Tag: business brokerages

The principal value of a business broker is to act as a buffer between the buyer and the seller

This new Apple Watch camera lets you shoot from the wrist

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The Apple Watch has never had a camera. Apple may never add one. But one company is giving the Watch the power of sight via a watchband accessory called the Wristcam . As watchbands go, the Wristcam is a bit of a beast; it looks thick and rigid on the wrist. But there’s a lot of technology inside. The band packs two cameras—an 8-megapixel world-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing selfie camera. Both use Sony sensors (like the iPhone), and both capture high-definition photos and 1080p video. A large button on the band activates one or the other of the cameras (you double-press to switch between the cameras, single-press for photos, and long-press for video) Read More …

Trump supporters believe election whistle blowers because they agree with them

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It’s amazing who right-wing pundits and politicians decide to take at their word. As Donald Trump continues to lose more and more lawsuits intended to overturn his election loss, his supporters in the media and beyond have put an increased emphasis on personal accounts from alleged whistleblowers. “Many [sworn affidavits] have been thrown out and many debunked, but many still have not. These Americans, these whistleblowers, deserve to be taken seriously and at least heard without threat of reprisal, but that’s not happening,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said recently . Fine, let’s take a look at some of these whistleblowers. There was the woman at Rudy Giuliani’s circus-like hearing in Michigan on Wednesday, December 2, who argued for stringent voter ID laws because “all Chinese people look alike.” There’s the star witness at that same hearing, Dominion Voting Systems contractor Melissa Carone , an irate rambler who came across as an SNL character rejected for being too broad, and who has already become the subject of parody . a drunk woman is trump team’s star witness in michigan pic.twitter.com/qGxEI3hp2G — marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 3, 2020 Then there’s the trio of whistleblowers who appeared on Sean Hannity’s extremely popular Fox News show on Tuesday, December 1, to share their stories of an alleged conspiracy to commit mass voter fraud. First up are USPS subcontractors Ethan Pease and Jesse Morgan. Pease claims that USPS workers were ordered to illegally backdate ballots so that they’d meet the November 3 deadline, while Morgan claims he picked up several pallets worth of ballots in New York and was ordered to bring them across state lines. The stories are only marginally more believable than Roger Stone’s recent claim of North Korean boats dropping off ballots in Maine Harbor . Whether they are true or not is for the judges to decide, but Hannity found them credible enough to put on air for an audience of millions, and the usual suspects tended to agree . Even just on the surface, though, these witnesses don’t seem terribly credible. All we know about them is that they appeared on Hannity fresh from a mostly maskless, indoor press conference , and that despite the host’s repeated insistence that these two are both “non-partisan,” Pease states that his reason for speaking up is that this is the “most important election of our lifetime.” (Hannity does not pursue this inquiry any further.) The third guest on the show manages to be even less credible. Kristina Karamo, an election observer from Michigan, claims that she was ordered to mark multiple ballots for Biden that may hav been mistakenly filled out for both Biden and Trump or Biden and a third-party candidate. She then zooms out to rant about all the general supposed election fraud evidence that the lamestream media is ignoring Read More …

Top AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says Google fired her over an email

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Timnit Gebru, a high-profile AI ethics researcher and leader in the field, has been forced out of Google. Gebru, who announced the news on Twitter Wednesday night, wrote that she was fired by Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean over an email she had written to a list consisting of women and allies at Google Brain. Read More …

