Category: News and Views

Texas university students to protest gun law with dildos | BBC News

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Texas students are planning to hang sex toys from their bags in protest at a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons on university campuses.

“You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,” Jessica Jin, organizer of Campus (DILDO) Carry, wrote on Facebook.

About 3,000 people have signed up for the protest, which is planned for next year when the law takes effect.

Gun rights supporters have criticized the rally on the group’s Facebook page.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott enacted the campus carry law in June. Under the law, university presidents are permitted to create so-called “gun-free zones”.

“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms, however it DOES have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence,” wrote Ms Jin, a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Solar & Wind Reach a Big Renewables Turning Point : BNEF | Bloomberg Business

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Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It’s the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.

But that’s less interesting than what just happened in the U.S.

To appreciate what’s going on there, you need to understand the capacity factor. That’s the percentage of a power plant’s maximum potential that’s actually achieved over time.

Consider a solar project. The sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, varies in brightness with the weather and the seasons. So a project that can crank out 100 megawatt hours of electricity during the sunniest part of the day might produce just 20 percent of that when averaged out over a year. That gives it a 20 percent capacity factor.

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Urban Outfitters wants full-time employees to work for free | Business Insider

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As the holiday season approaches, Urban Outfitters is hoping that its employees are in the giving spirit.

Gawker published an email asking the full-time employees at URBN, Urban Outfitters’ parent company based in Philadelphia, to work without pay during five weekend days in October.

The email explains that October is the busiest month of the year for URBN (which houses Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie), and therefore, URBN needs its employees’ help.

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Google Is Planning For A Zero-Waste, Circular Economy | Fast Company

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The current economy is built on waste—dig up some materials, turn that into a product, ship it to an “end user” who eventually tosses it in the trash. But that’s starting to change.

Google is one of the latest mega-corporations to commit to the principles of a circular economy—one that keeps “technical nutrients” like plastic and silicon out of the landfill, and trims out wasted water, energy, food, and land.

“Our goal is to embed circular economic principles into the fabric of Google’s infrastructure, operations, and culture,” says Kate Brandt, Google’s sustainability lead. “What that means is that we’ll be focusing on opportunities wherever possible to eradicate waste through smart design—at our data centers, in our kitchens, on our campuses, in all we do around the world.”

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So Long Blogging. Hello—Yep, We’re Going to Say It—Plogging | WIRED

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WE LOVE SHORT.

Concise 140-character limits. GIFs. Texts. Snaps. Vines. Photos. Summaries. Notifications. Emoji. Slang. Yo.

But some of Silicon Valley’s biggest, smartest tech companies and investors are going long on long. And not long videos, either. They seem to be doubling down on good old-fashioned words.

Last week, Facebook updated its little-known Notes feature to encourage users to write “more beautiful and customizable” posts separate from status updates. Medium announced a $57 million round of funding (on Medium, of course) and is holding a VIP event next week to reveal new features. Everyone’s favorite unicorn Slack relaunched its Posts feature to help users write longer at work. And Re/code reports that Twitter is building a product to allow users to share posts longer than the typical 140-character limit.

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Facebook Declines to Remove Page Vilifying Autistic People | Forbes

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Over the weekend, a Facebook page appeared that claimed it existed for families united against “autistic shooters.” It’s unclear whether or not the administrator of the page was attempting satire or parody or being serious or somewhere in between, but the entire page used a jocularly vicious tone in its extended series of false claims that could have had no other effect but to cause harm and damage to autistic people.

Given the glee that the administrator evinced over the negative response to the page, the intent could not be in doubt: to compound for the autism community the pain that we all feel over yet another national tragedy.

To my certain knowledge, within hours of the page’s appearance, there were hundreds of requests to Facebook to remove this page, in addition to a petition to request that it be removed, which had thousands of signatures. From what I understand–and from my own experience–for almost two days, Facebook’s repeated response was to assert, again and again, that the page did not violate Facebook’s community standards. ETA: Evidently, Facebook continues to think that because the page, taken down last night, is back up again.

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Google and Microsoft agree to lawsuit truce | BBC News

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Microsoft and Google have agreed to end a five-year battle over patents.

Eighteen lawsuits had been active between the companies, relating to uses of technologies in mobile phones, wifi and other areas.

Details of the deal were not shared, but in a joint statement the firms said they would “collaborate on certain patent matters”.

It is the latest move by technology firms to keep patent rows out of the courts.

The battles, particularly over software, intensified in recent years as firms sought to capitalise on their patent portfolios.

But of late there has been a shift towards licensing rather than litigation.

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AI Is About To Go Mainstream And Reshape The Workplace | TechCrunch

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Much like the evolution of systems design, IT-enabled process change ebbs and flows over time. We see this in history as each technology revolution brings with it a refactoring of business operations.

With the rise of client/server computing in the 1980s, and the introduction of database servers and visual development tools like PowerBuilder, “business process re-engineering” became all the craze during the 1990s.

By 1993, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 developed IT systems to automate mundane tasks like insurance claims processing or AP invoice/purchase order reconciliation, channeling the mandate of technology-led business transformation in Michael Hammer’s infamous 1990 HBR article, “Don’t Automate, Obliterate.”

Twenty-odd years later, we’re about to see another “flow” of transformation thanks to resurgent interest in artificial intelligence and the emergence of the AI-powered business application. What’s different this time around is the transformation will be driven bottom up by rank-and-file employees, making it potentially more disruptive than any “flow” of process change that came before. What are AI-powered apps, and what do they have to do with business process re-engineering?

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The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet | Bloomberg Business

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Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was always at the top of the pyramid. A TV campaign was like “the Air Force,” Amram says. “You wanted to get your message out, you did carpet bombing.” But TV wasn’t cheap, nor did it solve “that age-old question: Half of my marketing is working, half of it is not, and I don’t know which half.”

About 10 years ago, not long after Google went public and Yahoo! was still worth upward of $50 billion, attitudes shifted. Digital search and display ads had the potential to reach TV-size audiences at a fraction of the price. “People thought it was going to change everything,” Amram says.

The euphoria escalated again around 2010 with the arrival of programmatic advertising, a typically banal industry term for what is, essentially, automation. The ideal programmatic transaction works like this: A user clicks on a website and suddenly her Internet address and browsing history are packaged and whisked off to an auction site, where software, on behalf of advertisers, scrutinizes her profile (or an anonymized version of it) and determines whether to bid to place an ad next to that article. Ford Motor could pay to put its ads on websites for car buffs, or, with the help of cookies, track car buffs wherever they may be online. Ford might want to target males age 25-40 for pickup-truck ads, or, better yet, anybody in that age group who’s even read about pickups in the past six months.

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