v.19 n. 45 – Released November 4, 2015
Jon Stewart’s next act will be on HBO.
The former host of “The Daily Show” has struck a four-year production deal with the company just in time for the 2016 election cycle.
“The partnership marks the next phase of Stewart’s groundbreaking career, beginning with short-form digital content, which will be showcased on HBO NOW, HBO GO and other platforms,” HBO said in statement on Tuesday.
In other words, whatever new work he creates will be streaming on the Internet.
Stewart will start by producing “timely short-form digital content,” allowing him to comment on current events, HBO said.
Social media rumors were taken far too seriously this weekend, as word spread around the globe that Snapchat’s recent privacy policy update gave the company ownership over user content, which includes photos, videos, and text messages. The rumors were picked up by publications that included The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald. Snapchat addressed the rumors in fairly plain language this morning with a statement assuring that its users retained control over their content.
In the statement, Snapchat assured users that they were not storing user content indefinitely.
“The Snaps and Chats you send your friends remain as private today as they were before the update,” the statement read. The company further elaborated that while messages were deleted from Snapchat’s servers after viewing, the company had no control over screenshots or pictures taken by their recipients.
WASHINGTON — Two of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) newly empowered committee chairmen took immediate advantage Thursday of the freshly elected leader’s pledge to give power back to committees — and may have handed him a 9/11-related publicity disaster.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee, both announced measures to temporarily extend the expiring 9/11 health and compensation programs.
In the process, they appear to have ignored permanent 9/11 legislation that was already proposed and sponsored by a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority of more than 240 members in the House.
The US will release nearly 6,000 people jailed for drug crimes in the coming days, an effort to reform policies that led to mass incarceration.
About 3,400 inmates were already confined in places like halfway houses.
Another 1,700 of the inmates are not US citizens and will possibly face deportation.
The changes come as part of an effort to reverse long jail terms for non-violent offenders, who make up about half of the federal prison population.
Many of these prisoners were released from federal custody on Friday. The rest will be released by Tuesday.
Quitting school to operate a startup is all the rage these days. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel even has a special fellowship that encourages young people to do that.
Most startup-minded students quit college, not high school, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
But teenagers are getting into tech at earlier and earlier ages. Writing apps and participating in hackathons are standard ways of getting internships at hot employers like Google and Facebook.
BEIJING — China’s Communist Party brought to an end the decades-old “one child” policy on Thursday, when leaders announced that all married couples would be allowed to have two children in a bid to reverse the rapid aging of the labor force.
The announcement came after the party’s Central Committee concluded a four-day meeting in a heavily guarded hotel in western Beijing where the committee approved proposals for China’s next five-year development plan, which starts next year.
“Improve the demographic development strategy,” said the official communiqué, or summary, of the meeting issued through the Xinhua news agency. “Comprehensively implement a policy that couples can have two children, actively taking steps to counter the aging of the population.”
The slowing down of life on a hot summer day isn’t your imagination. Economic literature is full with examples of how productivity comes to a crawl—even in America’s over-air conditioned society—when the temperatures climb above a given tipping point.
Consider that the number of cars rolling off U.S. auto assembly lines decreases during heat waves. Or that American children have scored lower on math tests that are given when the thermometer rises above 79 degrees. One study found that weekdays above 86 degrees have cost an average of $20 a person in lost economic performance in the U.S. And if temperatures above 85 degrees are sustained over a growing season, yields for crucial crops like corn and soybean in the U.S. drop substantially—a worrisome economic and global food security outcome in a predicted future of hotter summers.
The many trillion dollar question is what happens when all of these individual effects become more frequent as the world’s thermostat rises. How much will climate change cost? And how will it change the economic landscape of the places that aren’t affected by heat-related productivity losses now, but will be soon.
v.19 n. 44 – Released October 27, 2015
Having addressed marketers’ concerns about desktop viewability (ads that are actually seen by consumers) in 2014, the Media Rating Council is now in the hot seat to provide guidance on mobile advertising.
In May, the MRC made its first statement on mobile viewability, saying that smartphone-size ads need to be measured differently than desktop ads. Five months later, however, marketers are still waiting for an industry standard for chargeable impressions to buy ads against, even with the MRC’s promise to address the issue by the end of the year.
“Mobile viewability is huge—people want it done already, so there is a lot of pressure on all sides to move this forward,” said George Ivie, CEO and executive director of the MRC. “There’s also pressure to do it right. We don’t want to set parameters that aren’t properly informed by the data and how people use mobile.”
