iPhones are made to operate in temperatures above 32 degrees. Tens of millions of Americans are enduring lows in the negative double digits.In conditions like these, many smartphones will start experiencing problems like shutting off, shortened battery life, display problems or even the glass shattering. Most smartphone batteries are lithium-ion, which can stop discharging electricity in extremely cold temperatures.
26.3 billion robo-calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers last year, up from 18 billion in 2017. One report last year projected that as many as half of all cellphone calls in 2019 could be spam. Incoming calls, 60 on average, were from unrecognized numbers or numbers not linked to a person in the recipient’s address book. Only half of all cellphone calls are being answered.
E-waste is now the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. This waste stream reached 48.5 million tons in 2018. E-waste typically isn’t biodegradable and contains components made from toxic materials. Breaking down and recycling the e-waste, causes health problems. “Workers...suffer high incidences of birth defects and infant mortality." The material value [of e-waste] alone is worth $62.5 billion, three times more than the annual output of the world’s silver mines and more than the GDP of most countries.
San Francisco could be the first city in the nation to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance technology under proposed legislation. The legislation echoes ordinances adopted by Oakland and Berkeley, as well as by BART, that call for approval by the Board of Supervisors before city agencies adopt new surveillance technologies as well as policies for existing technologies. “We know facial recognition technology, which has the biases of the people who developed it, disproportionately misidentifies people of color and women. This is a fact.”
Facebook has been abusing its role in Apple’s enterprise program by using it to distribute an app to non-employees. (It) took advantage of the program to distribute the app without Apple’s knowledge. (So) Apple stopped Facebook from distributing all apps associated with its developer program. This means the special versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp that Facebook employees use aren’t working on iPhones. It also means internal Facebook apps aren’t working in iOS. Apple revoked its publishing abilities. If Facebook’s product teams can’t ship internal beta versions of its apps, it hinders product development.
Intel rose to dominance because of its confidence in Moore’s law.We’ve gotten innovation for free, as every few years new chips allow us to do more than we could before. (But) it takes time for information to travel from one chip to another. As chips have become faster they need to wait longer to get the information they need. (And) we want to have more specialized chips for advanced applications. The more different chips the more computing time we lose. If you can’t increase performance by speed, then reduce the distance between chips. That’s 3D stacking. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent and if you don’t invent you will be disrupted
“(Google)provides travel measures, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using and their trip purpose.”The program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It models this anonymized data that replicates a city’s real-world patterns but “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people.” It is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism. (It) comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use personal data
Piracy can act as a form of invisible competition that prevents both a manufacturer and a retailer from jacking up prices at an unreasonable rate: "When information goods are sold to consumers via a retailer, in certain situations, a moderate level of piracy seems to have a surprisingly positive impact on the profits of the manufacturer and the retailer. There are other positive effects of piracy such as positive network effect (i.e., the more people use the product, the more valuable it becomes) and learning (i.e., pirate users may learn about the product and buy the legal version later on).”
Risk levels are rising as more robots morph from being offline and isolated to being internet-connected machines, often working alongside humans.“There’s no antivirus for your robot." 5G wireless networks—with speeds up to 100 times faster than most current data networks—are expected to encourage more connected automation in “smart” factories in the coming years."The greater the connectivity, the greater the risk."
Apple has found that no country, and certainly not the United States, can match China’s scale, skills, infrastructure and cost. “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Chinese factories have shifts working at all hours, if necessary, and workers are sometimes roused from their sleep to meet production goals. That was not an option in Texas.“China is not just cheap. It’s a place where, because it’s an authoritarian government, you can marshal 100,000 people to work all night for you. “That has become an essential part of the product-rollout strategy.”
