DataScience4you2me

Last week, when actress Rose McGowan’s Twitter account was suspended, a boycott of the social media platform was called. Thousands people refrained from using Twitter for one day in protest of her suspension. But the boycott, which was backed by prominent celebrities, was criticized by some for being self selective in its outrage: where was the boycott for the countless women of color who were harassed? In any case, Twitter seemingly took the criticism to heart and responded by announcing changes to its terms of service . These changes include new policies to prevent “hate symbols and imagery, violent groups, and tweets that glorify violence.” Twitter plans on rolling out these changes gradually over the next few months and has released a calendar on when people can expect them. On the surface, new policies may seem like a good idea, but in reality, they might make the situation worse. Harassment from bigots and trolls isn’t the only thing that marginalized people have to face on Tw...

Construction technology may seem like the opposite of a traditional Silicon Valley sweetheart, but a new startup views it as untapped potential. Built Robotics, which dubs itself “a new kind of construction company,” is using automation to add efficiency and safety to increasingly dangerous construction sites. The company, which announced its first project today (Oct. 18), is launching with a focus on excavation—an area of construction that is already suffering a lack of skilled workers in the US. Built Robotics’ automated track loader, a small construction vehicle for digging and loading materials can be seen above excavating a portion of land at the touch of a tablet button. Built is one of the first in the space, but it isn’t the only company to recognize the opportunity. It has already drawn the attention of sector-building investors like Aaron Jacobson and Founders Fund . Construction Robotics , which uses a robotic arm to lay bricks was also an early entrant to the field. ...

1. Valley forge “‘It’s easy to say, ‘Get these people out, build the wall,’ when it’s these people . When you put a live person in front of them, like their hairdresser or their kid’s best friend, then it’s different.” We begin today in the San Joaquin Valley with what, these days, might feel like the ultimate man bites dog story. It’s a community where conservative Trump voters and new immigrants live side by side. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. But they’ve managed to keep one American tradition alive: They talk to each other. And that’s because they rely on each other. From CS Monitor: How Stockton, Calif., has resisted political polarization . + “It’s a great opportunity to have this conversation about all these factors. …Stockton is a proxy for America: its diversity, its people. It’s a place that’s emerging and has big bold ideas.” Three years ago, Stockton, California, was bankrupt. Now it’s trying out a basic income (with a little help from big tech). + Alexis Madrig...

Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago professor and recent Nobel laureate in economics , is perhaps best known for his work on mental accounting . This is the human tendency to mentally divide what is essentially one pot of money into different mental accounts with different purposes, values, and rules. If you’ve ever contributed to a savings account while maintaining credit card debt, or spent an unexpected bonus on an indulgence you wouldn’t have bought with your regular paycheck, you have engaged in mental accounting. Thaler was asked to explain mental accounting in a recent interview (paywall) with the New York Times. He deferred, as he has before , to a one minute YouTube clip of an undated interview with actors Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. In it, Hackman tells a story about Hoffman asking to borrow money when the two men were broke young actors living in Los Angeles. Hackman went to his friend’s apartment and saw on a shelf several jars labeled with various household...

Whenever a friend complains that her supervisor or colleague reminds her of her manic-depressive mother, or that his direct-report is “exactly like” his overbearing brother, I try not to look alarmed, but it takes effort. Specifically, the confession calls to mind the experience of watching as a former colleague—someone who had compared our boss to his manipulative mother—fell into a heated argument with said boss over a trivial issue involving a piece of office furniture and was abruptly fired. Someone else I know spent months finding creative ways to avoid her manager, who was, she said, “essentially the same person” as her psychologically abusive father. “I’ve got to get out,” she’d say almost daily, and often tearfully. After several more months of misery, she did. This type of situation is probably more common than you think. It’s often challenging for all involved. But psychologists and executive coaches say there are ways to work around, and even with, that monster who remin...

Facebook has rolled out a new feature that lets users browse content they might be interested in but may not see as part of their regular newsfeed. It’s called Explore and, unlike the Newsfeed, it isn’t composed of posts from pages you like or people you follow—but it might as well be just that. Content on the feed, which was previously available on mobile, isn’t random; it features posts similar to things you’ve liked in the past, or that your friends have, notes TechCrunch , which first reported and confirmed the rollout for desktop. You can easily compare it to Instagram’s somewhat addicting feature with which it shares a name. A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch that it decided to introduce the feed because users told them “that they want an easy way to explore relevant content from Pages they haven’t connected with yet.” By only reinforcing people’s existing interests, there seems to be the potential for perpetuating the so-called “filter bubble,” a phenomenon that many ...

