Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Here In Mesa: Year-Over-Year Rent Increases Highest in The Entire USA For Mid-Sized Cities

A new report from https://www.rentcafe.com
The National Average Rent Stagnated in January – Cities in America’s Sun Belt Experienced the Fastest Growth
February 4, 2019 [7 Min Read]
Apartments in Mesa, AZ  have seen year-over-year price increases of 8.4% on average in January, reaching $981. 
Monthly-Report-january-2019-mid-size-cities-map

Tuesday, February 05, 2019

Expanding Economic Opportunity for More Americans

A hunger for new ideas + an URGENCY . . .
Streamed live 22 hours ago
Views: 368
Despite a historically long recovery, the U.S. economy continues to face significant, long-term challenges. Many workers find themselves lacking the requisite skills and training to thrive in the modern economy. Most low- and middle-income workers have not seen meaningful increases in their wages, and many have fallen out of the workforce altogether. Geographic disparities in economic opportunity have become more pronounced: prosperity is increasingly concentrated in certain regions and cities, while other communities, particularly those in rural areas, have fallen further behind. Taken together, these challenges, though vexing and deep-rooted, are not insurmountable.
As the 116th congress begins, lawmakers have ample opportunities to come together to advance bipartisan solutions to these challenges. At this event, the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, co-chaired by Henry Paulson Jr. and Erskine Bowles, will highlight some of these opportunities by releasing a series of policy proposals that aim to expand economic opportunity for more Americans
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How Does Millennial Generation Date Compared to Generation X?

Amazing! 46,000+ views!
Published on Feb 4, 2019
Whatever you need a website for, create yours today with Wix: https://www.wix.com/go/infographics2019
Has dating really changed so much throughout years?
Do the millennials (generation y or millennial generation) date differently than other generations?
In today's animated education video, we will take a look at just that:
How Does Millennial Generation Date Compared to Generation X?

Town of Queen Creek Mayor: Past, Present, and Future of Queen Creek

HUH? What is the mayor omitting in this 2-minute take on the past-present-and-future ?????
Published on May 24, 2018
Views: 75+
Town of Queen Creek Mayor Gail Barney actually grew up in Queen Creek, AZ. Hear his comments on the past, present, and future of the town!

24GHz XENSIV™ radar demo kits: Choose the right board to support your ap...

U GO Infineon! Whoa!
Published on Feb 2, 2019
Views: 147+
https://www.infineon.com/24GHz

Infineon provides three industrial XENSIV™ radar demo kits, supporting different applications - from basic movement detection to advanced motion detection and sensing. This comparison video will present the features and benefits of each of them: Sense2GoL, Distance2Go and Position2Go. Now you can choose the right one for your application.

Update from Google > A Number of Changes

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019:
Google+ widgets: Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets in Layout will no longer be available. All instances of these widgets will be removed from your blog.
+1 buttons: The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed.
Please note that if you have a custom template that includes Google+ features, you may need to update your template. Please contact your template supplier for advice.
Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog
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Contract Micro Workers In The Gig Economy Kept In-The-Dark

Two reports are out online today for the first time today 
The rise of the gig economy has presented a myriad of challenges for organized labor.
Most gig economy firms, including virtually all crowd-worker platforms, classify their workers as contractors, which means that they do not qualify for benefits, minimum wage, or overtime. The sites pay as little as $1 per hour.
At Google . . an open rebellion broke out over one - Project Maven. Several employees quit Google in protest, while others openly challenged the Silicon Valley giant’s leadership, claiming that the company had abandoned its “Don’t Be Evil” ethos. Employees demanded that the company swear off future “warfare technology” projects.
Executives were later caught misleading workers, erroneously stating that the contract was merely worth $9 million, while internal documents revealed that Google expected Project Maven to ramp up to a $250 million contract.
The distributed network allows for a global workforce. Figure Eight has a large user base in countries such as Venezuela, Indonesia, and Russia, as well as the United States. The far-flung employee base and individualized tasks on an opaque platform provide few opportunities for questioning corporate decisions.
One from The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/04 
Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project
 February 4 2019, 11:32 a.m.
"Millions of gig economy workers around the world now earn a living on so-called crowd worker websites — work that falls under the umbrella of crowdsourcing, or dividing up tasks into minuscule portions to spread over a large number of people.
The sites pay as little as $1 an hour for individuals to perform short, repetitive tasks, such as identifying images seen in pictures and churning out product reviews.
Some of these crowd workers were unknowingly helping to build out the Pentagon’s battlefield drone capability.
Several Figure Eight workers told The Intercept that it is not out of the ordinary for workers to be left in the dark about how their assembly-line style of data entry is used.
The work was done as part of a Defense Department initiative called Project Maven. Last year, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon had quietly tapped Google as part of the project to develop an artificial intelligence program to help Air Force analysts swiftly sort the thousands of hours of drone video and choose targets on the battlefield. . . " 
Since 2007 Figure Eight has hosted one of the largest digital platforms that allows individuals to sign up to perform micro-tasks, such as data annotation. Thehuman-in-the-loop” service is marketed as a cost-effective way for companies to fine-tune large data sets to make algorithms more accurate. Other firms in the industry include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Upwork, and Clickworker.
Will Pleskow, an account executive at Figure Eight, confirmed his company’s role on the Project Maven initiative during a September 2018 interview with The Intercept at the AI Summit, a trade show for machine-learning companies. Pleskow said the
workers performing the data labeling, known as “contributors,” did not know that they were working for Google or for the military, which is not an unusual arrangement. 
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One from The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/4 :
"According to a new report from The Intercept, Google hired gig economy workers to help build out a controversial artificial intelligence program that the company had paired with the Pentagon to build.
The workers were hired through a crowdsourcing gig company outfit called Figure Eight, which pays as little at $1 an hour for people to perform short, seemingly mindless tasks.
Whether the individuals were identifying objects in CAPTCHA-like images, or other simple tasks, the workers were helping to train Google’s AI that was created as part of a Defense Department initiative known as Project Maven.
Project Maven is a Pentagon project intended to use machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to differentiate people and objects in thousands of hours of drone footage. By employing these crowd-sourced microworkers, Google was able to use them to teach the algorithms it was running how to distinguish between human targets and surrounding objects.
According to The Intercept, these workers had no idea who their work was benefitting or what they were building.
Figure Eight, which was previously known as Crowdflower, is one of the largest platforms that employs microworkers. On its website, Figure Eight says its platform “combines human intelligence at scale with cutting-edge models to create the highest quality training data for your machine learning (ML) projects.” By partnering with these microworker outfits, Google could quickly and cheaply build out its AI.
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Google AI and Machine Learning with Dr. Karina Montilla Edmonds on MIND & MACHINE

Zelensky Calls for a European Army as He Slams EU Leaders’ Response

      Jan 23, 2026 During the EU Summit yesterday, the EU leaders ...