Religion

The Largest main World Religions in order are:

• Christianity: 2.1 billion.
• Islam: 1.3 billion.
• Hinduism: 900 million.
• Buddhism: 376 million.
• Sikhism: 23 million.
• Judaism: 14 million
• Which is the largest religion in the world?
  It reveals that five years ago, there were 2.2billion Christians in the world making it ‘by far’ the world’s largest religion with Islam second with 1.6billion out of a global population of 6.9billion. By 2050, there will be 2.8billion Muslims and 2.9billion Christians, it is estimated.

  Here’s what they predict

They Say It Was Weiner’s (Laptop)Metadata

 

• FBI officials knew in early October that Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained emails that were sent to or received from Hillary Clinton’s secret server 
• However, agency head James Comey wasn’t informed of this development until Thursday, writing a letter to congress Friday that the emails existed
• Republicans, including Donald Trump, pounced on this news suggesting the FBI must have found a smoking gun in the new email trove 
• Democrats have pushed back suggesting it was inappropriate for Comey to write to congress without knowing what the messages contained 
• Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid today said he believed Comey may have violated the Hatch Act 
• What the FBI officials used to make their determination that Clinton emails were on the laptop was the metadata 

Read About It here

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In North Dakota, hundreds of Standing Rock Sioux tribal members and their supporters have held a months long campaign to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which would skirt the reservation’s northern border. The tribe says the 1,200-mile pipeline will damage its water supply and endanger sacred sites.

Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners is building the conduit from western North Dakota to Illinois, and state officials say no sensitive cultural sites have been found on the route.

The North Dakota protesters face misdemeanor charges, including trespassing and engaging in a riot. President Obama called on the US Army Corp of Engineers to review the risks of submerging an oil pipeline under the Missouri River, which supplies drinking water for 18 million people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has submitted documents to the court that certified one of their main claims in the case: that the pipeline will pass through and likely destroy Native burial sites and sacred places.

The Fascination​ With Space?

https://youtu.be/DhmdyQdu96M

Books of The Year

The Uneducated-Low Skilled Employee Not Concerned About Robots

 

A new survey released by salary benchmarking site Emolument revealed that the least educated people in the professional world are also the least concerned about the risk of technology taking their jobs.

Emolument surveyed 900 people working across “several industries and countries” and found that those with no university education were least likely to think that technology is a risk to their job. Just 18% of people with no degree answered yes when asked: “Is technology putting your job at risk?”

Emolument

Recent research from the University of Oxford’s policy school, the Oxford Martin School titled “Technology at work: V2.0,” revealed that 35% of jobs in the UK are at risk of being replaced by automation, 47% of US jobs are at risk, and across the OECD as a whole an average of 57% of jobs are at risk. In China, the risk of automation is as high as 77%.

Many  of the jobs at risk include low-skilled service jobs like call centres or in manufacturing industries

Emolument

World Economic Forum (WEF) warned that in the mean time, while this is pushing us into “the fourth industrial revolution” and  transforming the labour markets beyond all recognition from decades ago, it will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020. This includes countries like Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US.

The Report

 

Shodan -A Search Engine For Internet Of Things

 

To look up security cameras (or Wi-Fi baby monitors or smart TVs or routers), all hackers have to do is go to Shodan.  IoT devices are connected to the internet, and as a result each has an IP address, a string of numbers that identifies the device and serves as its specific address on the net. IP addresses are public information, which anyone can index on a search engine, not just Shodan, Google or Bing. The creators of Shodan and similar search tools say their goal is to help good-guy researchers.  Security experts say the good guys need to be able to see as much as the bad guys can in order to be effective.

AT&T Purchased Time Warner For $85 Billion

The combination of AT&T and Time Warner will create a media-telecommunications firm that is much larger than Comcast, the giant cable TV distributor that purchased NBC Universal five years ago. It also makes AT&T a major media power player after its acquisition last year of DirecTV for $48.5 billion.

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iPhone7 vs Samsung Galaxy S7

Obama Administration &The Employers

The Obama administration has called on U.S. states to ban agreements that prohibits many workers from moving to their employers’ rivals, saying it would lead to a more competitive labor market and faster wage growth.

