Treasury Picks Tubman for $20 Bill, Hamilton to Stay on $10 | Bloomberg

April 20, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman will appear on front of the $20 bill, replacing former President Andrew Jackson and becoming the first woman featured on U.S. paper currency in modern times, a Treasury official said, in a design overhaul that will leave Alexander Hamilton on the $10 note.

The decision is the latest chapter in a 10-month-old controversy that erupted after Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew tried to address gender imbalance on U.S. currency notes. He opened up the selection process to the public just as the current face on the $10 bill was enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and outrage ensued.

Save Time and Money With the 80-20 Rule in Marketing |All Business

April 20, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The 80/20 Rule is a potent little principle that can increase your business revenue and make your life easier.

The gist of the 80/20 Rule is that you get 80 percent of your results out of 20 percent of your efforts. For example, 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of your customers, or 80 percent of your sales comes from 20 percent of your salespeople.

It doesn’t always come out as 80/20. It can be more extreme with 95 percent of the traffic coming from 5 percent of the roads on your commute, or 3 percent of your employees creating 67 percent of the errors. The point is that large results come from small efforts.

How Gorilla Glass Works | HowStuffWorks

April 20, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The manufacturing company Corning has developed a product it calls Gorilla Glass. The company designed the glass for our electronic lifestyles. As we carry around computers, tablets, smartphones, MP3 players and other devices, we risk damaging them through everyday use. Corning’s Gorilla Glass stands up to abuse with scratch- and impact-resistant qualities. And Corning’s approach allows the glass to be incredibly thin, meaning it won’t interfere with capacitance touch screens or add significant weight to a device.

Mitsubishi Motors admits falsifying fuel economy tests | BBC News

April 20, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Mitsubishi Motors has admitted falsifying fuel economy data for more than 600,000 vehicles sold in Japan.

Tyre pressure figures were falsified by employees to flatter mileage rates, the company said.

Almost 470,000 vehicles that Mitsubishi made for Nissan were affected and the issue was uncovered after Nissan found inconsistencies.

The announcement sent shares in Mitsubishi down more than 15% in Tokyo.

The Real Reason AI Won’t Take Over Anytime Soon | Live Science

April 19, 2016April 20, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Artificial intelligence has had its share of ups and downs recently. In what was widely seen as a key milestone for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, one system beat a former world champion at a mind-bendingly intricate board game. But then, just a week later, a “chatbot” that was designed to learn from its interactions with humans on Twitter had a highly public racist meltdown on the social networking site.

How did this happen, and what does it mean for the dynamic field of AI?

Stanford Is About to Have the Dopest Map Collection on Earth | WIRED

April 19, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

WHEN YOU VISIT the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University’s Green Library, if you can, take the stairs. Yes, you’ll have to spiral up three flights, but the wallpaper will give you plenty of excuses to take a break. Like: a Grand Canyon panorama, a birds-eye view of Manhattan, and a Buddhist world map featuring the imagined spiral of headwaters for the region’s three great rivers high in the Himalayas. There are more, but don’t dally too long. The stairwell is barely a prelude.

The Center itself is classroom-sized, and packed with approximately 150,000 historical cartographic artifacts. Many are stored in wooden cabinets that take up an entire wall. Along the other walls are globes galore, banquet table-sized plats, and massive, many-paneled digital touchscreens capable of calling up millions of megabytes of high-resolution historical maps stored on Stanford’s servers.

Supreme Court affirms Google Books scans of copyrighted works are fair use | TechCrunch

April 19, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. Related Articles As “Paying The Writer” Gets Easier, Whither Bookstores? Pronoun, A Self-Publishing Platform For Authors, Is Ready To Serve Humanity With Publishing Tools Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

The order is just an item in a long list of other orders that appeared today, and adds nothing to the argument except the tacit approval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals 2015 decision — itself approving an even earlier decision, that of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2013. So in a way, it’s old news.

What San Francisco’s Tech Boom Means For Bay Area Real Estate | Forbes

April 18, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The current state of Bay Area housing bears resemblance to the years leading up to the dotcom bubble in 2000 and the 2008 housing market collapse. At the peak of the housing bubble in 2007, the median sale price for a home in San Francisco was $895,000 while renters were paying just over $2,400 a month on average.

There’s no doubt that the Bay Area real estate market is white-hot once again and it’s largely due to the surging tech industry. Over the last few years, San Francisco has begun looking more and more like Silicon Valley, with companies like Google, Twitter, Airbnb and LinkedIn scooping up office space.

Nine years since the 2007 peak, housing prices, home values and rental rates are once again climbing to unsustainable levels. In 2015, home values jumped by more than 14% and the median sale price, meanwhile, is hovering around $1.1 million.

According to the California Realtors Association’s Housing Affordability Index, just 20% of residents living in the nine Bay Area counties can afford to pay that much for a home. Renters aren’t faring any better, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco hitting a whopping $3,490 as of January 2016.

Why You Should Remove QuickTime From Your Windows Computer Right Now | Inc.com

April 18, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

This past Thursday, The United States Department of Homeland Security issued an alert advising people running Apple’s QuickTime program on Windows computers to immediately uninstall the software. QuickTime was once a popular package for playing video and audio clips on computers, but it has since been eclipsed by other technologies.

Unfortunately, security vulnerabilities continue to be discovered in the QuickTime software — including two critical ones announced just this past week that could allow criminals to hack into computers with QuickTime installed if the devices’ users either run malware or visit a malicious webpage (which a criminal can induce via phishing, offering some “great deal” and spreading word of it on social media, etc.). Without security patches being issued by Apple, QuickTime software poses a serious danger to those running it.

Dunkin’ Donuts loyalty app stirring up trouble for Starbucks? | Fast Casual

April 18, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Dunkin’ Donuts is hoping to cash in on rage-filled, under-caffeinated Starbucks fans with its new DD Perks Rewards program. Coincidentally — or not — it launched today a new version of its mobile app for “quick, easy and secure payment.”

Guests who join DD Perks using the special code “STARS” through April 21 will earn an automatic 125 points towards a free any-size beverage, plus an additional 125 points during their second and third visits when purchases are made using an enrolled Dunkin’ Donuts card, said Sherrill Kaplan, VP of Digital Marketing & Innovation at Dunkin’ Donuts, “Our guests are the cornerstone of our brand, and we are committed to continuing to exceed their expectations.

Although numerous Starbucks customers posted angry Tweets when the coffee giant previewed the changes in February, their anger is again percolating via Twitter, since the official changes took place this week.