MoviePass Wants To Gather a Whole Lot of Data About Its Users — Lowe said that was possible because “we get an enormous amount of information. Since we mail you the card, we know your home address . . . we know the makeup of that household, the kids, the age groups, the income. It’s all based on where you live. It’s not that we ask that. You can extrapolate that. “Then,” Lowe continued, “Because you are being tracked in your GPS by the phone . . . we watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards, and so we know the movies you watch. We know all about you. We don’t sell that data. What we do is we use that data to market film.”
Amazon is testing a “brief mode” for Alexa that replaces verbal responses with beeps – The Verge — This seems to be the only difference with brief mode — using beeps instead of verbal cues to acknowledge successful commands — but it’s not hard to imagine how Amazon might expand its applications. (We’ve reached out to the company to find out and will update the story if they reply.)
No, Space Did Not Permanently Alter 7 Percent of Scott Kelly’s DNA – Slashdot — The mistake stems from an inaccurate interpretation of NASA’s ongoing Twins Study. When Scott went to space in 2015, his identical twin Mark — also a former NASA astronaut — stayed on the ground. The idea was that Mark would serve as a control subject — a nearly identical genetic copy that NASA could use to figure out how the space environment changed Scott’s body. Some fascinating results have come out of the experiment. For one thing, Scott’s gut bacteria changed significantly while he was in space. And yes, he did experience genetic changes. The protective caps on the ends of his DNA strands — known as telomeres — increased while in space. But space didn’t permenantly alter 7 percent of his DNA. […] NASA also confirmed this in a statement to The Verge: “Scott’s DNA did not fundamentally change,” a NASA spokesperson said. “What researchers did observe are changes in gene expression, which is how your body reacts to your environment. This likely is within the range for humans under stress, such as mountain climbing or SCUBA diving.”