The administration said so-called non-compete agreements interfere with worker mobility and states should consider keeping companies from requiring low-wage workers and other employees who are not privy to trade secrets or other special circumstances to sign them.

Biden also mentioned that a salesman in Connecticut who was laid off and forced to spend his retirement savings because he was prohibited from accepting other sales jobs.

“(Workers) can’t reach their true potential without freedom to negotiate for a higher wage with a new company, or to find another job after they’ve been laid off,” Biden said.

.The problem drew attention from some lawmakers and advocacy groups in June when the attorney general of Illinois filed a lawsuit claiming non-compete agreements signed by employees of fast-food franchise Jimmy John’s were unlawful. The company said it would stop using the agreements in order to settle the case.

The Obama administration on Tuesday also urged states to ban non-compete agreements that are not proposed before a job offer or promotion is accepted and said employers should not be able to enforce the agreements when workers are laid off.

The White House said 20 percent of U.S. workers are bound by non-compete agreements, including 14 percent of those earning less than $40,000 per year.

 

Russia’s Satan 2 Missle

Russia has finally revealed it’s RS-28 Sarmat missile—better known as the Satan 2 nuclear missile—The new weapon can deploy warheads of 40 megatons, or about 2,000 times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945. Satan 2 is also capable of evading radar defenses and could travel far enough to strike the US East and West Coast.

US and Russia both signed treaties in 2010 restricting the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles the countries would keep in reserve, but despite the truce, Russia said it must maintain a strong nuclear deterrent because of the US military involvement in Europe. The Satan 2 is expected into service in late 2018, and Russian officials say it will fully replace the old Satan missiles by 2020.

Hidden Apartments In New York Public Libraries

A 100 years ago people resided in hidden apartments above New York’s public libraries there are thirteen left.When these libraries were built, about a 100 years ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million, worth well over $100 million today, to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings, the Carnegie libraries, were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with his family. “The family mantra was: Don’t let that furnace go out,” one woman who grew up in a library told the New York Times. 

But since the ’70s and ’80s, when the coal furnaces started being upgraded and library custodians began retiring, those apartments have been emptying out, and the idyll of living in a library has disappeared. Today there are just 13 library apartments left in the New York Public Library system.

 Fort Washington, the front room.

 Inside the apartment, looking past the living room and kitchen doors. 

Inside the apartment, looking past the living room and kitchen doors.

The back bedroom.

Fort Washington plan. (Image: New York Public Library)

Another bedroom, used for storage.

Read More On Library Apartments

Galaxy Note 7 Owners Upset: Where’s Our Money?

A report from The Guardian, says a number of individuals who suffered property damage when their Note 7 exploded say Samsung is resisting paying compensation.

The Snoo Baby Bed

Pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp together with Swiss designer Yves Béhar (of the Fuseproject firm) and a team at MIT’s Media Lab to create a solution. Five years later,resulted in the automated Snoo baby bed.

Throughout the night, Snoo rocks the baby and plays back soothing in-the-womb-like white noise. 

When the integrated microphones detect that the baby is crying, the bed starts jiggling the infant and increases the white noise until the crying stops, at which point it resumes the gentler rocking. Parents wishing to monitor or manually control the bed can do so via an app on their smartphone, using a Wi-Fi connection.

An optional organic cotton swaddle can be quickly wrapped around the baby and attached to the bed using built-in clips, to keep them safely lying on their back. There’s also an LED night light, the intensity of which is dictated by an ambient light sensor.

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Ozone Pen Purifies Drinking Water

The O-Pen supports off-roaders and world travelers by keeping drinking water clean and fresh. In contrast to more common purification means, like UV rays and iodine, this pen-sized, battery-powered purification device kills bacteria, protozoa and viruses with the stuff that blocks those UV rays in the atmosphere: The O-Pen recharges via USB cord .The O-Pen was launched in July and is available for US$199. The price is expected to become more competitive over time.

Source: Roving Blue

 

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White House design, designer known only as “A.Z.”

Maryland Historical Society

James Hoban’s earliest known drawing of the White House, 1792.

Massachusetts Historical Society

Hoban’s exterior drawing, or “elevation,” 1793.

