The farmer-influencer and the economics of streaming – Marginal REVOLUTION:
“he has boosted his YouTube audiences high enough to provide a steady advertising revenue of around $2,500 to $4,000 a month, about eight times what he earns from selling farm products.”
Secret Service Bought Phone Location Data from Apps, Contract Confirms:
“A myriad of smartphone apps, from weather predictors, to games, to flashlights, collect location data. Sometimes this may provide some benefit to the app’s operation itself, such as being able to route directions from a users’ current location, but many of these apps often sell that information as well to data brokers or other companies who incorporate it into their own products.”
an agency does not need to seek a warrant when it simply buys the data instead.
“On the day that prediction was published, April 30, the seven-day average of new cases was 28,943. On Aug. 16, the seven-day average was 51,523.”
Marvin Creamer, a Mariner Who Sailed Like the Ancients, Dies at 104 – The New York Times:
“Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.
Skills like these, he long maintained, had let the master mariners of antiquity answer the seafarer’s ever-present, life-or-death question — Where am I? — and in so doing sail safely round the world.”
“It is believed that we rounded the Horn at noon yesterday and have amended our longitude accordingly. We were not able to sight any landmarks so have based our conclusion on (1) the presence of an extremely cold north wind of relatively short duration, and (2) the change of water color from blue to a fairly dark, transparent green to a lighter, less transparent green and back to a quite dark transparent green as we proceeded from west to east at an estimated latitude of 56°55’.”
On one occasion they sat, becalmed, bothered and bewildered, until his geographer’s ears came to their aid. As the wind started up again, a crew member happened to open a hatch. It emitted a loud squeak.
That sound told Professor Creamer unequivocally in which direction the boat was facing: Only dry air from the Antarctic, he knew, would have caused it. Moist air from the opposite direction would have lubricated the hatch, yielding a more congenial noise.
On May 13, 1984, as the Globe Star negotiated the Atlantic, the crew received a visit from a housefly. They recognized it at once as a humble emissary from land. Sure enough, they arrived back at Cape May four days later.
America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them. – The New York Times:
“How big is a foot? In the United States, that depends on which of the two official foot measurements you are talking about. If it comes as a surprise that there are two feet, how about this: One of those feet is about to go away.
The first foot is the old U.S. survey foot from 1893. The second is the newer, shorter and slightly more exact international foot from 1959, used by nearly everybody except surveyors in some states. The two feet differ by about one hundredth of a foot (0.12672 inches) per mile — that’s two feet for every million feet — an amount so small that it only adds up for people who measure over long distances.”
*Really interesting article.
Feel Like You’re Going Out of Your Mind? Consider Your Mind-Set – The New York Times:
“High school teachers in cities around Texas, including Houston, El Paso and Fort Worth, who had studied in a growth mind-set program, said students with more of that mind-set were able to adapt faster to online learning. And the teachers themselves are using what they learned to guide students; as one teacher said in an Education Week article, he tried to make sure his students were comfortable enough to discuss their struggles ‘That’s the big thing from growth mind-set. What do you do when you have that struggle? I try to push onto them, ‘you use it as a learning opportunity. You ask questions, you can’t just give up.’’”
D.L. Damore 