tingilinde

gm and spying on customer's driving behavior

They harvested information on how cars are driven without permission and sold it to insurance companies. This sounds like the basis for a big lawsuit.  Other companies that make connected cars may well be doing the same thing.

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Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who was spied on.

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Not a good way to build brand and dealer loyalty. 

 

navy carrier training in ww2

a tip of the hat to Bart

spreading information

Spreading information in a social network can be done without mapping the entire network.  A nice use of the friendship paradox.

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Editor’s summary

Exploiting features of social networks (e.g., identifying “gossips”) has effectively diffused knowledge across populations. However, selecting ideal frontline individuals to receive information (influencers that serve as “seeds” to boost message diffusion) previously required mapping the entire social network, which is an expensive, time-consuming, and often impracticable task. Is it possible to identify the best seeds without having full maps of all individuals in networks? Field experiments by Airoldi and Christakis explored this question in a very challenging context: extremely poor, isolated Honduran villages. By expanding the “friendship paradox” strategy, in which friends nominate optimal friends as seeds, their algorithm efficiently distributed seeds throughout social networks without full network maps. This scalable strategy was more effective than random targeting, carrying far-reaching policy implications for enhancing low- and middle-income country welfare.

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experts on snow

A reasonably sized catalog.

 

the gop

pipe maker

Making Uilleann pipes almost the old way (he does use electricity)

 

converting office space into apartments

Much has been written about how ill-suited office building are for conversion. Some are taking a different approach - go to areas that are desirable to live in (Manhattan for young single workers), don't worry about making the apartments super-desirable, but make them slightly less expensive than convention apartments and assume tenants will leave in a few years anyway. 

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All his apartments are market-rate properties, so what he creates is élite but ordinary, luxurious but cramped, permanent but marginal. Avinash Malhotra, an architect who has done several conversions with Berman, noted that a single office tower can be carved up into hundreds of little units, as in a hotel. “He is not making housing for the homeless,” Malhotra said. “But I often joke among my employees that what we do is slums for the rich.”

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on the arizona territorial abortion law

It's not over until it's really over and the Rs are out of power.

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You’ve been conned.

At least if you fell for the news reports claiming that Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban has been repealed. If that is something you believe happened then, yeah, totally conned.

And the people who conned you know it.

They know there was no emergency clause placed in the bill the repeal the 1864 abortion ban, which means it won’t go off the books until 90 days after the Legislature adjourns.

Months from now.

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consequences of a gedanken experiment made read

disney's sodium vapor light system