The Maryland Historical Society

Ellicott began his survey on February 11, 1791. He had already hired Benjamin Banneker, an astronomer and surveyor, to make the astronomical observations and calculations necessary to fix the south corner of the new city’s square at Jones Point in Alexandria, Virginia. For the next two months they surveyed ten-mile lines first along the southwest line, then along the northwest line, next along the northeast line, and finally along the southeast line to create the square. Read More

 

 

 

African American Albino Brothers Kidnapped For Circus

Eko and Iko were the sideshow stage names of George and Willie Muse, the grandsons of former slaves.

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The Stalkers Profile

 

Stalkers often suffer from low self-esteem, and feel they must have a relationship with the victim in order to have any self worth. Preoccupations with other people almost always involve someone with weak social skills and low self-esteem. Few stalkers can see how their actions are hurting others. They display other sociopathic thinking in that they cannot learn from experience, and they don’t believe society’s rules apply to them. Most stalkers don’t think they’re really threatening, intimidating, or even stalking someone else. They think they’re simply trying to show the victims that they’re the right one for them.  To the victims of stalking it is like a prolonged rape. Sociopathic thinking Has a mean streak No or few personal relationships Lack of embarrassment or discomfort at actions In “A Study of Stalkers” Mullen et al.. (2000)[16] identified five types of stalkers: Rejected stalkers pursue their victims in order to reverse, correct, or avenge a rejection (e.g. divorce, separation, termination). Resentful stalkers pursue a vendetta because of a sense of grievance against the victims – motivated mainly by the desire to frighten and distress the victim. Intimacy seekers seek to establish an intimate, loving relationship with their victim. Such stalkers often believe that the victim is a long-sought-after soul mate, and they were ‘meant’ to be together. Incompetent suitors, despite poor social or courting skills, have a fixation, or in some cases, a sense of entitlement to an intimate relationship with those who have attracted their amorous interest. Their victims are most often already in a dating relationship with someone else. Predatory stalkers spy on the victim in order to prepare and plan an attack – often sexual – on the victim.

 

Facial Recognition & Police

A new study published Tuesday by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology.

The study reveals:

• Around 117 million American adults are already in a facial recognition network.
• The FBI runs searches of face recognition databases more often than wiretaps.
• About 25 percent of police departments across the country have access to facial recognition networks. Those networks are often cross-referenced with databases of ID photos such as driver’s licenses.

According to the report. law enforcement can do almost whatever they want with this technology, including scanning the photos of people who have never committed a crime. No state legislature “has passed a law comprehensively regulating police face recognition,”

Wiki Leaks Assange Internet Access Cut

 

Ecuador has temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications networks within its Embassy in the United Kingdom. This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.  Ecuador admits it cut off Assange’s internet due to his use of it to interfere in the U.S. election.

Samsung Has Exchange Booths @ The Airports

Samsung now it has booths at airports. Travelers heading out of a number of Australian airports, as well as many of the biggest in the U.S. and Japan, will find Samsung representatives willing to exchange their Note 7 for an alternative. Anyone heading into an airport will have to exchange their phone too since taking one on a plane was recently prohibited in the United States.

Don’t Feel Like Standing?

Google Trips

 

The APP

The Robotic Lawyer

 

The UK-based DoNotPay chatbot has extended its services into New York in March 2016, and successfully challenged 160,000 of 250,000 parking fines over a 21-month period. The free online program asks people a series of questions to work out whether an appeal is viable, and then guides the user through the appeals process. The DoNotPay program is also able to navigate compensation for delayed flights.

Image

Millenials Millionaires Earning Their Money Differently

 There are  less than half of the demographic affluent millennials completing post-graduate degrees compared to wealthy baby boomers.While millionaires are much more likely to have higher level education degrees compared to the average American, millionaire boomers and gen-xers are much more likely to obtain higher degrees than affluent millennials. The younger generation sees greater opportunity to create their own businesses and working full-time, with about 90 percent of millennial millionaires working full-time in their own business.

Young millionaires millennials are clearly different, many of them are taking another route to becoming wealthy and working in their own businesses.

Males still make up the largest percentage of millionaire individuals, with 67 percent of all millionaires being men and only 33 percent women. When looking at millennials the percentage only shifts slightly, with 66 percent men and 34 percent women.