For a company trying to fend off activist investors targeting bloated corporate spending, General Electric has seemed particularly clueless about how it spends money. Along with paying executives astronomical salaries for mediocre results, it has showered them with perks that read like a caricature of executive excess. Perhaps the most egregious example is the one revealed yesterday (paywall) in the Wall Street Journal. It reports that the company often sent an empty aircraft to follow then-CEO Jeffrey Immelt around as he traveled the world on another corporate jet, just in case his primary plane (no doubt equipped with GE aviation equipment) broke down during one of his business trips. GE also paid Immelt $27.5 million last year—that’s total compensation, including some deferred money—for a performance so uninspiring that he resigned under pressure in June. His replacement, John Flannery, is cleaning house now. The new CEO has vowed to trim the fat, including grounding GE’s fleet...

A common backyard bird evolved an extra-long beak in a stunningly short period of time, researchers have found, and the reason might be the very human (and specifically very British) phenomenon of bird feeders. Up until now, as far as any bird expert knew, great tits that lived in the UK and great tits that lived in the Netherlands were almost exactly the same. There was no reason to believe otherwise; they inhabit a fairly similar natural habitat, aren’t geographically that far apart to begin with, and look almost exactly the same. But when researchers happened to comb through the genomes of birds from each country, they discovered something pretty strange that completely undermined that assumption. Great tits from the UK and great tits from the Netherlands, they realized, had significant differences in their DNA—specifically in the regions associated with beak morphology. Wondering why that would be, they then they looked at samples of birds from each country dating back to the 19...

On Oct. 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22.6% in a single day. Quartz http://ift.tt/2yA1Uyi October 19, 2017 at 09:54PM

Japan’s space agency found a cave in the moon . It is 50 km long and 100 m wide. Quartz http://ift.tt/2gmF2dd October 19, 2017 at 09:41PM

Scientists with Japan’s space agency have announced they have discovered what appears to be a humongous cave on the surface of the moon—a potential spot for astronauts to set up an exploratory base. It has been hypothesized that the walls of the cave—what remains of a 3.5 billion-year-old lava tube—could serve as a shield for lunar astronauts from micrometeorites, intense radiation on the surface of the moon, as well as temperature swings that can plummet from 100°C (212°F) days into frigid -173°C(-280°F) nights. Scientists still don’t know what the inside of the cave looks like—that will likely require further exploration, according to the findings published in Geophysical Research Letters . “Dreams of putting people into lava tubes on the moon have been ongoing for decades, and this work is an important step in turning that dream into reality,” wrote the editor of the research based on data gathered by Japan’s SELENE lunar orbiter. Scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Ag...

The only thing certain in this life are death, taxes and the US department of energy’s massive underestimate of renewable energy capacity. Every two years, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) , America’s official source for energy statistics, issues scenarios about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the US. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIA is wrong. Last year, it was spectacularly wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA’s predictions for energy usage and production. It found that the EIA’s ten-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted it would be. Meanwhile, EIA estimates regularly over state US fossil fuel consumption, which some see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry. These estimates matter because they form ...

In the race to autonomous vehicles, no one is more aggressive than Chinese tech giant Baidu. At The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ D.Live technology conference on Tuesday (Oct. 17), the company’s chairman and CEO Robin Li said Baidu plans to roll out fully driverless buses in China next year, mass produce semi-autonomous cars by 2019, and produce fully autonomous ones by 2021. It also envisions equipping its vehicles with interactive screens and entertainment. The company has partnered with an unnamed Chinese bus maker and Chinese car maker BAIC Motor for the fleets’ design and manufacturing. Baidu is competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which began developing self-driving technology in 2009, several years earlier than the Chinese company. Baidu uses self-driving open-source software Apollo, developed with over 50 partners including Ford, Nvidia, and Intel. Most industry experts agree that Waymo’s technology is more advanced, the Journal reports. Baidu spends roughly 15% of its revenue, or...

