1. Google's Ad Quality Team Stats Data Sets Range In The Billions
"Our data sets contain billions of observations before any aggregation is done.Even after aggregating down to a more manageable size, they can easily consist of 10's of millions of rows, and on the order of 100s of columns."
-- Nick Chamandy, statistician at Google
2. Internet Huge Factor In Buying Decisions For Never-before Purchased Products
"According to a Nielsen global survey, the Internet is an important influence on consumers interested in buying new products
[...]
Social media is also an integral decision-making tool for consumers hunting for new products."
-- Nielsen Wire
3. The Pirate Bay Reports Anti-piracy Group To Police For Piracy
"The Pirate Bay has asked the Economic Crime unit of the Finnish police to investigate the alleged criminal actions of anti-piracy group CIAPC.
Last week the group copied The Pirate Bay's design, violating the site's usage policy.
In their complaint TPB cite a similar case where the owner of a parody site was prosecuted recently. "We will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright," TPB comments."
-- Torrent Freak
4. Buy.com Rebranded As ... Rakuten.com
"While "rakuten" does means "optimism" in Japanese, it sounds just plain weird in English, like a raccoon or something. Or ten of them. [...]
Why would you want to position away from a URL name that has a universal, positive meaning and replace it with something that means nothing to almost everyone.
This rebrand is so crazy that I have to assume that somebody inside the company has gone insane."
-- INC.com
5. Car Gets Stuck At 125Mph, Driver Can't Stop Or Get Out
He was going 60 miles an hour when the car's speed dial jammed.
Lecerf tried to brake. Instead of slowing, though, the car sped up -- with each tap on the brake leading to more acceleration.
Eventually, the car reached a speed of 125 mph -- and then remained stuck there. For an hour.
[...] an escort that The Guardian describes as "a platoon of police cars" to help him navigate a busy highway
[...] I just wanted it to stop."
-- The Atlantic
6. Geo-profanity Helps Identify Happiest And Crappiest Places To Live
"[...] a team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets [...]
The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content [...]
For individual cities [...] the amount of swearing contributed substantially to their final scores.
They think it's worth investigating this phenomenon, which they call "geoprofanity." "
-- The Atlantic
7. Facebook Censors Breast Feeding, Condones Hard Core Hate
"Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.
Yet images currently appearing on the site include a joke about raping a disabled child, a joke about sex with an underage girl and image after image after image of women beaten, bloodied and black-eyed in graphic domestic violence "jokes".
There are countless groups with names such as [...] and "Its Not 'rape' If They're Dead And If They're Alive Its Surprise Sex". One of the worst images I came across in a brief search shows a woman's flesh, with the words "Daddy f*cked me and I loved it" carved into it in freshly bleeding wounds. [...]
When I asked if the banned cupcake images could have been removed in error by an automated image scanner, the spokesperson said it was very unlikely. So it was a human decision to ban the image of a cupcake. Just as it is a human decision to allow pages such as "Teen SLUT pics" to continue to publish images of very young-looking girls, with no evidence they gave consent for their photographs to be used."
-- The Guardian
Note that the linked article is not a pleasant read. The material the article links to has been removed -- hours after the publication of the article...
The problem itself ... remains.
8. Kids Born Today Will Watch A Screen For 25% Of Their Lifetime
"By the age of 7 years, the average child born today will have spent one full year of 24-hour days watching screen technology; by the time they reach 80 they will have spent almost 18 years of 24-hour days watching non-work-related screen technology. That's a quarter of their lives."
-- Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman
9. Bio-Google Of The Future Produces 6TB Of Data Daily
"Yet that has only created new challenges: how to store, analyze, and make sense of the data. According to BGI, its machines generate six terabytes of data each day.
Zhang Yong, 33, a BGI senior researcher, predicts that within the next decade the cost of sequencing a human genome will fall to just $200 or $300 and BGI will become a force in assembling a global "bio-Google"-it will help "organize all the world's biological information and make it universally accessible and useful."
-- Technology Review
10. Permanent Hotmail To Outlook.com Transition Has Begun
"Microsoft's faster, simpler, cleaner Outlook.com officially launched on Tuesday, marking the demise of its predecessor. All users will switch to the new-look service over the next few months, although we can keep our hotmail.com addresses if we like. I probably will, hoping it now becomes charmingly retro rather than deeply un-hip. [...]
Farewell then, Hotmail. Are you sure you want to sign out? Click yes."
