Friday, February 17, 2017

Mark Zuckerberg's Sociology 101 essay. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 2017 By Darrell Etherington

Remember essay questions in first-year college exams? Yeah, it's like that. Read about humans and more in The Daily Crunch for February 17, 2017.

1. Mark Zuckerberg goes long on humans

Facebook's CEO wrote a huge letter about world building and creating social good. It was a lot of words. And then even more words were written about those words.

The basics are that Zuckerberg acknowledges his platform's transformative power, but he's hoping to skirt any divisive politics in wielding that power, while also still "helping people" in the end. Good luck with that.

2. ...but in the end how much is he actually saying?

If you're looking for a more concise and clear-eyed cutting through of Zuckerberg's lengthy rumination, Taylor has you covered. There are bullet points! A tally of terms mentioned – and terms left out! And bolded sentences that articulate exactly what the Facebook founder is loftily meandering around.

3. I guess there's such a thing as a "car celebrity"

Richard Hammond qualifies as a "car celebrity," though I think Mike coined the term for this one. The star of Amazon's The Grand Tour, neé Top Gear, sat down with Butcher to discuss his social app for drivers, DriveTribe. Band together, drivers, for you are an endangered species looming on the precipice of automated vehicles.

4. Trucks are going to get chatty

Speaking of which, transport trucks using Peloton Tech will soon hit the road in semi-automated platoons, human driven but guided by an adaptive-cruise style collision avoidance and adaptive cruise system that will let them get big savings in trip time and fuel efficiency.

5. Project Loon's roving balloons won't be roving that much in the future

Alphabet's Project Loon moonshot is changing strategies. Thanks to an advance in their tech, these high-flying air balloons can now hover in a fixed spot, whereas before they roved about beaming their internet on different spots. Now it'll be easier to provide consistent access to a fixed location.

6. Google's AI can be the second set of hands on your keyboard duet

In other Alphabet news, Google has a new AI experiment that will let you play tunes via standard keyboard or USB MIDI keyboard, and have its machine learning algorithm try to play along. It sometimes even sounds melodic.

7. Twitter continues its anti-harassment efforts

Twitter is not going to notify you about convos started by people you've blocked or muted, though it will loop you in if someone you still follow gets involved in the conversation and @'s you as well. This seems like it strikes a balance, but I can see times when you'd want to know someone you've actively blocked is talking about you. The big lesson from Twitter's ongoing efforts to curb its rep for harassment is that this is a tricky needle to thread.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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