Toronto Is Building An Ambitious “Smart” Neighborhood From The Ground Up
It is not the first smart city—municipalities around the world have adopted smart infrastructure like artificial-intelligence-enabled traffic lights—but it might be the most ambitious. The project’s 200-page wish list of features is astounding. The “vision document” imagines not only the revitalization of a 12-acre plot that has sat largely vacant since its heyday as an industrial port, but its transformation into a micro-city outfitted with smart technologies that will use data to disrupt everything from traffic congestion to health care, housing, zoning regulations, and greenhouse-gas emissions. Long before flying cars, smart sensors won’t just be in our mattresses or our bidets, they’ll be embedded in the walls of our homes and the concrete beneath our feet. … [Read More]
Carlos Ghosn’s downfall lays bare Nissan’s board problem FT. “The company ‘had literally no governance structure,’ said Koji Endo, head of the equity research department at SBI Securities.” Everything is like CalPERS
The IRS hired private debt collectors who are squeezing poor people and hurricane victims Quartz (DK).Two US senators pushed the IRS to outsource its debt collection to private companies through this program: Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, and Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York who has hailed the initiative for bringing jobs to one of the poorest parts of his state. As if by coincidence, three of the four debt-collecting companies contracted by the IRS are based in Iowa and New York. They declined to comment on the program.No doubt. Some days, it seems like the planet is owned and operated by the Harkonnens.“A 2017 study by the Government Accountability Office estimates that a typical borrower of a $30,000 student loan who places their loan into forbearance for three years — the maximum allowed for economic-hardship forbearance — would pay an additional $6,742 in interest on that loan.”As above.Countering the geography of discontent: Strategies for left-behind places Brookings InstitutionFinancial structure and income inequality (PDF) Bank of International Settlements
A Disaster of Our Own Making. The Atlantic
How Political Opinions Change Scientific American
After 20,000 workers walked out, Google said it got the message. The workers disagree. RecodeAmazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers - Dr. Matt Wood – “Today, I’m excited to share that, for the first time, the same machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now arevailable to all developers through AWS. We’ve been using machine learning across Amazon for more than 20 years. With thousands of engineers focused on machine learning across the company, there are very few Amazon retail pages, products, fulfillment technologies, stores which haven’t been improved through the use of machine learning in one way or another. Many AWS customers share this enthusiasm, and our mission has been to take machine learning from something which had previously been only available to the largest, most well-funded technology companies, and put it in the hands of every developer. Thanks to services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Lex, tens of thousands of developers are already on their way to building more intelligent applications through machine learning.
- New AWS Certification for Machine Learning – To help developers demonstrate their knowledge (and to help employers hire more efficiently), we are also announcing the new “AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty” certification. Customers can take the exam now (and at half price for a limited time). Customers at re:Invent can sit for the exam this week at our Training and Certification exam sessions. The digital courses are now available at no charge at aws.training/machinelearning and you only pay for the services you use in labs and exams during your training.”