The Democratic operative who beat Trump on Facebook is bracing for the war ahead

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Tara McGowan should be celebrating. Acronym, her three-year-old political outfit, placed an unprecedented $100 million bet on digital ads ahead of last month’s election, with the aim of convincing millions of Americans to vote against Donald Trump, and it appeared to pay off. Still, when we spoke in a wide-ranging conversation about Acronym’s work in 2020 and beyond, the 34-year-old veteran of Democratic campaigns sounded nervous. Trump wasn’t the Democrats’ only opponent: They also faced an unprecedented hurricane of right-wing disinformation that wreaked far more damage than the Kremlin ever could. That Trump won more votes than any incumbent president, and that Republicans succeeded in so many down-ballot races, represents one challenge for Democrats; that Trump hasn’t quite acknowledged his defeat and keeps harping on conspiracy theories represents a bigger one. Tara McGowan [Photo: courtesy of Acronym] These are different problems from Acronym’s original focus. Early on, McGowan had raised the alarm about a Republican “death star” of data and ads, and more than $1 billion in Trump campaign funds—all operating in lockstep with a powerful right-wing media apparatus. To combat it, she raised millions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow and the majority owner of The Atlantic . She built a strong team of digital operatives, many of them ex-Facebookers , tasked with bombarding key voters in battleground states with a virtuous circle of microtargeted ads, a monster data machine, and its own network of partisan news sites. Between Acronym’s work and a revamped Democratic data sharing operation, McGowan says the left once again has the digital advantage. “I believe that we definitely closed the gap, and started to leapfrog where Republicans are in terms of digital innovation and infrastructure and investments this cycle.” But the medium for Acronym’s success is also part of the problem, McGowan says. For someone who oversaw the left’s biggest Facebook ad blitz yet, using heaps of Big Tech cash, she has surprisingly little nice to say about the platforms. Now, after helping to accelerate right-wing falsehoods, Facebook and Google are making the problem even worse, she says: The platforms’ new indefinite bans on political ads could give a leg up to wealthier incumbent candidates, who can more easily buy TV spots. But they hurt Democrats in other ways, too: McGowan says the left doesn’t have the same kind of partisan media infrastructure as the right, which can use organic posts on Facebook and Google to circumvent ad bans. McGowan knows the damage that partisan misinformation can do. After a voter tabulation app made by a for-profit spin-off of Acronym failed disastrously during last year’s Iowa caucus, she became the target of a few conspiracy theories herself. (The startup’s name, Shadow Inc., didn’t help.) The incident brought intense scrutiny to Acronym, and its associated super PAC, Pacronym, spooked some donors and fed a burning skepticism about its venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style approach to progressive politics. Read More …

Inside the controversial rise of a top Twitter COVID-19 influencer

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E ric Feigl-Ding picked up his phone on the first ring. “Busy,” he said, when asked how things were going. He had just finished up an “epic, long” social media thread, he added—one of hundreds he’s posted about society’s ongoing battle with the coronavirus. “There’s so many different debates in the world of masking and herd immunity and reinfection,” he explained, among other dimensions of the pandemic. “We at FAS, we’ve been kind of monitoring all the debates and how we’re seeing signals in which the data goes one way, the debate goes the other,” he said, referring to his work with the Federation of American Scientists , a nonprofit policy think tank. He rattled off a rapid-fire sampler of hot-button COVID-19 topics: the growing anti-vaxxer movement, SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and antibodies, the body of research suggesting masks could decrease viral load, along with a quick mention of the debate among experts about what airborne  means. This whirlwind tour through viral COVID-19 themes felt like the conversational equivalent of Feigl-Ding’s Twitter account, which has grown by orders of magnitude since the dawn of the pandemic. The Harvard-trained scientist and 2018 Congressional aspirant posts dozens of times daily, often in the form of long, numbered threads. He’s fond of emojis, caps lock, and bombastic phrases. The first words of his very first viral tweet were “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” Made in January, weeks before the massive shutdowns that brought U.S. society to a halt, that exclamation preceded his observation that the “R0” (pronounced “R-naught”) of the novel coronavirus—a mathematical measure of a disease’s reproduction rate—was 3.8. That figure had been proposed in a scientific paper, posted online ahead of peer review, that Feigl-Ding called “thermonuclear pandemic level bad.” Further in that same Twitter thread, he claimed that the novel coronavirus could spread nearly eight times faster than SARS. The thread was widely criticized by infectious-disease experts and science journalists as needlessly fear-mongering and misleading, and the researchers behind the preprint had already tweeted that they’d lowered their estimate to an R0 of 2.5, meaning that Feigl-Ding’s SARS figure was incorrect. (Because R0 is an average measure of a virus’s transmissibility, estimates vary widely based on factors like local policy and population density ; as a result, researchers have suggested that other variables may be of more use.) He soon deleted the tweet—but his influence has only grown. At the beginning of the pandemic, before he began sounding the alarm on COVID-19’s seriousness, Feigl-Ding had around 2,000 followers. That number has since swelled to more than a quarter million, as Twitter users and the mainstream media turn to Feigl-Ding as an expert source, often pointing to his pedigree as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist Read More …