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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

You Can Never Have Too Much Money, Happiness Researcher Finds

Life and dreams are pages of one and the same book. To read them in the proper order is to live, to leaf through them is to dream. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer



Colorado rattlesnake “mega den” gaining national attention via webcam for citizen science The Colorado Sun


Elon Musk says his transgender child was 'killed by the woke mind virus,' vows to destroy it


Amazon Prime Day ‘major cause of injuries’ for workers, Senate finds CNN

 

You Can Never Have Too Much Money, Happiness Researcher Finds Bloomberg

 

What Happened to Ancient Megafauna? Nautilus



Donald Trump introduces his children Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump to Jeffrey Epstein at the opening of the Harley Davidson Cafe in Manhattan in 1993, about 4 kilometres from Epstein's mansion

Jimi Hendrix Goes Acoustic

A true master of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix missed the era of MTV Unplugged by almost 20 years and video & audio clips of him playing an acoustic guitar can be difficult to find. Open Culture recently collected a pair of videos of Hendrix unplugged.





The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. 

As our name suggests, the focus is on works now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. 

Our aim is to promote and celebrate the public domain in all its abundance and diversity, and help our readers explore its rich terrain – like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond. 

With a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of content which truly celebrates the breadth and diversity of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.”

1143 posts in Collections featuring public domain content from 196 source institutions353 essays, including 29 in Curator’s Choice and 20 in Conjectures, from 297 authors; and 913 prints in our online shop.


Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 13, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. 
On a weekly basis Pete Weisshighlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. 
Five highlights from this week: How AI Is Helping Scammers, and How You and Your Family Can Stay Safe Online; Every [smart] Phone Can ID Your Router – Here’s How to Stop It; Opinion | Driving Apps Like Google Maps Drive Me Crazy; and 10 Security Tips for Business Travelers This Summer.

The US Experiences A Spicy Heat Wave As Romance Bookstores Boom

“Once a niche that independent booksellers largely ignored, romance is now the hottest thing in the book world. It is, by far, the top-selling fiction genre, and its success is reshaping not only the publishing industry, but the retail landscape as well.” - The New York Times


The Words We Make Up When We Can’t Remember The Right Ones

Apparently, the struggle to find the right word is real and has been for some time, because the Oxford English Dictionary has its own category for these terms, labelled “thing or person whose name is forgotten or unknown”. - The Conversation

“…Forewarn is primarily marketed to and used by the real estate industry, and it has been penetrating that market at a rapid clip. 

Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records. In addition to those records, the product — owned by the data broker red violet — also supplies a given individual’s address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories. 

Although such data could generally be gleaned from public records, 

Forewarn delivers it at the press of a button — a function real estate agents say allows them to gather publicly available information without having to visit courthouses and municipal offices, a process which would normally take days. The power of Forewarn’s technology has led to rapid adoption, but the company is still largely unknown outside the real estate industry. 

Several fair housing and civil rights advocates interviewed by Recorded Future News weren’t aware of its existence. The individuals whose data it sells also have no idea their information is being shared with real estate agents, who potentially might choose not to work with them because of what they discover on the app. 

Forewarn did not respond to multiple requests for comment, however, statements made by one of its executives suggest that the company intentionally keeps a low profile.

Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn,” a company executive said at a recent training webinar with Illinois real estate agents.

 

She emphasized that potential buyers “do not get notified” when they are screened with the app, a question she said many real estate agents ask. Real estate agents who, for example, discover a client has a lien filed against them, should consider telling the prospect they “obtained this information from a confidential service that bases their information on available public record information,” the executive added.

 

As Forewarn continues to penetrate the real estate industry, one of the biggest questions for the company is whether it will be able to evade scrutiny and pushback by privacy advocates who say it is essentially mass profiling renters and potential homebuyers in silence, as well as regulators who have cracked down on similar practices…”How a little-known tool is sweeping the real estate industry by giving instant access to vast amounts of homebuyer data - The Record