Digital technology is separating citizens in all societies into watchers and watched. It works by providing free services that billions of people use, enabling providers of those services to monitor the behavior of those users in detail, without consent. (It) claims human experience as free raw material for translation into data. Although some data are applied to service improvement, the rest are a behavioural surplus, fed into machine intelligence and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do. These products are traded in behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists grow wealthy from these operations
Psychiatry is littered with the fragments of paradigms that were going to “save” it.My brain scan and the results of this MRI battery would be fed into a machine learning algorithm. Scientists would use it to discover how human beings respond to social situations. They want to compare healthy people’s brains to those of people with mental health disorders. That might help make correct diagnoses for mental health disorders and find the underlying physical causes. The lab is trying to do is discover the algorithms of the computational brain. Who gets to decide what's normal?
It took all of two seconds for the world to declare the expensive, experimental device creepy. Wearers of the device were proclaimed “glassholes.” Glassholes still exist. There’s a small group of fans still talking and updating and buying and selling.(But) at this point, owning Google Glass is like buying a vintage typewriter you have no intention of using. You buy it to own it; to remember a specific moment in time, and, to present yourself as the type of person who is concerned with remembering that specific moment in time. Using Google Glass requires a Google+ account. Google shuttered Google+ in October 2018.
According to the latest census numbers, 20% of Americans are bilingual, a number that’s been on the rise for three decades, and the number of homes with mixed language speakers is higher. Look up “Alexa” and “bilingual” on Twitter and you’ll find a long stream of people complaining about Alexa’s lacking language skills. In August, Google announced Google Home was bilingual. Owners can pair any mix of English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. While Amazon has dominated the smart speaker market since 2015, Google has been catching up, and a skill gap like this will deter bilingual customers.
Internet users continue to express loathing of the ad tech industry’s bandwidth- and data-sucking practices by running to ad blockers. Between a quarter and a third of U.S. connected device users’ are blocking ads as of 2018 (rates are higher among younger users). (And) advertising with cookies — so targeted advertising did increase revenues but by 4%. For merchants buying targeted ads over untargeted ads can be 500% times as expensive. The current system relies on mass scale exploitation of personal data.
Vine was recreated in the image of the internet around it — interminable feeds, customized content, an endless space that can be checked and rechecked but never quite finished, demanding as much as you’re willing to give it. If you had started reviewing your Amazon purchases, built a reputation as a reliable reviewer, secured an invite to the Vine program, kept your head down, filed your assignments, your take-home total (would be): five vacuums here; 14 hard drives there; some laptops and cellphones; Bluetooth speakers, and headphones. The program was intended to help vendors “generate awareness for new and prerelease products”
Apple has long contracted with Foxconn Technology Group to make its iPhones, protecting itself from the expensive, cyclical world of manufacturing. The iPhone isn’t soaring as high lately, but it has been a cash cow since 2007 and remains the envy of consumer product makers. Foxconn is a big reason why. Tesla churned out five cars built per person employed. Luxury auto makers churn out three to four times as many cars per employee. Tomorrow’s car will be valued for its software, artificial intelligence and ease of use. Every auto maker is asking ‘do we get to have a relationship with the end user or are we just going to be the next Foxconn.’
Self-driving features are already in a lot of newer cars. Cruise control is considered Level 1 autonomy and has been around for years. Heads-up displays, parking assistance, active cruise control - isn't the future, it's already here. But the next level of autonomy is Autopilot on steroids. New trucks that can auto-brake, self-steer, turn on windshield wipers, and gradually bring the car to a complete stop — basically drive without you. But you can't actually go anywhere. The system will warn you if your hands are off the wheel for too long.
Authorities in China have tapped artificial intelligence (AI) to clamp down on unsanitary cooks in kitchens — and to reward those who adhere to best practices.A camera-based system recognizes “poor [sanitation] habits” and alerts managers to offending workers via a mobile app. The system can identify 18 different “risk management” areas, including smoking and using a smartphone. (phones carry 10 times more bacteria than toilet seats.) On the flip side, it recognizes four positive habits, like disinfecting surfaces and hand washing, and monitors kitchen conditions that might impact food safety, such as temperature and humidity.
The problem is that companies can be stingy about providing data. If your service is “forcing consent” (as Google was recently fined €50 million for doing), then you might not want your users to see how much personal data you’re collecting. It takes the full 30 days to receive a link to download data (the limit imposed by the regulation). Some files (are)ambiguously labeled, while others were stored in formats that tested the limits of what constitutes “commonly used.” GDPR regulations have a long way to go if they want to give control over data. Making it useful means ensur(ing) what’s downloaded is easier for the average person to understand.
