For nearly 14 years, an online message board called Memegen has served as a virtual water cooler for Google employees. Memegen has been a place for employees to offer blunt critiques of their bosses, to share gallows humor about job cuts or joke about getting notes from their parents to excuse them from returning to…
Westfield Public Schools held a regular board meeting in late March at the local high school, a red brick complex in Westfield, N.J., with a scoreboard outside proudly welcoming visitors to the “Home of the Blue Devils” sports teams. But it was not business as usual for Dorota Mani. In October, some 10th-grade girls at…
The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta. One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose…
Insurance companies have long blamed private-equity-owned hospitals and physician groups for exorbitant billing that drives up health care costs. But a tool backed by private equity is helping insurers make billions of dollars and shift costs to patients. The tool, Data iSight, is the premier offering of a cost-containment firm called MultiPlan that has attracted…
Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Netflix and Spotify have used it to recommend more movies and music. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months,…
Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Netflix and Spotify have used it to recommend more movies and music. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months,…
OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. But in the future, they hope to use something called synthetic data. That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the…
On Feb. 26, 1998, hundreds of people gathered to watch a total solar eclipse. The crowd gasped as the moon gobbled up the sun. They oohed and aahed as the feathery streams of the top of the solar atmosphere burst into view. Applause erupted moments later, when the sun peeked back out from behind the…
Stripe, a payments start-up, is one of the most successful companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in a generation. Last year, it hit a valuation of $65 billion. But in the 15 years since it was founded, there has not been a way for most individuals to invest in it. It is a problem that…
Cualquiera que trabaje a fondo en las trincheras de internet te dirá que no es una maquinaria bien aceitada que funcione sin el menor problema. Más bien, es un conjunto de partes desorganizadas que se han ido ensamblando a lo largo de décadas y que solo se mantienen juntas gracias al equivalente digital de una…
