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: 23-29 September, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Apple to assemble Mac Pro in Texas
• Google wins one in court in Europe
• Amazon creates the Voice Interoperability Initiative
• Google tech contractors join a union in Pittsburgh
• Boston Dynamics leases robots
• Amazon has a big event with many new hardware products
• Peloton has a bad opening day
• DoorDash suffers a major hack

Monday 23 September 2019

Sometime next year Ikea will become a electric utility company creating more power than it uses.

Pioneers in the deep fake technology arena claim we are only six months away from "perfectly real" fakes. Just in time for the 2020 campaign. Won't this be fun?

200,000 persons apply for 30,000 jobs at Amazon.

Google has a program where it lends its Street View camera system to volunteers to fill in gaps in the world.

Our ozone layer is repairing itself.

Tuesday 24 September 2019

Microsoft releases new products to help businesses sell online...and compete with Amazon.

Google wins one in a European court as we learn that extraterritoriality isn't approved, i.e., the Europeans can't tell companies what they may not do outside Europe.

Google employees claim retaliation for raising concerns. Who is grumbling? Who is cheating?

Google starts a $5/month Play Pass subscription for games and apps.

Yahoo is alive and, although not well, has a new logo.

Wednesday 25 September 2019

Facebook demonstrates that "content moderation," a.k.a., censorship, isn't easy to do. Good lesson to learn. Someone seemed to have learned that in 1791.

And Facebook checks the facts and content of all our speech, but if I run for political office, they turn all that off as we all sort of expect politicians to, well, uh, ya' know, sort of stretch the truth or something.

Boston Dynamics is now leasing its four-legged walking robots. Good applications include inspections in rough terrain like construction sites and mines and other dangerous places.

From Seth Godin, "It gets easier to work our way through a situation if we preface our retelling with, 'the way I experienced what she said…'” Excellent advice.

Eighty tech workers who contract to Google join a union in Pittsburgh. (a) nothing happens, (b) this starts a trend, (c) they are all out of work within a year, (d) none of the above.

Huawei opens a computer-vision research center in London right next door to similar facilities of Google and Facebook. Bidding war on salaries. Of course one has to ask if any of the researchers have a conscience and don't mind working for a company that is part of a government that interns millions of persons based on their religion and ethnicity.

WeWork: sometimes success leads to failure. It isn't easy to be prepared to succeed.

We have all gone horribly wrong in how we recruit and train law enforcement officers. Citizens are empowered to bully other citizens.

Thursday 26 September 2019

The governors in San Francisco has just unleashed 10,000 electric scooters on the streets.

Dropbox has its own event with announcements of new features. The biggest is the Spaces system that is supposed to help tie together all the loose ends in the workplace.

Our government is gathering data and not telling corporations who are the targets. I guess this is all legal as judges say it is.

Amazon had a big hardware event yesterday. Here is one summary of the announcements. More speakers and cameras and ways to buy stuff.

Expert sea-level predictors adjust their prior predictions. "We are in greater trouble than previously predicted." Little thought given to the concept that they admit they were wrong before but right now.

Google releases thousands of deep fake videos to researchers to learn how to detect fakes.

Friday 27 September 2019

YouTube, as opposed to some others, will remove politician's speeches if they violate YouTube's guidelines for censorship.

Hiding in the connected world via obfuscation. It is possible, but takes a lot of work.

Microsoft, the Hewlett Foundation, and others fund the CyberPeace Institute to help those who need help against hackers.

oooops, DoorDash was hacked with the data for 4.9million users exposed.

WeWork: yet another group of persons who wanted lots of stuff and everyone found out when it all went wrong.

Peloton has a bad opening day on the stock market with someone losing about a billion dollars.

It appears that Uber wouldn't let its employees report crimes to law enforcement.

The College Board's SAT does what it is predictable: persons less prepared for the test score lower.

Saturday 28 September 2019

Instagram has difficult telling the difference between boys and girls. Photo-adoring mothers aren't amused.

Senator Warren wants to boost spending for government technical expertise. The dollars will be easier to find than the persons willing to work for us.

Researchers buy a few voting machines and show how easy it is to hack into them. See prior note about government technical expertise.

Computer vision systems are now reported to be just as good as humans at examining medical images. Will, however, medical provider assume legal liability for machines that are know to be faulty, i.e., not 100% correct?

Here comes 5G and handheld devices that will be pretty hot in the hands and the pockets.

Sunday 29 September 2019

Let's have NPSM—National Public Social Media funded partly by government and partly by our contributions. Probably wouldn't work.

One thing we've neglected to say about the plant-based not-meat: it costs three times as much as the regular stuff.

Great story of the writer with 21,000 rejections (that's about two a day for many, many years).

I like this infographic. First lines of good books. "In the beginning was God."

Writing in a setting that is completely foreign: "If the character’s experience is authentic, then the scene will be authentic."

The concept of using a road trip to plot a book.

Common reasons why books are rejected by publishers.

Something I had not seen before—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tips for writing fiction. He outlined in great detail and from the middle out instead of top down or bottom up.

The vignette, its role in writing, and how to write one.