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Showing posts from September, 2017

App That Paid Users to Exercise Owes Nearly $1 Million for Not Paying Users to Exercise

App That Paid Users to Exercise Owes Nearly $1 Million for Not Paying Users to Exercise : Supported by investors like PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Pact was initially called GymPact before it changed its name to reflect its additional meal-tracking features. The idea behind the app was relatively straightforward: A user could set a goal like, “I’ll go the gym for an hour five days in a row.” Then, the user set an amount of money that they’d be willing to pay as a penalty if they failed to meet their goal. When setting a goal, the app would tell you how much money you’d be rewarded with if you managed to achieve your goal—usually a small amount that was pulled from the pool of failures out there. At first, Pact had a deal with thousands of gyms that the user could check into and that feature was expanded to GPS tracking. �
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Using machine learning to enhance the customer journey - Think with Google

Using machine learning to enhance the customer journey - Think with Google : Believe it or not, just five years ago, the “customer journey” didn’t even register among marketers’ top priorities.1 Data changed everything. Today’s leading marketers identify customer intent at all touch points along the journey. There are powerful signals to consider—search intent, videos viewed, content read across the web, and more. This creates an exciting opportunity for marketers to assist customers and offers unparalleled insight when trying to engage a target audience.
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(19) The Physics of Life: How Water Folds Proteins - with Sylvia McLain - YouTube

(19) The Physics of Life: How Water Folds Proteins - with Sylvia McLain - YouTube : From its effect on protein folding to its work as a universal solvent, the unique properties of water make it an indispensable ingredient for life. In this Discourse, Sylvia McLain will explore the fundamental and mysterious role of water in life. Sylvia McLain is a Research Lecturer in the University of Oxford's Department of Biochemistry. She investigates the role of water in protein folding and life. This Discourse was filmed in the Ri on Friday 25 February 2017.
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The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI - Bloomberg

The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI - Bloomberg : “The data is cheaper than it used to be, the availability of data is enormous, the cost of storage is essentially irrelevant,” says�Sandy Rattray, Man Group’s chief investment officer. “How to use it? That’s hard.”
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Face Time | Asymco

Face Time | Asymco : Since the iPhone launched 10 years ago, 1,253,000,000 units have been sold.[1] Given that they don’t last forever, we can assume that only the most recent units sold are still in use. If we measure just the�units sold in the last 3 years, the total is about 663 million. Rounding down, we can say that there are perhaps 650 million iPhones in use. Repeating the exercise for the iPad but extending time in use to 4.5 years, gives a population or install base of about 240 million. That’s a total base of 890 iOS million units, well below the 1 billion total “active devices” Apple reported in January 2016. The difference can be filled by Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPods and Macs.
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'Free Speech Week' At Berkeley Is A Mess

'Free Speech Week' At Berkeley Is A Mess : “No, it’s not cancelled,” Alexander Macris told HuffPost in an email, adding that Yiannopoulos is “looking forward to speaking throughout the 4-day event alongside other defenders of freedom.”
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Facebook’s Ad Scandal Isn’t a ‘Fail,’ It’s a Feature - The New York Times

Facebook’s Ad Scandal Isn’t a ‘Fail,’ It’s a Feature - The New York Times : After much outcry over this revelation, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, called the anti-Semitic ad targeting “a fail on our part,” promised to put more human reviewers in place, and said the company “never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way — and that is on us.”
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How I went from selling food in the street to working for top firms in tech

How I went from selling food in the street to working for top firms in tech : As a way to bring in extra income, we tried to sell homemade pasta on the streets. I would go door-to-door collecting orders for the weekend. “Hello, do you want to order ravioli to eat this Sunday?” I’d ask person after person. “Yes, they’re homemade. Just give us a time and we’ll deliver them.” Then, after people ordered them, we spent our entire weekends making 2,000 ravioli only to end up with 500 pesos in our pockets, which comes about $20, not counting expenses.
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The Empire Strikes Back with a Coordinated War on Crypto

The Empire Strikes Back with a Coordinated War on Crypto : You see, Chinese law doesn’t work like western law. Although the Chinese Constitution provides legal, executive and judicial powers, they’re all subject to the whim of the Communist Party. The Party is supreme. Courts and regulatory bodies don’t need to follow any of those frameworks in deciding cases. China runs by rule of man (r�n zh� 人治), not rule of law (fǎzh� 法治). Essentially, it means that regulators can change the rules whenever they feel like and that’s exactly what they did here. In classic rule of man style, the statement was overly broad, vague and subject to interpretation any way they saw fit, a staple of bad law making (just drop it into Google Translate to see).
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How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good

