Sunday, August 2, 2020

This week too much was happening in the world and also too little was happening to make a sense of it all. Thankfully there are a lot of different news sources out there.

But here’s a quick breakdown of top articles and miscellany we found after scouring the web:

• Face recognition with masks is making headlines
  Amazon and Rekognize or Rekognition is getting scrutiny. Apparently thanks to the protests and clash between them and law enforcement, tech companies are trying to slow a one-world gov take over and overreach. It’s been shown that AI face recognition has a bias skew when it comes to stereotyping by color and race. Not good, no bueno. Some 3 letter acronym law enforcement agencies are upping their use of facial recognition AI and civil liberty groups have to sue to obtain transparent info on how the agencies create their algorithms and whether they are abusing privacy. Thank you sunshine laws and FOIA, right? IBM also is getting out of the mix with Amazon by forbidding some in its use policies for their programs to be used in law enforcement to prevent encroaching on privacy rights. Score a win for protestors this round.
• This is not so much a breakdown of headlines, but for news reporters and tech writers, you might see some userful information below and also see templates that are similar to our site. Great minds think alike, no? Research below for design layouts, articles and other interesting info. Mainly it’s a collection of articles and tech and odd musings from the net.
  https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/page/3/
  https://readwrite.com/category/fintech/
  https://futureoflife.org/
  https://sociable.co/
  hackernoon
  https://readwrite.com/2016/12/20/ai-driving-future-autonomous-cars-tl4/
  https://fossbytes.com/
  getpocket
  theverge
  wired
  archive.vn?
  betanews
• Now is the time to get looking to survive in this SHTF 2020 world. Here are some sites to get you started. 2020 has those overhyped “murder hornets” and then we have the pandemic, returning to school, hurricanes, and a potential economic depression with stock market recovery. But hey, it can still go downhill from here right? Nice sites below.
  See graywolfsurvival … offthegridsurvival … skilledsurvival
  There are many others of course.
• The American Disability Act just went by a few days ago. It was enacted in July 26, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. We were impressed the other day scouring social media and found some videos of someone showing how to use a rotary keyboard for typing out Braille on an iPhone. Apparently this type of system is based on Braille which is a system of dots. Think similar to a Dice except it’s 3 dots vertically and another set of 3 dots vertically and they are side by side. Then you have a “code” of dots in this particular matrix that symbolize letters. There’s a logical set sequence that you can use to memorize half the alphabet in Braille while the second row of the alphabet just adds another dot or so to the previous row.
  So for instance if you have dots in position 1 and 2 to represent the letter B then you use two fingers on one side of your phone. Your phone is turned to the side and you have a left and right side. It’s pretty neat and you can have the audio turn on for accessibility for people that can’t see: blind and visually impaired but can hear. There are also different swipes, double taps and vibrations to help give feedback to the use.
  Learn Braille: go to Wikipedia and read and check out the graphics.
• According to a TechCrunch article it says that people that get news from socia media are actually less informed in the world. Perhaps it’s a confirmation bias or skew toward people that are similar to you or you only have things that interest you? Uh oh for us, since we do spend quite a lot of time checking soc media. Luckily our editors also peruse the TV news, print media, radio and other sources. Voracious appetite.
• This week we heard more about snoop from Twitter. Apparently for some time some contractors had capabilities to check out user profiles of celebs and other people while moderating accounts. This along with the latest breach and also news that one of the groups that breached the platform was a minor… Hm? Another way to say script kiddie? Bad pun.
• War of the vaccines. Say we can’t get over this Covid because people don’t mask up and people get cavalier about social distancing etc. And we don’t build a herd immunity. If people get the courage to use the vaccine and not all paranoid then who gets dibs on the vaccine first?
  This was mentioned on NPR about how hopefully people will do things for the greater good and not stockpile and that some nations or people may not get it the first round due to shortages even despite best efforts. Spoonful of sugar doesn’t always help the medicine go down, y’know?
• The media, talking heads and analysts keep putting a spin on protests and covid. Some people are spinning the fact that protests occurred during a pandemic as if everything is normal while others are denying the basics of germ theory. The thing is crowds are still dangerous if there’s a contagion. But is this invisible taboo for safety or crowd control, that’s the social media debate this week still. And you know what they say about people getting info from social media… adding fuel to a confusing fire that has a dabbling of ethnic relations politics and you get a wildfire.
• Speaking of wildfire, that’s one going on this week in a part of the U.S. out of control this week. Disasters, pandemics, and emergencies oh my. As mentioned above, the greenhouse is on fire, (isn’t that right, climate-advocate Bill Nye?) And so is California with it’s almost annual wildfires, Aussie covid is happening and Florida hurricanes are making landfall. It’s almost like you can’t catch a break in 2020. Also more covid in middle east may actually be happening than is let on to public acknowledgement according to Aljazeera.
• More debate this week about opening school. The elites want your kids to go back to school, but you have to figure out walk, bus, pack, or school hoagies! So much confusion for parents and students. Back in my day it was crayons, backpacks and school bells and making it on the bus. Now it’s virtual classrooms, sitting apart… maybe not being able to pick your own food. Not being able to move from classroom to classroom to limit hallway traffic… No sports, extracurriculars… proms.. and no touching anything. Life just isn’t any fun is it? No field trips either this year maybe. The debate is whether it’s healthy to go back or possibly lose a year and get behind and if it will impact “growth” of a child.
• To the moon and beyond! This week the international space station and SpaceX was back in the news. The Dragon has landed. Some areas of the country might be able to see the International Space Station late in the evening. Also check for a stellar Perseid meteor shower near the middle of August.
• I spy with my Covid- eye.
  Apparently tracking is the thing in 2020. We have trackers across the internet dontcha know? And now we have covid tracking by adding sensors to hospital worker badges according to CNBC. The article mentions Swipesense which originally was used for tracking handwashing and valuable hospital assets. Well now there’s a sensor added to hospital worker badges in some places to find if Covid is being spread in a hospital. Supposedly they say they are not tracking employees through the whole day or even outside a patient room? But, well how does it know if Covid is spreading in the hallway if it doesn’t track out of a patient room. The creators stated it shouldn’t be used for timekeeping but how many other agencies do stuff like this all the time or use chat messenger away functions and video cameras to slowly encroach on what you’re doing while on the property or at “work”.
• In financial news this week.
  Gold briefly hits 2000. A record likely.
  The crypto digital coin king gets up to 11k then pulls back sharply.
• Finally an interesting proposition on energy.
  According to BBC’s future tech section it mentioned that with the world energy resources slowly being depleted across the years we may one day turn to radioactive diamonds and smelly earth-friendly fruit batteries one day.