Between September 2017 and August 2018, U.S. employers posted314,000 jobs for cybersecurity pros. If they could be filled, that would boost the country’s current cyber workforce of 714,000 by more than 40%. This is still the equivalent of pocket change. There is now a gap of almost 3 million cybersecurity jobs globally.Companies are trying to cope by relying more on artificial intelligence and machine learning, but this is still at a nascent stage and never do more than mitigate the problem.
The online retail giant is asking consumer-goods companies to create brands exclusively for Amazon, finding that developing them is costly and time-consuming, the latest example of (it) flexing its muscles to offer the lowest prices and widest selection, as it seeks to cut into the market share of big-brand manufacturers. Manufacturers risk cannibalizing higher-margin sales of their brands by offering comparable products under different labels. But in exchange for creating exclusive products, the brands get help launching their products on Amazon.com, marketing support, and revenue from the sales. They also appear at the top of search results
Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive and devoid of humor. Despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of techies. “It’s exploitative. The majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners.” (But) IT companies may have miscalculated in encouraging employees to equate work with their intrinsic value as human beings. After basking in positive esteem, the tech industry is experiencing a backlash
Swarms of microrobots will scuttle along beneath our roads and pavements, finding and fixing leaky pipes and faulty cables. Thanks to their efforts, we can avoid costly road work that costs billions of dollars each year—not to mention frustrating traffic delays.The microrobots will come in two versions. One is an inspection bot, which will navigate along underground infrastructure and examine its condition via sonar. The inspectors will be complemented by worker bots capable of carrying out repairs with cement and adhesives or cleaning out blockages with a high-powered jet.
Google Maps is partially responsible for low visitation numbers. “People aren’t coming to these parts of Australia because Google Maps isn’t updating its mapping.“People don’t come to these areas because the travel times are incorrect.” With little mobile phone coverage on the long roads through south-west Queensland, the issue of safety is also a concern. “People aren’t coming to places because they think it takes too long, or they’re missing opportunities to refuel and they’re getting sent off on another road that has no fuel.
After you’ve purchased an internet-connected device of any kind, it begins to generate information that the company can use itself or sell to third parties. The reason his company can sell TVs so cheaply now is that it makes up the money by selling bits of data and access to your TV after you purchase it: “post-purchase monetization." But it also changes the relationship the TV makers have with their customers. Consumers are no longer their sole revenue stream.CBS and Netflix are more important to their business success than you are.
Google has spent the last few years working (somewhat quietly) on an Android-based operating system for cars that doesn’t require the use of a smartphone. It will tap into a car’s system-level operations, meaning you could ask Google Assistant to turn on the heat, turn off the seat warmers, or even book maintenance appointments. The system is also customizable to suit carmakers’ differing styles, giving them more control than they get with projected Android Auto (or Apple’s CarPlay, for that matter).
Under the “constant companion model,” we see our smartphones as always-on portals to information. Instead of improving activities that we found important before this technology existed, this model changes what we pay attention to — often in ways designed to benefit the stock price of attention-economy conglomerates, not our satisfaction and well-being. The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital encroaches on the analog. If you return this innovation to its original limited role, you’ll get more out of both your phone and your life.
“Our own information—from the everyday to the deeply personal—is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” warned Apple chairman Tim Cook during his speech to the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. “Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance.”
Photos of other FACES matches aren’t the only potentially exculpatory evidence. Algorithm quality, confidence thresholds, and the format for returning matches can all affect the accuracy of the technology. Given those known issues, police should be required to disclose the very use of facial recognition software. Willie Allen Lynch, who was convicted in 2016 for selling crack, had no right to view photos of other suspects identified by the facial recognition search that led to his arrest.
Silicon Valley’s network is its most important currency. Few are as influential, as the PayPal Mafia. This all-male cohort of 20 founders and early investors in PayPal, which eventually sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002—have gone on to become some of the Valley’s most prolific investors. Among them are Elon Musk, who founded Tesla and SpaceX, and Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn.
