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: 4-10 November, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Wikipedia + Internet Archive = links into actual books Excellent
• Microsoft has a big event with new software
• Uber continues to lose $10million a day
• FTC fines AT&T for limiting unlimited data
• Researchers hack Alexa with cheap laser pointers

Monday 4 November 2019

This is excellent. The Internet Archived has teamed with Wikipedia so that when I click on a book reference I go to the book itself (those that have been scanned by the archive). Excellent tool for research and students.

The end of this decade is less than 60 days away, and the United States still cannot put a person into space. What happened to us?

It appears that Amazon will try to hire college computer science professors to train the programmers it needs. It is a nice time to be a CS teacher in the Washington DC area.

Americans don't like shifting our clocks twice a year. No one can decide where we like the clocks to be. We seem to want something else, anything else.

Microsoft tried a four-day work week in Japan with predictable increases in productivity. Almost any temporary change brings such.

It is the time of year to look at lists of gifts. This one is for best laptop computers.

Tuesday 5 November 2019

Microsoft shows Project Cortex. It is supposed to be a knowledge management tools that works in the cloud in Sharepoint and everything else. We shall see.

Facebook wants to separate the company from all their apps. Sort of reverse something or other intended to keep bad news from one area from smudging another area.

Dropbox releases its file sharing to everyone after a few months of limited beta testing.

"The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare." So says someone who worked in government and at Facebook. There is some truth to the claims. People gossip—nothing new here. That Facebook profits from gossip irks some folks who show more than a tinge of jealousy as they didn't think of it fir$t.

Israel, population 8million, is a tech startup boom place rivaling Silicon Valley. Why? Many credit time spent in the Israeli Defense Force and the confidence that ensues.

Apple donates $2.5Billion to help with housing in California. Will such gifts help or not?

Uber does better than expected this financial quarter, but still loses about $100million a week or $10million a day.

Facebook is slowly adding about 20,000 new employees in Seattle.

Google employees are distraught that they work for a successful company that has a wide variety of clients. You can always quit your job and go to work at the Post Office.

Studies show that the breathalyzer devices used by police are often...well, let's say they don't work as advertised.

Wednesday 6 November 2019

Our Postal Service will use Nvidia GPUs and artificial intelligence to process packages and shipping ten times faster.

DeliverFund.org: formal intel, military, and law enforcement using AI to catch human traffickers.

Tracking workers for safety...and for tracking their every moment. What could possibly go wrong?

Our FTC fines our AT&T $60million for limiting the unlimited data plans.

TikTok censors were told to not offend the Communist Party of China. At least they were explicit about it.

ooops, researchers show how to hack Alexa and other smart speakers with cheap laser pointers.

11,000 scientists declare a global climate emergency. They want others to take drastic action.

Thursday 7 November 2019

Apple and our Dept of Veterans Affairs team so that veterans can access their health records on their iPhones.

A new study shows that fake news on Facebook is more prevalent than ever.

Xerox may be trying to buy HP Inc. Xerox is about a third the size of HP.

Qualcomm had a better-than-expected financial quarter.

A look at the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center and how they monitor threats and how they helped win the Pentagon's cloud computing contract.

All these electric vehicles have a common problem: what to do with the old batteries.

Adobe—who created all this photo-shopped faked stuff—is now promising tools that help determine if photos and videos have been altered.

Big brother is taking care of those under 18 in China as the governors there bar youngsters from playing video games after 10PM to prevent addictions.

Two former Twitter employees are charged with spying for Saudi Arabia. They used their positions inside the company to watch the activities of Saudi critics.

The curse of the "internal documents" hits Facebook.

UPS delivers some prescription drugs in North Carolina via drone. This is yet another first of some kind or another.

A look at the details of the Impossible Whopper.

Friday 8 November 2019

No Internet viewing today as I had breakfast with some fine gentlemen.

Saturday 9 November 2019

Disney and Amazon reach a deal to have Disney+ on Fire TV.

The 2020 election is coming. Congress is toiling away on whistleblowers and impeaching impeachers. Congress is not doing anything to secure voting systems.

For some reason...many woke this morning to read a text someone else sent them on Valentine's Day.

Advertising on the Internet: $273Billion in 2018. It's all air, none of it is real. Will this bubble burst?

Kepler, a small satellite broadband company, delivers broadband Internet service to the Arctic.

We don't need to know this...Facebook and YouTube are blocking posts that name the unnamed whistleblower. Censorship at its finest here in America.

Bill Gates talks about a number of subjects. Forget space, let's feed the hungry.

Ten years ago, this video would have been eye popping. Now it is cute. MIT shows nine small "Cheeta" robots bounding about.

Now that it happened—see Twitter—folks are starting to consider spying by employees inside social media companies. You make $100K a year; the fill-in-the-blank offers you a couple million$$$ to pull info on persons of interest. What happens? Patriotism doesn't run inside gazillion$$$ companies.

Physics and finance: the cost for heavy space lifters and flights to Jupiter is...costly.

A study shows that our trash (in landfills) is the primary emitter of methane into our air.

ooops, it appears that having plants in the house does nothing to improve the air quality. If you like them, like them, but...

Sunday 10 November 2019

Recently leaked internal documents from Facebook...(we will hear a lot of that in the near future) show that ... gasp ... Facebook is competitive and wants to succeed more. Someone this is news.

At California ports, unions, non-unions, and robotics collide in a the-future-is-now scenario of the workplace.

Some journalists show that all this talk from social media companies about filtering misinformation ads is itself misinformation.

According to GitHub, the ten most popular programming languages this year.

There is some link shown between Acetaminophen use by pregnant women and autism in children. Maybe this explains why autism seems to be a middle-class white-America issue.

Machine learning solves the problem of gravitational interactions between three celestial objects like planets much, much (several orders of magnitude) faster that prior approaches.

AMD releases new 24-core processors aimed at desktop computers. The $749 price tag, however, is a bit much for the machines sold at Best Buy.

We can actually upgrade the Alienware 51m gaming portable computer. New modules are here with new Nvidia processors.

Dynabook's (Toshiba) newest portable computers show that the BluRay disk isn't dead yet.

How one writer became rich and famous traveling and writing.

It might not work? It doesn't have to "work." It only has to be.

"Don't be better; be different"—Jeff Goins

Why are the characters doing what they are doing? Lead the reader to the possible answers.

The use of mind maps for writing a novel. I have used mind maps for several decades. They work for me, which is why I have used them for several decades.

Thoughts on writing a memoir. This has a quaint title, but excellent contents.

The art of moving slower and doing less.