How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good : The language is degenerating. But I’m not saying TV has single-handedly eroded literacy. Maybe TV to language… Yes, thank you. Maybe it’s a bit like the role of cow farts in global warming: It may not be doing the most damage, but it doesn’t help.
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How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good

How Writing Closed Captions Turned Me off TV For Good : So though a 22-minute show takes hours to caption, and though my ears are hot when I remove my headphones for a break, my work is a handful of kilobits, encoded in ASCII — which is a language agreed to by a consortium to be an OK way to capture English in the lingua that’s the most franca of all: binary. So many on-screen dramatic worlds shriveled down to alpha-numerics. But this digital load-bearing has its limits. Regardless what is said in any show, the CW cannot overload the viewer, who is after all, a reader. Adults shows must cap at 255 wpm max, children’s programming much less at 160.
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AAPL Company | 9to5Mac

AAPL Company | 9to5Mac : In one of them,�Google’s then VP of engineering Vic Gundotra describes being called by Steve at home on a Sunday. So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow. I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient.�
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There might finally be a driverless car with some common sense - Business Insider

There might finally be a driverless car with some common sense - Business Insider : Zhao and Debbie Yu, one of his cofounders, show a clip of an accident involving a Tesla in China, in which the car drove straight into a street-cleaning truck. “The system is trained on Israel or Europe, and they don’t have this kind of truck,” Zhao says. “It’s only based on detection; it doesn’t really understand what’s going on,” he says.
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Chris Reining: How to calculate how much to save to retire early - Business Insider

Chris Reining: How to calculate how much to save to retire early - Business Insider : The 4% rule means you can safely withdraw 4% from your investment accounts each year, adjust your withdrawal for inflation, and never run out of money. Here's an example. You have $500,000 in an investment account. You can withdraw $20,000 the first year ($500,000 x 0.04). Then you forget about the 4% rule and increase your withdrawal each year by the prior years inflation rate. Let's say inflation is 3% so in the second year you withdraw $20,600 ($20,000 x 1.03). And so on.
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Here's What a Real Growth Strategy Looks Like — Road Tested by Facebook and Remind | First Round Review

Here's What a Real Growth Strategy Looks Like — Road Tested by Facebook and Remind | First Round Review : "I see a lot of startups with one person dedicated to 'growth,' but I'd encourage every founder to think of it as a team effort," says Balar. "At Remind, there's a dedicated team for growth but it constantly works with point people on marketing, engineering, product, support, the CEO. We're all tasked with figuring out how we can get more people engaged on the platform. It's the whole company's job."
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Beyond the Bell Curve, a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine

Beyond the Bell Curve, a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine : In 1972, the biologist Robert May devised a simple mathematical model that worked much like the archipelago. He wanted to figure out whether a complex ecosystem can ever be stable or whether interactions between species inevitably lead some to wipe out others. By indexing chance interactions between species as random numbers in a matrix, he calculated the critical “interaction strength” — a measure of the number of flotsam rafts, for example — needed to destabilize the ecosystem. Below this critical point, all species maintained steady populations. Above it, the populations shot toward zero or infinity. Little did May know, the tipping point he discovered was one of the first glimpses of a curiously pervasive statistical law. Harold Widom, left, and Craig Tracy pictured in 2009 at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in Germany. Renate Schmid The law appeared in full form two decades later, when the mat...
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Shut Down Peter Thiel For Supporting Trump (And It Was a Big Mistake) | Inc.com

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Shut Down Peter Thiel For Supporting Trump (And It Was a Big Mistake) | Inc.com : Now to the current issue at Facebook. Both Hastings and Thiel are on the company's board of directors and were last summer before the election. According to the New York Times, here's the content of the email Hastings sent Thiel: I appreciate that we can disagree and be direct with each other. I have our board Gordy feedback session tomorrow. I see our board being about great judgment, particularly in unlikely disaster where we have to pick new leaders. I'm so mystified by your endorsement of Trump for our President, that for me it moves from "different judgment" to "bad judgment". Some diversity in views is healthy, but catastrophically bad judgment (in my view) is not what anyone wants in a fellow board member. I continue to experience you as very honest, well informed, and certainly very independent. No response is necessary, I just didn...
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Debunking study suggests ways to counter misinformation and correct 'fake news'