Demographic information is key to retail shopping. Retailers want to know what people are buying, segmenting shoppers by gender, age, and income and then targeting them. “Cooler Screens” do not use facial recognition. Shoppers aren’t identified. Cameras analyze faces to make inferences about shoppers’ age and gender. The camera takes their picture, which an AI system will analyze. The system can estimate if the person is a woman in her early 20s or a male in his late 50s, making note only of what shoppers picked up and basic information on their age and gender.
Amazon is trying to poach shippers from FedEx and United Parcel Service by targeting fuel surcharges and extra fees that drive up the cost of home deliveries. The residential surcharge at FedEx is $3.80 per parcel and $3.95 at UPS. That can equal 40% of the average ground-delivery charge. The two carriers also impose fuel surcharges which, for a domestic ground delivery is 6.75% at FedEx and 7% at UPS. Extra fees can amount to 30% of the shipping cost. Amazon’s shipping rates (are) 10% lower than UPS and FedEx.
Pickup trucks are a cultural shibboleth in the United States — a staple of American farms, construction sites, and country music videos. Ford Motor Company announced it plans to create a battery-powered version of its most popular offering, the F-Series. Ford sold more than 900,000 units of the F-series last year, making it the best-selling model line in the United States. The F-150 in particular stands out, with more than 40 million sold over the last 60 years.
BitTorrent usage piracy is on the rise. The culprit: an increase in exclusivity deals that force subscribers to hunt and peck among a myriad of streaming services to actually find the content they’re looking for. Every major broadcaster will have launched their own streaming service by 2022.“More sources than ever are producing "exclusive" content available on a single streaming or broadcast service—think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid's Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon.” The industry could lose this audience back to piracy by making it expensive and cumbersome to access content.
People requesting procedures to resemble their digital image (is) referred to as “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Where cosmetic surgery patients once brought in pictures of celebrities with their ideal nose or jaw, they now point to photos of themselves. Filtered images’ “blurring the line of reality and fantasy” could be triggering body dysmorphic disorder, a mental health condition where people become fixated on imagined defects in their appearance. 55% of surgeons said patients’ motivation was to look better in selfies, up from 13% in 2016. Instagram, where 60% of users are aged between 18 and 24 has become a marketplace for cosmetic procedures.
If your machine-learning model is trained on images, then the concept has to be visually expressible. TCAV lets humans ask an AI if certain concepts matter to it. But what if we don’t know what to ask — what if we want the AI system to explain itself? Interpretability research focuses on building inherently interpretable models that reflect how humans reason. AI models are already being used for important purposes, without having considered interpretability.
High-altitude surveillance was once the domain of global superpowers. Now, a growing number of start-ups are turning it into a business, aiming to sell insights gleaned from cameras and other sensors installed on small and inexpensive “cube satellites.” Orbital Insight tracks activity in more than 260,000 retail parking lots across the country, and it monitors the levels of more than 25,000 oil tanks around the world. Advances in artificial intelligence allow machines to analyze this data with greater speed and accuracy.
Apple's largest iPhone assembler, Foxconn, is considering producing the devices in India. As difficulties in the China market grow, India is attracting the world’s tech companies, both for its potential as a manufacturing base and for its huge emerging market of 1.3 billion consumers. Manufacturing high-end iPhones in India could help lower prices by allowing Apple to avoid a tariff that adds 20% to devices imported from China. Expanding business in India could also offer Apple an alternative to China, the world’s largest smartphone market.(But) Indian workers aren’t as skilled as Chinese and India’s infrastructure lags behind China’s.
