In its latest attempts at coping with growing pains, the parent company of Snapchat, Snap Inc., has laid off about 100 employees. This follows the company’s decision to cut about 120 engineers earlier in March, and another 22 employees in January from the content department. Snap went public last year to much fanfare but has …
Years of stewing privacy concerns have erupted in response to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica obtained information collected from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without users’ permission. In 2014, information gathered on Facebook was used to create around 30 million psychographic profiles. Surprisingly, the only “problem” according to Facebook’s rules was that Cambridge …
In the past few months President Trump has announced a number of new import tariffs: in January, it was tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels, and just recently, this March, it is tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. Aside from the tariffs on imported washing machines, this raft of import tariffs portend a …
Recently cryptocurrency has been a topic of much discussion across numerous fields. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating certain cryptocurrency offerings. Meanwhile Uber’s co-founder Garrett Camp wants to create his own global cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is even being discussed in the tax field. Two states, Arizona and Georgia, have proposed bills that …
Earlier this week, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, filed suit against Uber “for allegedly violating the state’s data breach notification law by waiting more than a year to disclose an incident that compromised the personal information of 57 million users.” To mitigate the fallout from the data breach, which occurred in late 2016, Uber paid …
Recently released studies show that people are unaware that their Facebook news feed is being filtered by the social network. Facebook uses an algorithm that looks at what videos people watch, what content they click on, and who they interact with through “likes” and “comments”, and, using that information, the algorithm filters new content to …
An “emerging contaminant” is an under-researched chemical byproduct, often from industrial processes, which has no regulatory health standards for exposure or release. Emerging contaminants such as complex, unnatural chemicals generated by modern industry are concerning because they may have long-term adverse impacts on human intelligence, reproduction, behavior, and the endocrine system’s regulation of hormones in …
Water wars, long predicted to occur in California may finally be materializing. The decade’s long drought, which culminated in mandatory water restrictions on users is being taken as an indication that resources will continue to be strained in the near future. The wars are first being fought within the legislature, as restrictions on water are …
Satoshi Nakamoto is most widely known as the alleged creator of Bitcoin, the world’s first functioning cryptocurrency. For BitCoin to work, Nakamoto had to invent Blockchain, which may prove more impactful on society than cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology functions as a “decentralized, online ledger maintained by computer networks” which verifies and records “transactions, then distribute[s] the …
Biospecimens are “samples of material, such as urine, blood, tissue, cells, DNA, RNA, and protein from humans, animals, or plants.” Biospecimens are often samples from people used in clinical research and laboratory studies to further advance the field of medicine. Biospecimens contain molecules that can be analyzed for indications of diseases. Biospecimens may confirm whether …
