- Sappho ( c. 630 – c. 570 BC)
Christmas Island tropical tour a waste of taxpayer cash
Allianz Stadium demolition to go ahead after NSW government wins court battle
DISPATCHES FROM THE COLD CIVIL WAR: Sarah Hoyt: We Are Dancing on a Powder Keg
Seasteading was conceived more than a decade ago out of libertarian enthusiasm for the possibilities of improving governance through an explosive proliferation of new polities. Building modular floating "land" on the high seas, its advocates argue, would increase our ability to escape the depredations of existing governments.21st CENTURY HEADLINES: First Seastead in International Waters Now Occupied, Thanks to Bitcoin Wealth
Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.
The dairy company in Portland, Me., agreed to pay $5 million to the drivers, according to court documents filed on Thursday.
Michael Geddati, 20, of Memphis has pleaded guilty to computer fraud. U.S. Attorney D. Michael Dunavant announced the plea today.
According to the information presented in court, during the 2017-18 academic year, Michael Geddati was a freshman pre-med major at Rhodes College in Memphis. He received a scholarship valued at approximately $30,000 per semester. Continued receipt of the scholarship depended, in large part, on maintaining a particular grade-point average.
Life insurance industry using AI and social media to rate customer risk - The New Yorker: “Recent news that life insurers are now subject to a mild setback in the process for determining premiums might have been cheering if it didn’t come with a revelation that the actuaries of the world might be studying your Instagram feed. Last month, in a circular letter, the New York State Department of Financial Services, a major regulator, allowed that life-insurance companies can, in principle, use information gleaned from customers’ social-media posts and other “lifestyle indicators” when setting premiums. The catch—that the use of this information has to meet non-discrimination standards—brought, in theory, a cold wind of accountability. In practice, though, it simply served to highlight one more horrifying thing that we didn’t know was going on. As the Wall Street Journal explained it, in a report by Leslie Scism, insurers have already begun using algorithms to comb through “nontraditional” information sources to evaluate customers’ risk, so most of us would be prudent to flaunt our virtues online. “Post photos of yourself running,” theJournal advised, in a sidebar. “Riskier sports, like skydiving, could complicate the situation.”..”
Pew FACTANK: “About a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form. Who are these non-book readers? Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about five times as likely as college graduates (37% vs. 7%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. Adults with lower levels of educational attainment are also among the least likely to own smartphones, even as e-book reading on these devices has increased substantially since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.) Adults with annual household incomes of $30,000 or less are about three times as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (36% vs. 13%). Hispanic adults are about twice as likely as whites (38% vs. 20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. But there are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the U.S.: Roughly half (51%) of foreign-born Hispanics report not having read a book, compared with 22% of Hispanics born in the U.S…”
Technology promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard.
The New York Times – How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly: “…The story of the wildly exaggerated promises and damaging unintended consequences of technology isn’t exactly a new one. The real marvel is that it constantly seems to surprise us. Why? Part of the reason is that we tend to forget that technology is only as good as the people who use it. We want it to elevate us; we tend to degrade it. In a better world, Twitter might have been a digital billboard of ideas and conversation ennobling the public square. We’ve turned it into the open cesspool of the American mind. Facebook was supposed to serve as a platform for enhanced human interaction, not a tool for the lonely to burrow more deeply into their own isolation.
OECD, 15 February 2019. In the context of digitalisation, this paper provides a review of initiatives across a number of fields including: competition, education, environment, innovation, and taxation
Here are the data brokers quietly buyingand selling your personal information
FastCompany: “It’s no secret that your personal data is
routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s
less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do. Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring
companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the
Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in
the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates
largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.
Even Vermont’s first-of-its-kind law, which went into
effect last month, doesn’t require data brokers to disclose who’s in their
databases, what data they collect, or who buys it. Nor does it require brokers
to give consumers access to their own data or opt out of data collection.
Brokers are, however required to provide some information about their opt-out
systems under the law–assuming they provide one. If you do want to keep your
data out of the hands of these companies, you’ll often have to contact them one
by one through whatever opt-out systems they provide…Those include big names
in people search, like
Spokeo, ZoomInfo, White Pages, PeopleSmart, Intelius, and PeopleFinders; credit reporting, like
Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion; and advertising
and marketing, like Acxiom, Oracle, LexisNexis, Innovis,
and KBM…”