FCC boss Ajit Pai (claimed) killing net neutrality would boost broadband industry investment, spark job creation, and drive broadband into underserved areas. According to analysis this week, capital spending among the nation’s four biggest cable providers is expected to decline 5.8% this year. ATT is prepping another round of layoffs despite netting $20 billion from tax cuts. Verizon this week said it would be cutting 7 % of its media staff—on the heels of a 10,000 employee “voluntary” severance package. ISPs have been letting their networks fall apart in many states, despite millions in taxpayer subsidies
Amazon now has a say in the development of a commonly used smart home standard, giving the company more power as it continues to push smart speakers, cameras, doorbells, and all other kinds of gadgets into its customers’ homes.Amazon has a seat on the board of the Zigbee Alliance, a wireless protocol for letting gadgets communicate; but unlike Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Zigbee is good for low-power devices and has the ability to travel longer distances, making it ideal for simple smart gadgets like a light switch.
Many of the good jobs of the future will require being good at using both sides of the brain. Jobs that tap both technical and creative thinking include mobile-app developers and bioinformaticians, and represent some of the fastest-growing and highest-paying occupations. Employers want workers with experience in capabilities as big-data gathering and analytics. Such roles require familiarity with advanced computer programs but also creative minds to make use of the data.
Avatars having complex and interactive conversations with customers will increase the amount of data businesses access. Avatars can know if you were bored or happy in real time and know the moment someone became disengaged. This raises questions around the idea that marketing AIs could intimately know their users,“Our evolutionary history suggests that we want eye contact, we want body language, and we want non-verbal communication like smiles or shoulder shrugs. If you’re Amazon or whoever, and you’re interested in having people engage with your AI, it’s inevitable that it ends up taking a human-like form.”
"I’d hopped on various models with broken brakes before, only to swiftly hop off and park safely. I’d heard others complain about sticky accelerators. This sudden motor failure, however, was new." The scooter industry’s approach to safety has seemed more in the “move fast and break things” spirit. The user agreements that all riders must sign are clear about rider risk assumption: Riders must agree that they understand that the activity they’re engaging in is potentially dangerous, and that they’re deciding to play anyway.
Verizon purchased Yahoo for $4.48 billion in June 2017 and bought AOL for $4.4 billion in June 2015. Yahoo and AOL were initially combined into a subsidiary called Oath, which was renamed to Verizon Media this month. Verizon's media division hasn't been able to compete effectively against Google and Facebook in the advertising market. Positive momentum for the media group includes Yahoo Sports' NFL streaming, Yahoo Finance's expanded coverage and visitor growth, and the Yahoo-HuffPost News Network getting 41 million visitors in November.
Currently a multi-billion dollar industry, influencer marketing is a neologism to describe a popular online figure paid to promote a product or service within their social media feed.The industry has grown rapidly and is projected to generate as much as $10 billion by 2020. “In 2016 an endorsement from a top-level influencer would cost$5,000 to $10,000. Now, brands are expected to pay over $100,000 for the same placement.” With so much money flooding into an unregulated market, ethical lapses ensue. One influencer justifiedmisleading her social media followers, “They assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t.”
Most workers believe that at least some aspects of their jobs are too complex for the most advanced robots. 80% believe that only a human could perform most or all of their job. (People) from Europe and Central Asia were the most confident that their jobs require a human touch. 30% of participants from South Asia felt entirely replaceable by existing technology. Another 19% said that most of their job responsibilities could be automated.
Publicly traded technology giants such as Apple (are) down 13% from a high set in August fostering newfound restraint for investors in Silicon Valley, especially for younger, cash-strapped startups. A worrying sign is the shrinking of seed deals, the earliest investments in startups. The number of these deals dropped to 882 in the fourth quarter from1,500 three years earlier. The attitude among technology investors is shifting, “swapping ’fear of missing out’ for ’shame of being suckered.’ ”
The electromagnetic scans account for 40% of all diagnostic imaging worldwide. In the U.K. alone, there are 330,000 x-rays at any time that have waited more than a month for a report. The system can prioritize x-rays.“There are no systematic, automated ways to triage chest x-rays and bring those with critical findings to the top of the pile.” A computer vision algorithm was trained using labeled images to predict priority from visual information only, not text. When tested, the AI system sort (ed) abnormal x-rays from normal with “high accuracy.” X-rays with “critical” designations received a radiologist opinion in 2.7 days, compared with the current 11.2-day average.
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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
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