Debunking study suggests ways to counter misinformation and correct 'fake news' : "Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation" was conducted by researchers at the Social Action Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The teams sought "to understand the factors underlying effective messages to counter attitudes and beliefs based on misinformation." To do that, they examined 20 experiments in eight research reports involving 6,878 participants and 52 independent samples. The analyzed studies, published from 1994 to 2015, focused on false social and political news accounts, including misinformation in reports of robberies; investigations of a warehouse fire and traffic accident; the supposed existence of "death panels" in the 2010 Affordable Care Act; positions of political candidates on Medicaid; and a report...
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The Doctor Game: How safe are cellphones? Science is mixed

The Doctor Game: How safe are cellphones? Science is mixed : We know that high frequency ionizing radiation from excessive X-ray exposure can possibly cause malignancy. This radiation is cumulative, and like an elephant, it never forgets the amount of radiation received. But cellphones emit very low-intensity non-ionizing radiofrequency energy that’s generally assumed to be safe. Researchers at the University of California analyzed several studies from around the world. They believed the debate would be settled by the “Interphone Study.” This research involved 13 countries and the World Health Organization at a cost of $25 million. But the results were considered inconclusive, or as they reported, “downright muddled.” It did show that the use of cellphones 30 minutes a day resulted in a higher risk of a brain malignancy known as a glioma. This cancer occurs on the side of the head where the cellphone is used. The report reminded me of a case I previously wrote about, of a woman who...
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Lorde on Twitter: "it's literally fucked that i could be on the cover of vogue i used to get called monobrow at school that BROW IS ON COVER OF VOGUE"

Lorde on Twitter: "it's literally fucked that I could be on the cover of vogue i used to get called monobrow at school that BROW IS ON COVER OF VOGUE" it's literally fucked that i could be on the cover of vogue i used to get called monobrow at school that BROW IS ON COVER OF VOGUE
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Ryanair CEO claims Norwegian is running out of cash - Business Insider

Ryanair CEO claims Norwegian is running out of cash - Business Insider : Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's CEO, said this in an interview last week with Travel Weekly. The outspoken chief executive of Europe's largest airline by passengers took aim at his archrival's global expansion plans: "Norwegian has huge aircraft orders that they don't have the cash to pay for," referring to Norwegian's outstanding order of more than 200 planes.
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Facebook News Feed: Design and "dark UX" are turning us into sleep-deprived internet addicts — Quartz

Facebook News Feed: Design and "dark UX" are turning us into sleep-deprived internet addicts — Quartz : Dark UX is an industry term for sly design tricks that benefit the client’s bottom line. It ranges from creating defaults, such as a pre-checked opt-in email subscription or pre-selecting the most expensive options. It can also manifest in the form of interfaces requiring clients to supply their personal information before being allowed to look at the products on a website.
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Please Don't Use Google Translate Against Russian Trolls - Bloomberg

Please Don't Use Google Translate Against Russian Trolls - Bloomberg : The first generation of online�translation systems relied on the flawed approach of trying to�teach computers how language was structured. Unfortunately,�living languages tend to disregard�rules. Instead, modern translation engines use statistical analysis, parsing parallel text in different languages to figure out�how a word, a turn of phrase or a sentence is most frequently translated. Coupled with artificial intelligence -- neural translation, Google calls it -- the results are even more impressive because the algorithm looks at whole sentences rather than smaller bits and pieces. Google Translate now uses this approach in multiple languages.
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Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website

Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website : Web hoster DreamHost says it has been asked to hand over more than 1.3 million IP addresses on�visitors to a site that helped organize anti-Trump protests earlier this year. It published a search warrant�Monday signed July 12th, in which a District of Colombia court said DreamHost had to hand over records from disruptj20.org covering "the individuals who participated, planned, organized, or incited the January 20 riot," Trump's inauguration day. That data appears to include IP addresses, emails and physical addresses of the website owners, as well as similar details�on all users of the site, such as information about messages�submitted to the page and when they accesseddisruptj20.org. "The request from the [Department of Justice] demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people ...
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