Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Legacies are never simple; they create victims as well as beneficiaries. The more substantial the legacy, the more heated the disputes are over who has title of ownership, who gets to enjoy an inheritance, and who is left out in the cold. One of the most dangerous ways to treat a legacy is to bask…
(Bloomberg) — The economy in the U.S. expanded at a slower pace than forecast in the fourth quarter as cooling business investment, a slump in government outlays and a widening trade gap took some of the luster off the biggest gain in consumer spending in almost nine years. Gross domestic product grew at a 2.6…
Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye1,*, Laura Radaelli2, Vivek Kumar Singh1,3, Alex “Sandy” Pentland1 1Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 20 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 2Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aabogade 34, Aarhus, 8200, Denmark. 3School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University,…
Fukuoka, Japan When the Kimura family moved here from Tokyo, their middle school-aged daughter missed her old friends. Midway into her first year in high school, she stopped going. Between 14 and 19, she barely left the house, and for one year hardly left her room, interacting only with her parents. Now 33 and recovered,…
People who are concerned about the use of excessive force by law enforcement may have to deal with another fatal can of worms. If Texas state Rep. Dan Flynn (R) gets his way, teachers will have the right to use deadly force against students in Texas classrooms, in the near future. The Lone Star State…
(Bloomberg) — Companies that defaulted for a second time in the years following the latest recession accounted for more than twice the proportion of total defaults than the historical average, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Firms that missed payments on obligations more than once due to debt swaps or bankruptcy reorganizations, made up 39 percent…
Google on Thursday added to Wall Street’s concerns about a slowdown in its core desktop search business and falling profit margins as it reported quarterly earnings that fell short of already downbeat forecasts. The search company’s shares, which had already underperformed the wider market over the past three months, slipped another 2 per cent in after-market…
Still from Jupiter Rising an upcoming scifi thriller Maybe you haven’t noticed, but in the past 20-or-so years there’s been a real catchy trend in major Hollywood movies to constrain the palette to orange and blue. The color scheme, also known as “orange and teal” or “amber and teal” is the scourge of film critics…
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer Much ink has been spilled railing against vaccine skeptics—you know, those people who don’t get their kids immunized against catastrophic childhood diseases because they believe the shots can cause autism and other serious problems. In a recent Parade magazine piece, reporter Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus: A True…
“This guy says he’s a doctor, so maybe he’s right.” Photo by Monkey Business Images/Thinkstock. The best account on Twitter, without question, has just over 40,000 followers and doesn’t tweet anymore. It’s called Don’t Read Comments (@avoidcomments), and in its heyday it periodically tweeted things like “Nobody on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I…