TraffickCam
Smartphone users in the United States can try to help catch sex traffickers with *a newly introduced app designed to identify hotel rooms where victims are held*. The app, TraffickCam, asks users to upload photos of hotel rooms where they may be staying and compares those to photos by law enforcement that depict suspected sex trafficking. […] TraffickCam uses an algorithm that matches hotel rooms by comparing features such as carpeting, furniture and accessories. (Reuters)
Let me see if I have the right. I’m staying at the Day’s Inn in Pissant, Kansas. I take some photos of my room with this app. Up they go to cloud where they’re compared to photos some sick fuck has posted online. If there’s a match, authorities at least now know where those were taken. I do love me some Big Data. Like any tool, can be for good or evil.
How I use Google Calendar
Barb recently started the process of transitioning from MS Office to Google apps (Gmail, Calendar, etc). I’ve been using Google Calendar for years (I’m hardly a power user) so I made this short (9 min) video. If you’re already using Google Calendar you probably won’t find much new here.
Does Frugality Matter If You’re Rich?
“A 2015 study showed that one-third of American households with an income of $75,000 or more live paycheck-to-paycheck … and 44 percent of those households claimed that lifestyle purchases were to blame for their lack of financial progress.”
“According to a 2015 poll, which surveyed 1,044 investors, one in five respondents with investible assets of $100,000 to $1 million dollars agreed they carried too much debt and said they live paycheck to paycheck. Worse, 1 in 10 respondents with assets of $1 million to $10 million were in the same boat.”
“In the same poll, 45 percent of respondents with investible assets of more than $100,000 worried they wouldn’t have enough money to last through retirement.”
Personal Capital Blog
The Big Picture
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. By Sean Carroll
Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary.
For a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. […] Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode.
“Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems.
At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms. […] We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big deal.
The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Continue reading