-- The Guardian
"Our data sets contain billions of observations before any aggregation is done.Even after aggregating down to a more manageable size, they can easily consist of 10's of millions of rows, and on the order of 100s of columns."
-- Nick Chamandy, statistician at Google
2. Internet Huge Factor In Buying Decisions For Never-before Purchased Products
"According to a Nielsen global survey, the Internet is an important influence on consumers interested in buying new products
Social media is also an integral decision-making tool for consumers hunting for new products."
-- Nielsen Wire
3. The Pirate Bay Reports Anti-piracy Group To Police For Piracy
"The Pirate Bay has asked the Economic Crime unit of the Finnish police to investigate the alleged criminal actions of anti-piracy group CIAPC.
Last week the group copied The Pirate Bay's design, violating the site's usage policy.
In their complaint TPB cite a similar case where the owner of a parody site was prosecuted recently. "We will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright," TPB comments."
-- Torrent Freak
4. Buy.com Rebranded As ... Rakuten.com
"While "rakuten" does means "optimism" in Japanese, it sounds just plain weird in English, like a raccoon or something. Or ten of them. [...]
Why would you want to position away from a URL name that has a universal, positive meaning and replace it with something that means nothing to almost everyone.
This rebrand is so crazy that I have to assume that somebody inside the company has gone insane."
-- INC.com
5. Car Gets Stuck At 125Mph, Driver Can't Stop Or Get Out
He was going 60 miles an hour when the car's speed dial jammed.
Lecerf tried to brake. Instead of slowing, though, the car sped up -- with each tap on the brake leading to more acceleration.
Eventually, the car reached a speed of 125 mph -- and then remained stuck there. For an hour.
[...] an escort that The Guardian describes as "a platoon of police cars" to help him navigate a busy highway [...] I just wanted it to stop."
-- The Atlantic
6. Geo-profanity Helps Identify Happiest And Crappiest Places To Live
"[...] a team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets [...]
The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content [...]
For individual cities [...] the amount of swearing contributed substantially to their final scores.
They think it's worth investigating this phenomenon, which they call "geoprofanity." "
-- The Atlantic
7. Facebook Censors Breast Feeding, Condones Hard Core Hate
"Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.
Yet images currently appearing on the site include a joke about raping a disabled child, a joke about sex with an underage girl and image after image after image of women beaten, bloodied and black-eyed in graphic domestic violence "jokes".
There are countless groups with names such as [...] and "Its Not 'rape' If They're Dead And If They're Alive Its Surprise Sex". One of the worst images I came across in a brief search shows a woman's flesh, with the words "Daddy f*cked me and I loved it" carved into it in freshly bleeding wounds. [...]
When I asked if the banned cupcake images could have been removed in error by an automated image scanner, the spokesperson said it was very unlikely. So it was a human decision to ban the image of a cupcake. Just as it is a human decision to allow pages such as "Teen SLUT pics" to continue to publish images of very young-looking girls, with no evidence they gave consent for their photographs to be used."
-- The Guardian
Note that the linked article is not a pleasant read. The material the article links to has been removed -- hours after the publication of the article...
The problem itself ... remains.
8. Kids Born Today Will Watch A Screen For 25% Of Their Lifetime
"By the age of 7 years, the average child born today will have spent one full year of 24-hour days watching screen technology; by the time they reach 80 they will have spent almost 18 years of 24-hour days watching non-work-related screen technology. That's a quarter of their lives."
-- Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman
9. Bio-Google Of The Future Produces 6TB Of Data Daily
"Yet that has only created new challenges: how to store, analyze, and make sense of the data. According to BGI, its machines generate six terabytes of data each day.
Zhang Yong, 33, a BGI senior researcher, predicts that within the next decade the cost of sequencing a human genome will fall to just $200 or $300 and BGI will become a force in assembling a global "bio-Google"-it will help "organize all the world's biological information and make it universally accessible and useful."
-- Technology Review
10. Permanent Hotmail To Outlook.com Transition Has Begun
"Microsoft's faster, simpler, cleaner Outlook.com officially launched on Tuesday, marking the demise of its predecessor. All users will switch to the new-look service over the next few months, although we can keep our hotmail.com addresses if we like. I probably will, hoping it now becomes charmingly retro rather than deeply un-hip. [...]
Farewell then, Hotmail. Are you sure you want to sign out? Click yes."
-- The Guardian