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Tens of millions of US citizens were given a “COVID-19 decree violation” score as a result of a data harvesting program conducted during the first lockdown by voter analytics firm PredictWise.“These Covid-19 decree violation scores were calculated by analyzing nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings to get “real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns.” People who were “on the go more often than their neighbors” were given a high Covid-19 decree violation score while those who mostly or always stayed at home were given a low Covid-19 decree violation score,” writes Reclaim the Net’s Tom Parker.The data collected was then used...

The head of the scientist-and-artist collective BarabásiLab reflects on the transformative power of data in art.The 1961 Jasper Johns work 0 Through 9, which depicts the numerical figures stacked one on top of the other and scaled to fill the whole canvas, is art’s early acknowledgment of the important role that numbers play in our lives. Five years later, On Kawara began a series of small canvases, each painted with nothing more than the date—in simple white letters and digits—of its creation. His “Today” series, which now numbers more than 3,000 canvases, relies on the same indicators of numerical...

This is making the rounds on the internet. If you take the number of years between 2021 and your year of birth and then subtract those years from your year of birth, what year would that be? In my case, 2021-1968 = 53. Then 1968 - 53 is 1916. Just for fun, what year would you get?

The debate over bitcoin's environmental footprint has shaken its price, and prompted a public discussion about the environmental footprints of various industries, from oil & gas to tech to Wall Street. In a gauge of the public's interest in the environmental footprint of various industries vs. crypto, one chart that sought to offer some context for the bitcoin network's energy usage went viral.Still, as Bloomberg concedes, all those emails, memes, videos, PDFs and photos need to be stored somewhere. And with most companies increasingly reliant on cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure, these companies are building data centers like...

For a long time, the only foods that were “delivery foods” were pizza and American Chinese food. While American Chinese food delivery was largely taken on by independent restaurateurs, pizza delivery was backed by large companies like Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s. Or, as we like to call them… ‘big pizza.’ Take a look at the history of these companies, and you’ll find that they depended on technology at every stage to make delivery timely and efficient. Before big pizza got into the delivery game in the ’80s, pies were wrapped in blankets and driven to customers in cars....

Recently, a mainland Chinese netizen named “v64500” wrote on the online forum “V2EX” that his internet-connected television was scanning electronic devices in his house and uploading the data to a company called “Gozen Data.” The netizen revealed that his television is a mainland Chinese brand called “Skyworth.” The netizen thought the television was a bit slow and checked its backend service program and “found something called ‘Gozen Data’ and had no idea what it was doing.” The netizen said the television used the Android system. After studying the data for a while, v64500 found that “this thing [Gozen Data] scans...

WATCH #SHADOWGATE LIVESTREAMING NOW!! DOWNLOAD IT ASAP when it finishes! This documentary is what got Millie Weaver arrested this morning because the Deep State doesn’t want this information out in public!!

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure provider and content delivery network, is reportedly suffering outages resulting in major websites crashing across the internet. Multiple websites crashed worldwide today as one of the web’s most important infrastructure providers and content delivery networks, Cloudflare, suffered an outage. Cloudflare provides DNS and CDN services and powers approximately “40% of the internet.” The Cloudflare system status page stated that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The issue is reportedly related to the Cloudflare Resolver in the company’s edge network in certain locations. The outage struck at quite a few Cloudflare data...

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois Department of Employment Security has confirmed that a new online portal that processes claims for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance briefly allowed public access to applicants’ personal information including Social Security numbers. The PUA system, which went online May 11, is a federal program that provides unemployment benefits to gig workers and other independent contractors who are not normally covered by regular unemployment insurance. The data breach was first made public Saturday when state Rep. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican, said in a news release that she had been alerted to the issue by a constituent the...

Western democracies, especially the United States, just heaved a huge sigh of relief after getting word that United Kingdom PM Boris Johnson is dropping the controversial Chinese tech company, Huawei, as the nation's provider of 5G infrastructure. Although Johnson was in support of the Chinese tech giant laying the non-sensitive portions of 5G infrastructure, he said China's lack of transparency about coronavirus made the communist-run country untrustworthy. President Trump, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and members of the so-called "Five-Eyes" countries that share intelligence information, brought huge pressure on the Brits to dump Huawei. The U.S....

Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson · 1/ Okay, 11 am. Breaking news: it is almost certain more people over 100 have died of #COVID worldwide than under 30 - and more over 90 than under 50. Try to wrap your head around that. We have shut the world for a virus that has killed more CENTENARIANS than people under 30... 2/ How do I know? Well, in general, countries don’t track much data by age on the deaths of people over 85. But some states have reported actual ages; in Florida, 2 of 419 COVID deaths are in people over 100. Here’s...

As the CPP virus swipes through the United States, much attention has been paid to the situation in large cities. That’s not, however, where the rate of infection has been the highest. The epidemic has been the most concentrated in three suburbs around New York City as well as in New Orleans. While New York City has the highest number of confirmed cases, over 57,000, when counted per capita, the worst hit is Rockland County, a neighboring suburb of some 325,000 on the west side of the Hudson River. More than one in 67 Rockland residents has tested positive, a...

See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19 As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

Michael Bloomberg has plenty of reasons to hide his true intentions and plans. They are opaque by design for many reasons, one of which is that it gives him multiple options, depending on how things play out. Is Bloomberg, the possible Presidential candidate, the reason he is “the greatest threat to Trump’s re-election?” Uh, no. Is Bloomberg’s money “the greatest threat to Trump’s re-election?” Again, no. The greatest threat to Trump’s re-election is Bloomberg’s data project, or as I call it, Bloomberg’s big data machine. Why is it big? According to media reports, he has spent untold tens of millions...

THE HAMMER IS THE KEY TO THE COUP

If you have ever owned a smartphone, shopped online, bought an airline ticket or used a credit card, you are being secretly scored in ways that can impact your wallet. The scorers are businesses we buy products and services from every day. They are called Customer Lifetime Value or CLV scores. All sorts of retailers and businesses use them to judge our value as consumers... most businesses will not tell you what your score is. “It’s not your right as a consumer right now,” Thomas said. “Nobody has legislated that it’s your right to see it and to have input...

If, in late 2018, you are contemplating going into quantitative finance, then keep contemplating. Panelists at the recent Quant Conference in London say you’re unquestionably on the right track. “It's super-exciting to be a quant in 2018-2019,” said one panelist (a hedge fund researcher who formerly worked for a large U.S. bank). “Everyone is hiring.” Quants’ enthusiasm for being quants might be dismissed as self-love. Except, they're not the only ones in the zone. Goldman Sachs has proclaimed its pursuit of strats (its own personal brand of quant technologists), while at another conference the week before, the head of recruitment...

A file containing personal information on millions of Texas voters was found on an unsecured online server, Techcrunch reported Thursday. An estimated 14.8 million records were found on the server, representing files on the majority of Texas’s 15.2 million registered voters. It is unknown who owns the server, but analysis suggests the data was likely aggregated by the GOP data analytics firm Data Trust, according to Techcrunch.

The NSA has reportedly set up shop in AT&T buildings across the US for at least the past several years. The Intercept says it's identified eight AT&T facilities that are used for the National Security Agency's surveillance initiative. They are reportedly linked to a program called "Fairview," started in 1985, and AT&T is the only company involved with it. The facilities are spread out in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, according to the report. Last year, The Intercept reported on a likely NSA surveillance site in New York. Monday's report is...

The Next Big Discovery in Astronomy? We Probably Found It Years Ago — But Don't Know It Yet By Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County | June 3, 2018 08:44am ET MORE An artist's illustration of a black hole "eating" a star.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy. The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren't from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were...