Lloyd Blankfein has had an account on Twitter since 2011, but the Goldman Sachs CEO only began tweeting four and a half months ago. It’s too bad he held out on us all those years. He has offered up 20 tweets since June 1, a pace of one per week, and they’re a satisfying mix of exactly what you’d expect from a Wall Street chieftain on Twitter (finance topics, weak emoji usage, and self-congratulatory messages about supporting diversity) and what you might actually hope to see (leadership, intelligence, flashes of authenticity, and the occasional sick burn). His latest tweet, posted today, is perhaps his greatest yet. Just left Frankfurt. Great meetings, great weather, really enjoyed it. Good, because I'll be spending a lot more time there. #Brexit — Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) October 19, 2017 It’s funny, smart, and sharp, all signs that he’s clearly getting more comfortable with the medium. Consider this doozy from June 2—the strangely spaced emoji, the multiple abb...

With her election to the helm of New Zealand’s government today (Oct. 19), Jacinda Ardern became the world’s twelfth 30-something head of state or government. None quite match William Pitt the Younger, who became British prime minister at the age of 24 in 1783. They’ll also be lucky to better Pitt’s more-than-two-decade stint in power. The longest serving of the current crop is North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who succeeded his father nearly six years ago at the age of—probably—33. (North Korean authorities say he’s 35, but that’s thought to have been artificially lined up to be 40 years after his father and 70 after his grandfather.) The European microstate of San Marino has an impressive pedigree of youthful leaders. The country is headed by two Captains Regent , who serve six-month terms before being rotated out. Earlier this year, one of those was 28-year-old Vanessa D’Ambrosio , who was replaced in October with a pair of comparatively wizened men in their 30s. Quartz http://ift...

Tezos was one of the biggest initial coin offerings (ICOs) of the last year. It raised $232 million in July with a utopian pitch: to create “ a new digital commonwealth .” This would take the form of developing a new blockchain—the technical idea behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin—that would avoid the fractious disagreements that have split the bitcoin world. Instead, it would institute a harmonious governance process to create a “self-amending cryptographic ledger.” An investigation by Reuters published yesterday suggests that isn’t happening any time soon. Tezos itself is beset by infighting, according to Reuters. The company had set up a complex governance structure where the inventors of the protocol, a couple named Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, own a company that develops and owns the code. But instead of the $232 million raised in the ICO going to the company, an independent Swiss foundation was created to handle the money. The Breitmans are now in a dispute with the head ...

Elon Musk is invoking the spirit of a dead poet to help him bore. Musk has been developing machines to dig a network of tunnels he’s promised, in order to connect cities like New York and Washington, D.C. with a hyperloop train. On Oct. 18, the entrepreneur tweeted that another of his Boring Company machines is almost ready, and that it’s called “Line-Storm,” named after an early 20th-century poem by Robert Frost. Second boring machine almost ready. Will be called Line-Storm, after the poem by Frost. "And be my love in the rain." http://pic.twitter.com/xlWPYdPu3P — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2017 “A Line-Storm Song” is one of Frost’s earliest poems, published in his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1913). The lyric poem is told from the point of view of a young man coming of age, appealing to his lover to join him as a rainstorm rages. The storm brings despair to the poem’s woods, stops birds from singing, and flowers and bees from meeting. The Boring Com...

In the world of luxury one-upmanship, “my other house is an Aston Martin” is a boast you might hear soon. The venerable British luxury sportscar brand, immortalized in James Bond movies since the 1960s , is getting into real estate. The company broke ground on a 66-story sail-shaped glass and steel apartment building in downtown Miami yesterday (Oct.18). Racy. From the company description, living in the Aston Martin Residences Miami sounds not unlike living inside one of its super-swish cars. The building promises carbon-fiber reception desks, Aston Martin door handles, and accents of its signature kestrel tan leather. The 391 condos will sell for between $600,000 and $50 million, and include seven penthouses and a duplex penthouse with private pools. There will also be a spa, cinemas, and a virtual golf room, as well as direct access to a yacht marina. You get the picture. Aston is not the first sports car brand to branch out into high-end real estate, as it happens: Porsche...

The captain and crew on the bridge of the starship Enterprise are tense as they track a Romulan ship that has just attacked a Starfleet outpost. The Romulans have developed a new technology: an invisibility cloak, which has made them undetectable to the Enterprise’s sensors. The crew must now figure out how to defeat their adversary, which means understanding the invisibility cloak and exploiting any weaknesses the technology may possess. Those familiar with Star Trek will recognize the invisibility device as the Romulan cloak, and the ensuing drama that plays out as the episode “Balance of Terror” from the original Star Trek series. But the Star Trek cloaking technology isn’t just the stuff of fairy tales: It actually has strong links to real-world science. When fictional future technologies are extrapolated from today’s scientific advancements, we begin to feel that they may one day actually be possible. Presented with a plausible hypothesis, we can explore how a device or tech...