Your cell phone provider is probably selling access to your real-time location, Fast Company reports. That’s the takeaway from a still-developing story that all started when a former police sheriff used a cellphone-locating service meant to track prisoners to find people who aren’t inmates—according to a chilling report in the New York Times. His alleged targets included a […]
Is the risk of automation to the jobs economy “50-100 more years away,” as per the Treasury Secretary, or might almost 50 percent of jobs be at risk by 2033, as per a 2013 Oxford University study? New findings in the journal of Social Science and Medicine indicate that wherever reality falls between the extremes, […]
A long piece in The Guardian on how and why Amazon keeps CEOs in possibly dozens of different sectors up at night. With fingers in nine of the top ten US industries by GDP, Amazon has inspired a “Death By Amazon index” from Bespoke Investment Group. Fifty-four retail stocks the firm considers most vulnerable to […]
A secretive scheme that proposes to (literally) codify credibility within a society that inherently lacks any is more likely to undermine public trust that instill it. Few would knowingly risk signing up for such a scheme; unfortunately, by 2020, no one living in the People’s Republic of China—foreign or Chinese—will have a choice.
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
At the moment, one garbage truck-ful of plastic is dumped into Earth’s oceans every minute. The rate is set to double by 2030, and then double again by 2050. That’s the context in which New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a ban on single-use plastic bags in his state. “The blight of plastic bags takes a […]
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Minnesota are developing materials that can be 3D printed based on the flexibility and nimbleness of invertebrates such as a squid, according to an ARL release.
Another war, another Waste Land, and another Lost Generation.
“In our bank we have people doing work like robots,” [Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan] said. “Tomorrow we will have robots behaving like people. It doesn’t matter if we as a bank will participate in these changes or not, it is going to happen.”
The “terms and conditions” reckoning is coming, Bloomberg Business reports. New European Union privacy rules go into effect in May. They require among other things much less opaque end user agreements. This combined with the backlash against Facebook for the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica and some recent, specific actions by companies like Paypal […]
