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Newley's Notes

NN 152: More Bad News for Google; Tesla’s Big Quarter; Old People in 1929; Paper Airplane Bible

Here are ten items worth your time this week:

🔍 1) Another big Google story, following our recent piece about the company exposing user data: How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’ [NY Times] – After being accused of sexual misconduct, “Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out,” Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner write. “Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package.”

🍎 2) Elsewhere in Silicon Valley: Apple CEO Condemns ‘Data-Industrial Complex’ [WSJ] – In a speech at a privacy conference in Brussels, Tim Cook “issued the tech giant’s strongest call yet for U.S.-wide data-protection regulation, saying individuals’ personal information has been ‘weaponized,’” my colleagues Sam Schechner and Emre Peker write.

🚗 3) This week in e-car news: Tesla rides Model 3’s popularity to its first profit in two years [The Verge] – “The turning of financial fortunes can be largely attributed to how Tesla nearly doubled production of the Model 3 from the second quarter to the third this year,” Sean O’Kane reports.

🤖 4) …and in autonomous vehicle news: Self-driving car dilemmas reveal that moral choices are not universal [Nature] – “The largest ever survey of machine ethics, published today in Nature, finds that many of the moral principles that guide a driver’s decisions vary by country,” Amy Maxmen writes.

📵 5) Quote of the week: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.” That’s from a Nellie Bowles story at the NY Times headlined A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.

💊 6) Medical story of the week: A Blue Pill Is Stopping HIV, World-First Study Shows [Bloomberg] – The lede on this Jason Gale story: “An antiviral pill taken daily by thousands of men across Sydney and other parts of Australia led to a globally unprecedented reduction in new HIV cases, showing that a targeted, preventative approach may accelerate progress on ending the AIDS epidemic.”

👴🏻 7) Fascinating video of the week: 1929 – Interviews With Elderly People Throughout The US [YouTube] – “The first hundred years is the hardest,” says one centenarian.

💬 8) Linguistics tool of the week: Time Traveler – Search this Merriam-Webster database to find out which words were first used in print by year.

✈️ 9) Paper airplane-related tool of the week: Fold’NFly – “A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions.”

🐶 10) Dog/human-related link of the week: O.M.G. Look at That Dog! [NY Times] – Pia Peterson offers this dispatch from the “world’s largest creative grooming industry event,” where “dogs are every color of the rainbow.” (Thanks, Patrick!)

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👊 Fist bump from New Delhi,
Newley

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