Summary of this week:

Facebook photo tagging ruled a privacy violation in Illinois
Facebook caught slanting the news (like old media)
Facebook denies everything
Internal documents show Facebook is guilty as charged
And Congress wants answers about this
Viv is demonstrated by the people who brought us Siri

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday May 9, 2016

Judges rules that Facebook's photo tagging violates Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. Score one for individual privcay in the age of publicy.

James West: the Bell Labs engineer who invented the microphone we all use everyday.

The Panama Papers are online. Tracing the money has never been so complicated.

The New Yorker had an augmented reality cover this week.

And we have more analysis of the man removed from a plane for doing math. American Airlines looks bad. This whole notion of "if you see something, say something" looks bad, stupid actually.

More on college education and the lack of skills possessed by graduates.

Helix: follow this one. While you write, Helix suggests references to other writing about the same topic.

Uber and Lyft will disappear from Austin, TX because of vote requiring fingerprinting of drivers.

Tech startups are thriving in Utah, but not all the locals are happy with the invasion.

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Tuesday May 10, 2016

Thoughts on the mess that our immigration system has become. And it is a mess wrought from illogical decisions.

Amazon continues to push into the food market and will launch a recipe and food delivery service.

Apple is experimenting on its own employees to learn about fitness and health.

Facebook is slipping from new media into old media with editorial policies like the old CBS News. More on this story here.

This is America? Person reports security problems in an election system and is put in jail.

A US newspaper company fires its qualified Americans and sends their jobs overseas. This is America?

ooops, it seems that electric cars pollute more than their old gasoline ancestors. Well, it was a good experiment.

The folks who created Siri now bring us Viv, and yes, it is better.

Here comes tatoo ink that fades away after a year.

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Wednesday May 11, 2016

Count the votes—President Obama is the most disliked President in US history.

Foxconn is building a plant in India to manufacture iPhones.

Sue Googe for Congress. Read it again—it is Googe NOT Google.

Current problems with scientific research. They are big, but simple. Since $$$ is involved, don't expect solutions soon.

Senate committee to investigate Facebook's news policing and policies. They got caught.

The pitfalls of "everyone learn to code."

After all these years, Amazon starts a YouTube competitor.

Facebook claims that 10,000 persons are developing chatbots.

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Thursday May 12, 2016

A travel day, so no Internet viewing.

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Friday May 13, 2016

Mark Zuckerburg denies that Facebook slants the news. This makes Facebook look worse.

Documents show that Facebook was editing news items. Persons, not algorithms, chose stories.

Silicon Valley layoffs are double what they were last year. The continuing economic recovery continues (not).

Google makes progress on helping blind people navigate cities.

Alphabet passes Apple as the world's most valuable company.

Wendy's restaurants go to more automation given rising minimum wages. Another example of lawmakers accomplishing the opposite of what they intended.

Philadelphia Police disguise their license-plate-reading car as a Google car. This is terrible as it lends to the notion that government and many government employees are not trustworthy. It is a terrible thing for the citenzry to lose trust in their publicly funded employees.

Gboard for iOS. Search from the keyboard—no need to leave the app and search somewhere else.

Google open sources SyntaxNet: a natural language understanding neural network.

Nvidia has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

Must-see video of DARPA's latest prosthetic arm.

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Saturday May 14, 2016

Evernote provides Google drive integration.

The guys on Antiques Roadshow don't always get it right.

A look at the Amazon college bookstores without any books.

Schools, not in Los Angeles, work with Apple to use iPads in education.

The optimistic outlook that robots will create jobs. Perhaps in the long term, but not in the short term.

Facebook continues to work in vain to protect itself after its news editing debacle.

Must-see video: man downs a drone with a spear.

When technologists go to court and run into lawyers—it isn't pretty.

Fashionable photos of computers from the 1960s.

Everyone says Yahoo is a flop, but there are a lot of rich people bidding to buy it.

A look at an $80 8" tablet that runs real Android (as opposed to the Fire OS).

Information on China's plutocrats is hacked and leaked.

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Sunday May 15, 2016

Facebook learns of the perils of making it easy for persons to livestream whatever.

A German company puts a new twist on the instant-print film camera.

Our TSA causes people to miss flights and then blames budget woes. This is the iron law of bureacracy at work. Create a system where the TSA controls airports. Then the TSA does a bad job, citizens complain, and the remedy is to give TSA more money to waste.

Out FBI is hiding microphones in public places to listen to citizens' private conversations. I have to wonder about those citizens working in the FBI and how they view the rest of the citizenry.

Netflix has changed the way entertainment enters our homes, and we love it.

White hat hackers show the ease of cloning the ever-present RFID entry badge.

A look inside the Google Tango project of 3D-mapping the interior space of our lives.

Facebook, its grand failure in India, and the arrogance and ignorance of Zuckerburg.

How to have a feedback or critique partnership work among writers.

"If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy" Book title tells it all. I don't agree with the author's source of happiness. Consultant Jerry Weinberg to as one of his missions in life to work with smart people so they could be happy, too.

"Your idea needs marination time..." Amen.

Confusing discipline of the process with commitment to the result.

Some help for working from home.

No writing ideas: try rewriting a classic old story in a new setting.

Tips on moving away from analysis paralysis as a writer. Reduce it all to one question: which path brings writing income?

I can't write because...five excuses and how to work around them.

Writing, free-lancing? You have to be selfish with YOUR TIME. Becuase it is YOURS.

In writing, it is do or not do, no in between or sort of or I guess so.

Writing and reading: read great old books, think about them, write like them.

Thoughts on time management. We all have 24 hours in a day. We can all waste much of them.

Breaking that great novel into pieces that you can write one at a time.

Thoughts and how-to on ghostwriting.

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