NASA is to open up the International Space Station (ISS) to tourists from 2020, at the cost of $35,000 per night PPS. The price doesn't include transfers to and from earth, which are estimated at $60m each way!
Climate scientist at University of Reading Ed Hawkins has created the #ShowYourStripes datavis site, which generates an image of temperature increases for every country for the last 100 years or so. Each stripe averages the temperature over a year and is built from the Berkely Earth Temperature Dataset. (H/T to Mikael for sharing this)
The Spanish soccer league LaLiga has been fined €250,000 for breah of data privacy laws after they used their scores app to covertly listen for soccer matches being illegally streamed in bars using the phone's microphone and GPS location. The app was downloaded more than 10 millions times and did include a clause in the terms and conditions that user would consent to allowing their phone to be used to detect fradulent behaviour like pirated soccer games.
Researchers at UC Berkeley and a team at Adobe have trained a convolutional neural network to detect photoshopped faces at 99% accuracy compared to 53% human accuracy.
PWC have released a report on the current proliferation and uptake of voice assistants and voice recognition technology among consumers. "Usage will increase but consistency must improve for wider adoption".
Shopify have released a State of Commerce report which presents the results of surveys conducted between April 2018 and 2019 of over 3,800 shopify merchants and 2,600 consumers.
The Zero-G design company in Dublin has created a great and illuminating map of the Irish State, which re-imagines the various state bodies and organisations as island land masses, grouped and positioned based on their allocated budgets and perceived power within Ireland.
