MesaZona > Table of Contents : Here's The Menu. Enjoy

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Yup, It's Always Something: Need Another Reminder??

Every day more invasion of personal data piracy and privacy

Facebook's new data-for-cash debacle

Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Axios

TechCrunch reported late Tuesday that Facebook had paid users, some of them teenagers, $20 a month to install software on their iPhones giving Facebook detailed access to everything taking place on the device.

Why it matters: We're all losing count of Facebook's privacy controversies, but this one is even more sensitive because it involves teens.

The social network faces further backlash from users and regulators, and it's also in hot water with Apple.

Facebook described the program as research to analyze how people use its own services and those of competitors. Late Tuesday night, Facebook defended the program, which dates back to 2016, but said it was discontinuing it for iOS users.

"Despite early reports, there was nothing 'secret' about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App. It wasn't 'spying' as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate. Finally, less than 5 percent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms."

— Facebook spokesperson

From Axios: Wall Street is split on self-driving cars

There's a growing realization on Wall Street that self-driving cars are still many years away. That pessimism is weighing far more heavily on traditional automakers than technology companies.

THE BIG PICTURE: Investors are betting the real value of AV companies will come from the estimated 4 terabytes of data each car will generate per day. And based on the way they’re valuing the major AV players, Wall Street seems to think tech companies have a better shot than Detroit at capitalizing on that data. . .

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Joann Muller4 hours ago

What's happening: The mood has changed about automated vehicles.

Bold predictions by Tesla and others that cars would be able to drive themselves by now have evaporated in the face of technology challenges and market realities. . .

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THE BOTTOM LINE:

The bottom line: "The value is in the data and what you can do with it," says Jonas.

Here's the link > https://www.axios.com/split-views

Mesa Farmers Market & Flea @ Pioneer Park

Did the organizers get their act together enough at the second weekend??? or is this all just more over-blown hype?
How many downtown residents/people turned-out for this or stayed away?

Published on Jan 29, 2019

Every Saturday from 8 am to 1 pm.
Pioneer Park, 526 E. Main Street, Mesa 85201https://www.mesafarmersmarketandflea....

Yes U Can Dig It: News + Significant Numbers

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.

Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features

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22nd place

The U.S. has fallen from 16th to 22nd on this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a measure of the countries perceived to be the least corrupt, administered by the watchdog group Transparency International. Denmark scored best, Somalia scored worst, and the U.S. sits right between France and the United Arab Emirates. [NPR]

“5,000 troops to Colombia”

John Bolton, the national security adviser, carried a yellow legal pad with him during a news conference in which U.S. sanctions on Venezuela were announced. Photographers got a clear shot of the legal pad, on which the words “5,000 troops to Colombia” had been written. Colombia shares a border with Venezuela. Colombia’s Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes said that his country did not know the “importance and reason” for Bolton’s note. [CBS News]
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3-minute hearing

In a 13-minute hearing yesterday, Roger Stone, President Trump’s longtime adviser, pleaded not guilty to one count of witness tampering, one count of obstruction of an official proceeding and five counts of making false statements. The charges were brought as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. [NBC News]

16,625 papers

The MIT Technology Review analyzed 16,625 abstracts of academic papers in the “artificial intelligence” section of the arXiv, a repository of scientific work, to understand where AI is heading. The researchers observed three trends: “a shift toward machine learning during the late 1990s and early 2000s, a rise in the popularity of neural networks beginning in the early 2010s, and growth in reinforcement learning in the past few years.” [MIT Technology Review]

16,889 bottles

In March in Hong Kong, the auction house Sotheby’s will hold what is predicted to be the priciest-ever wine auction — 16,889 bottles will be on the block and the sale is expected to bring in as much as $26 million. A quick glance at my calculator here tells me that these bottles cost, on average, about 100 times what I am accustomed to paying for my wine. And my wine works perfectly well, thank you very much. [New York Observer]

25 or more candidates

It’s presidential election season — but then again, when isn’t it? In any case, we’re tracking all the 2020 polls. Our tracker had to go through a bit of a redesign to accommodate all the candidates that pollsters are asking about — in some cases, 25 or more per poll. Enjoy all this sweet polling data. [FiveThirtyEight]
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2-for-1: Mesa City Council Meetings Mon 28 Jan 2019

Two short meetings with subliminal explosive content.
Need I say more??
It's now clear where politics is going .... SEE THE SMILING FACE OF MARK FREEMAN.
Who's gonna be next-in-line to pass the torch to when John Giles moves on in one or another?
Listen to what Kevin Thompson has to say at the start of the regular meeting over the selection of Mark Freeman as Vice-Mayor.
Giles seems rattled at both: even forgets the Boy Scouts are there to give The Pledge of Allegiance

1 Study Session [13 views]