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Daily Archives: October 8, 2020

Forecast Election Results With Presidential Plinko

Lifehacker: “You see The New York Times’ “election needle,” and you get anxiety. You read FiveThirtyEight, and you wonder how your candidate can lose after being up by some seemingly impressive number of “points” or polls prior to an election. Welcome to the wide world of uncertainty, which many people—including myself—tend to discount when glancing at statistics, probability, and flat-out guesses. A prediction based on polling can be true and not true at the same time; yes, your candidate can be ahead in a poll, theoretically, but still end up losing because the poll didn’t quite accurately capture the will of the people that it intended to represent. And that little thing called the “margin of error” is important, too, even though we often pretend it doesn’t exist. To help us better understand this, Matthew Kay, an assistant professor of computer science at Northwestern University, devised a rather clever way to show how uncertainty can affect polling data…”

Google is giving data to police based on search keywords

Cnet – Court records in an arson case show that Google gave away data on people who searched for a specific address. “There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that… Continue Reading

Microsoft Edge gets free 24-hour video calls, screenshot tool, shopping features

VentureBeat: “[On October 8, 2020] Microsoft…announced a slew of new features coming to its Chromium Edge browser. There are PDF improvements, a built-in screenshot tool, support for more themes, and new shopping features in time for the holiday season. But the most notable addition is the one powered by Skype because, for better or for… Continue Reading

50 richest Americans are worth as much as the poorest 165 million

Bloomberg – A look at U.S. wealth data through the first half of 2020 shows stark disparities by race, age and class. “New data from the U.S. Federal Reserve, a comprehensive look at U.S. wealth through the first half of 2020, show stark disparities by race, age and class. While the top 1% of Americans have a… Continue Reading

Coronavirus Hit the U.S. Long Before We Knew

WSJ – The COVID Storm – Coronavirus Hit the U.S. Long Before We Knew Months before travel bans and lockdowns, Americans were transmitting the virus across the country. “The Wall Street Journal interviewed disease detectives and reviewed hundreds of pages of new research to piece together how the coronavirus infiltrated the wealthiest nation on earth.… Continue Reading

US states stopped their pandemic social restrictions too soon

Ars Technica: “Many countries that controlled their COVID-19 cases in the spring are now seeing rises in infections, raising the prospect that they’ll face a second wave of cases, as many epidemiological models had predicted. But in the United States, the number of cases has never dropped to low levels. Instead, it varied between high… Continue Reading

In-House Discussion on Gender Pay Gap Had Very Few Male Listeners

Phillip Bantz, In-House Discussion on Gender Pay Gap Had Very Few Male Listeners, Corp. Counsel (Oct. 7, 2020). “Legal department leaders for HP Inc., Fortune Brands and Interstate Battery System of America had a candid talk Tuesday about a thorny topic—the gender pay gap in the legal profession.  Unfortunately, few men attended the web panel… Continue Reading