Shullman Research

Billionaire Wealth Declined By $300Billion

 

The total wealth held by international billionaires has been affected by external factors in 2015, decreasing to $5.1 trillion from $5.4 trillion, according to a new report by UBS and PwC.

Factors such as asset transfer within families, the deflation of commodity pricing, such as petrol, and the appreciated value of the United States dollar are responsible for a decline of total wealth. UBS and PwC’s annual “Billionaires Report” found that the average billionaire’s wealth dropped from $4.0 billion to $3.7 billion.

Michael Spellacy, a global wealth leader at Pricewaterhouse Coopers said “strategic planning becomes even more crucial for wealth preservation,”. This year 60 individuals from Europe inherited their fortunes in 2015 for the first time.

The United States., which boasts the biggest collection of billionaires by region, sets the trend. Total U.S. billionaire wealth fell, but ‘new money’ fared better than old, falling by just 4 percent, from an average $4.7 billion per individual to $4.5 billion.”

UBS and PwC’s Billionaire Report found that Europe has the highest number of multi-generational billionaires. These 182 individuals, or 54 percent of billionaires, have proved to be the most resilient in preserving wealth.  Familial ties and upholding legacy are important to many billionaire families, meaning that the wealthy of Europe tend to the businesses that may have been established generations before either by investing in their companies or buying other family-owned firms.

Germany and Switzerland have the highest concentration of “old wealth” based on inheritance, whereas billionaires in U.S. are beginning to outnumber those of inherited wealth.

One hundred -seventy five,  billionaires are multi-generational. But, for the first time in 10 years, the average of self-made billionaires has overtaken those who inherited their fortunes. The average self-made billionaire has a total wealth of $4.5 billion compared to multi-generational billionaires’ average of $4.3 billion. Asia mainly China has created one billionaire nearly every three days.

Transferring wealth is a common cause of fortunes becoming diluted. When a billionaire dies, the wealth is split between heirs, and oftentimes the resulting fortune does not meet the billion-dollar wealth ceiling.

Image courtesy of Ferragamo 

Image courtesy of Peninsula Hotels 

Ethnicity Of Developers & AI

Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab told President Obama that” it may upset some of his students at MIT, but one of his concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us. They think AI is an answer to “all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us… Everybody needs to understand how AI behaves is important… because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI”.

Pondering questions:

If a health care AI system is designed by white males will it skew towards protecting the health of that group?

If the government uses AI systems for future services will it be fair to everyone?

AI systems learn from studying human behavior;However, there are large differences between people. For example: AI systems serving a Hispanic community will require AI systems trained on that population. It will require ethnic profiling.

Similarly, the best AI systems will understand women’s needs and will learn from profiling that population.

Questionable Issues: Will AI systems for African-Americans have to be developed by African-Americans in order to be accepted? Women for women, etc?

 

Uber Drivers Now Eligible For Unemployment Insurance

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Nosey People

They’re nosey in your home life, the workplace, social life etc

Reasons Why

Spike Lee To Direct She’s Gotta Have It Series For Netflix

Netflix  ordered a 10-episode series of She’s Gotta Have It, which the company is a “contemporary update” to the original film. Lee will direct every episode, and executive produce alongside his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee.

As Deadline notes, the series was originally in development at Showtime in 2014, but never came to fruition. She’s Gotta Have It follows Nola Darling, a 20-something Brooklynite navigating the pitfalls of dating a trio of men. The original was shot in just 12 days on a very limited budget. Although details on the series version are scarce, one assumes it will be made with fewer restrictions. The project will be Lee’s first TV series.

Many Workplace Businesses Testing Facebook’s Workplace

The subscription product, called Workplace by Facebook, introduces the company into a crowded market for enterprise software and places it in direct competition with Slack, a messaging app introduced three years ago.

Many of the more than 1,000 businesses and organizations that have been testing Workplace during the past year showered praise on the product.  Facebook plans to charge $3 per active user for the first 1,000 employees, plus $2 per person for the next 9,000, and $1 for each after that. That’s cheaper than Slack’s paid version which starts at $6.67 per user.

