto currency. I suppose it is possible to lose something that only existed in a computer network.

This story has been floating around the Internet for a few days, so it must be true. Cows wearing VR produce more milk.

A Go champion retires citing AI as one of the reasons. You just can't beat the machine any more.

Our Justice Dept updates our drone policy with new regulations regarding security and privacy.

American tech companies deal with the governors in China in many ways. One day they wake to learn what those governors do to their subjects.

If you are willing to lie, it is easy to obtain your own .gov domain.

Am I ripe for being replaced by AI? Three questions (three "yes" answers is bad): Is my job fairly repetitive? Are there well-defined objectives to evaluate my job? Is there a large amount of data accessible to train an AI system?

Friday 29 November 2019

Amazon updates its ARM processors for its cloud servers.

Someone creates a strain of E.coli to each carbon dioxide. I trust they know what they are doing and will not release something that results in ... well, science fiction writers have gone through this plot many times.

Holiday shopping is already brisk enough to crash servers.

Learning slowly: presidential candidates are still not using security features available to protect emails.

Toshiba has created a blood test that can detect 13 types of cancer.

Dell reports that Intel is still behind on CPU shipments. Demand is up. The economy continues to hum, not bad for the worst president in history.

Not one to disappoint us, Apple boosts its AirPod manufacturing to two million units per month.

Ubuntu 19.10 is here, and its appears to be fast.

In Louisiana, the state government is slowing recovering from a malware attack. It seems that backups and all that weren't performed as they should have been.

Saturday 30 November 2019

Scientist use undersea fiber optic cables to detect tremors. Surprise. New fault lines are found and undetected quakes are detected. We don't know as much about our planet as we know. Climate folks, take notice.

A short video showing how Facebook uses object detection and labeling on videos to find and remove content.

AMD now has better processors for the desktop than Intel. Two questions: (1) Will they sell better than Intel's? (2) Does the desktop market matter as everyone goes up to the cloud?

Meanwhile in China, it is now illegal to publish fake news. "Fake" being subjective and the governors decide. Hence, take care what you say you mere subjects.

Using BERT to label sentences as positive or negative.

In case you haven't noticed, we are in the midst of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and discounts on everything.

DoorDash Kitchens: Kitchen space rented by all the places we know so they can do delivery only foods.

Sunday 1 December 2019

Each day this week sets a new record for online sales.

Out in western China, the governors are using AI to predict who, when, and where "incidents" will occur so as to round up the usual suspects ahead of time and re-learn them.

Analysis of Russian propaganda campaigns shows that nothing is new. They use the basic advertising techniques that have worked for centuries.

The life expectancy in the US falls again. This is not a health care issue. It comes from deaths in middle age caused by troubled lives and the destructive thing we do when troubled.

A baby Yoda (yes, that) is receiving twice the viewing as any Democratic candidate for president. This is a lesson in communication. Take note if you are in that business. See, e.g., Hallmark Christmas movies.

The Pascal of the 21st century, the Python programming language has achieved dominance in the data science field. Libraries built on libraries built on libraries mean you type a few statements and viola...it happens.

Always wanting to save us, psychiatrists invent Problematic Smartphone Usage as a disorder to be treated by them for a small fee. Nice industry—you create things that people have to pay you to explain.

A look at the shapes of stories concept from Kurt Vonnegut. Graph the ups and downs of the characters on a timeline. Simple concpet really, but interesting.

This could be useful: the collage method (collAge, not collEge). Make a collage out of whatever you want. Collage your book or story or article or post or ... The exercise helps some writers generate and organize ideas. Try it. If it works, use it.

More time. Give yourself the time to write first, other stuff comes later.

Helping writers manage their time. We all have the same amount. Energy? Maybe not.