Schools Are Locking Students’ Phones Away to Help With Concentration
January 31st, 2019Via: Fortune:
Students at a California high school are getting less screen time since the school implemented a ban on cellphone use during the school day.
After one teacher at San Lorenzo High School brought pouches, created by the tech start-up Yondr, into her classroom to lock away students’ phones, the entire school began using them from the beginning of the school day at 8 a.m. until the end of the day at 3:10 p.m.
According to a 2018 study from the Pew Research Center, more than half of teens said they felt loneliness, anxiety, or upset in the absence of a cellphone. The study also found that girls were more likely to feel these sentiments than boys.
“If something feels weird about modern life to young kids who are dealing with a lot of angst and anxiety in general, maybe it has something to do with relating to the world primarily through a screen eight hours a day,” Yondr’s founder Graham Dugoni told CNBC.
Students said they initially felt awkward and annoyed having their phones taken away during the school day, but added that they started to see more teens interacting with each other. One student added that not having a phone in class helped with concentration.
Dr. Jack Wolfson & Del Bigtree Discuss Vaccines
January 31st, 2019Via: Drs. Wolfson:
China’s Military-Run Space Station in Argentina Is a ‘Black Box’
January 31st, 2019China – Argentina – Patagonia ground station: Outrage, spying, unspecified doom in the media.
United States – Australia – Pine Gap: *crickets*
Via: Reuters:
The United States has long been worried about what it sees as China’s strategy to “militarize” space, according to one U.S. official, who added there was reason to be skeptical of Beijing’s insistence that the Argentine base was strictly for exploration.
Other U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters expressed similar concerns.
“The Patagonia ground station, agreed to in secret by a corrupt and financially vulnerable government a decade ago, is another example of opaque and predatory Chinese dealings that undermine the sovereignty of host nations,” said Garrett Marquis, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
Minnesota: Extreme Cold Straining Xcel Energy’s Natural Gas System, Residents Urged To Turn Down Thermostat
January 31st, 2019Via: WCCO:
Xcel Energy is advising residents in parts of central Minnesota north of the metro to turn down their thermostats and reduce their natural gas use.
According to the energy provider, the extreme weather conditions have resulted in a “significant” strain on Xcel Energy’s natural gas system.
“We need those in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton, and Isanti to reduce use of natural gas. Until further notice, you are urged to turn down your thermostat to 60 degrees or lower and avoid the use of other natural gas appliances including hot water,” Xcel Energy said.
WCCO’s Reg Chapman said shortly before noon Wednesday that Xcel Energy is asking customers to lower thermostat to 55 degrees.
Related: GM Halts Operations at 11 Michigan Plants After Utility’s Urgent Appeal
Jennifer Buscemi Deepfake
January 30th, 2019Via: The Daily Dot:
While the nation grapples with concerns over the spread of inaccurate and deceptive information online, deepfakes—videos in which an individual’s face is superimposed onto another—continue to advance at a quickening pace.
Now, the new ones are downright terrifying.
Also, here is the original video, which was created by @Villain_Guy https://t.co/LrzDLKJVet
— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) January 30, 2019
Amazon Is Hauling Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks Developed by Embark
January 30th, 2019Via: CNBC:
Amazon is using self-driving trucks developed by Embark to haul some cargo on the I-10 interstate highway, CNBC has learned.
The trucks were previously noticed by a Reddit user, who photographed and shared images this week showing tractors emblazoned with the Embark logo and trailers painted with the Amazon Prime logo.
Meth and Murder: Tijuana Is One of the Deadliest Cities on Earth
January 30th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times:
Tijuana, a city of 1.8 million that not long ago was celebrating a major reduction in violence, is in the grip of an unprecedented homicide crisis.
A record 2,518 people were killed here in 2018 — nearly seven times the total in 2012. With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world.
Across the border in San Diego, there were 34 homicides last year, or just over 2 killings per 100,000 people.
The root cause of the bloodshed is fundamentally different from previous iterations of violence in Tijuana.
In the past, the body count was driven by powerful drug cartels battling over lucrative trafficking routes to the United States. Now the main cause is competition in a growing local drug trade, with low-level dealers sometimes dying over the right to sell drugs on a single street corner.
Local and state officials estimate that up to 90% of the city’s homicides are linked to local drug sales, and authorities say they are seeing a similar pattern in Juarez, Cancun and other Mexican cities at the forefront of a nationwide rise in killings, which have nearly doubled over the last three years.
“We’re at war,” said Jesus Escajadillo, a medical examiner at Tijuana’s morgue, who one morning last summer was stooped over a tattooed body in a Lakers jersey, using forceps to dig out the bullet that had destroyed the man’s face. “We are living through a civil war.”
Smart Coolers: Now Your Groceries See You, Too
January 30th, 2019Via: The Atlantic:
Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”—fridges equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. On January 14, the company announced its first trial at a store in Chicago in January, and plans to equip stores in New York and San Francisco with the tech.
Demographic information is key to retail shopping. Retailers want to know what people are buying, segmenting shoppers by gender, age, and income (to name a few characteristics) and then targeting them precisely. To that end, these smart coolers are a marvel.
If, for example, Pepsi launched an ad campaign targeting young women, it could use smart-cooler data to see if its campaign was working. These machines can draw all kinds of useful inferences: Maybe young men buy more Sprite if it’s displayed next to Mountain Dew. Maybe older women buy more ice cream on Thursday nights than any other day of the week. The tech also has “iris tracking” capabilities, meaning the company can collect data on which displayed items are the most looked at.
Crucially, the “Cooler Screens” system does not use facial recognition. Shoppers aren’t identified when the fridge cameras scan their face. Instead, the cameras analyze faces to make inferences about shoppers’ age and gender. First, the camera takes their picture, which an AI system will measure and analyze, say, the width of someone’s eyes, the distance between their lips and nose, and other micro measurements. From there, the system can estimate if the person who opened the door is, say, a woman in her early 20s or a male in his late 50s. It’s analysis, not recognition.
Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones
January 29th, 2019Ah… It de-identifies the location of cellphone users.
Mmm hmm.
Via: The Intercept:
Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that.
The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It’s an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They’re not completely sure where the data is coming from.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, “Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school).”
To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations — creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city’s real-world patterns but that “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people,” as Bowden told The Intercept.
The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner: Obama Spoke at Boeing Retreat After Firm Gave Millions to Library Fund
January 28th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Boeing Co. lined up a surprise motivational speaker for an executive retreat in Arizona this month: former U.S. President Barack Obama.
He was the second former U.S. president in two years to offer up leadership tips to managers gathered for Boeing’s annual desert planning session. George W. Bush addressed the group last year, said people familiar with the matter.
While guest speakers are staples of corporate getaways this time of year, inviting former world leaders to inspire employees is unusual. That had been true at Boeing, too. Its change reflects the corporate ties that linger after a president leaves office — along with the planemaker’s swagger as it’s taken over the mantle from General Electric Co. as the largest U.S. industrial company.