With Workplace, Booking.com employees from around the globe conduct virtual brainstorming sessions on Workplace — and one discussion resulted in a new feature that helps travelers find a destination that matches their interests, budgets and time frame.

Sprint Donating Free tech Products To Disadvantaged Teens

President Barack Obama  traveled to Greensboro, North Carolina on  to participate in a town hall on race and sports and to highlight the administration’s work to improve the lives of disadvantaged youth through its My Brother’s Keeper initiative and other programs.

Sprint plans to give cell phones, tablets, laptops or mobile hot spots to students who do not have internet at home. Students would be able to choose the type of device that might meet their needs and it would be coupled with four years of free data plans.

The company hopes to reach its goal of a million students in five years.

A Trip To Mars May Cause Dementia?

Professor Charles Limoli of the UCI’s School of Medicine says “The space environment poses unique hazards to astronauts. Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel – such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making. Many of these adverse consequences to cognition may continue and progress throughout life”.
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Artificial Intelligence, Racism & The Whitehouse

 

Artificial intelligence is currently being used by law enforcement across North America to identify convicts at risk of re-offending and high-risk areas for crime. However,recent reports reveal that  AI will disproportionately target or otherwise disadvantage people of colour. 

Example: If a data set contains a bunch of faces of mostly white people, or if the workers who assembled a more diverse dataset (even unintentionally) rated white faces as being more attractive than non-white faces, then any computer program trained on that data would likely “believe” that white people are more attractive than non-white.

Read The Report Here

More On It Here

View my Archives about AI & Beauty pagents

Samsung Suspending Production Of Galaxy Note 7

After a number of replacement phones that was deemed safe after a recall — caught fire and sent at least one person to the hospital Samsung suspends the production of Galaxy Note 7.The report comes from the Korean news agency Yonhap. The New York Times corroborates the news citing a person familiar with the production stoppage. At least 5 replacement phones caught fire last week.

Thousands Of iPhone 6 Stopped Working & 3 Lawfirms Files Lawsuit

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple this year. Three additional law firms have joined in the lawsuit against Apple in Utah. Two years after iPhone 6 Pluses was released, the touchscreens are completely losing their functionality under normal use, which experts say is the long-term effect of the engineering flaw that gave us “bendgate.”

An excerpt from a class-action lawsuit demanding Apple address the issue.

Image: RiceIsForDinner/YouTube

Panasonic’s Invisible Television

When Turned on, it’s just like a normal TV. Turn it off, it’s as transparent as glass, meaning you can see the wall or shelving behind.

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Cossing New York’s Bridges With Facial Recognition Technology

Under The New York Crossings Project,10 bridges and tunnels leading into the city will be equipped with facial recognition and license plate reading technology, giving police a comprehensive record of every car making the crossing.The proposal already has civil liberties groups in an uproar.they are saying, “Governor Cuomo’s plan has the potential to put thousands and thousands of people’s images and data in a massive database that could be used by the government for who knows what,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement. “There is also an enormous risk that innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, especially people of color who are more likely to be inaccurately identified by the technology.”

ShakeShack managers and sommeliers at the new Union Square Cafe 2.0 eatery will wear devices to take better care of their diners. When the announcement came that all  that all  managers and sommeliers at his Union Square Cafe 2.0 would be sporting Apple Watches when it reopened this month, patrons paniced that the glow of organic bonhomie would be replaced by a bunch of smartphones. To ease the tensions, only  sommelier and managers will receive an Apple Watch which will not be seen. Servers will not wear the watch.These watches will be connected to an app developed by Resy, a tech-forward reservation system startup, and integrated into the restaurant’s point of sale system.This technology, is expected to allow the restaurant to take better care of its guests. Managers will be able to monitor with statistical precision how long a table has been seated and thus when their order should be taken.Likewise, guest using the Resy app will have a profile wherein preferences, allergies and past orders can be noted. The restaurant can also create profiles for every member of a party, not just the reserver.

Servers will not be wearing the watches and somms and managers wear long sleeves.’ Photograph: Issei Kato/Reuters

Google Phones With Verizon Wirless

 

 

The Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones from Google will be carried by Verizon Wireless

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