Tag: ratings

Taking Learning Online: Lessons from India for Universities around the Globe

By Raghav Gupta, Managing Director for India and APAC and Global Business Lead of Coursera for Campus The higher education landscape has shifted dramatically in the past few months because of COVID-19. As universities around the world work to develop online and blended learning models, they can learn from pioneering efforts by institutions in India.  […]
The post Taking Learning Online: Lessons…

The Gig Workers For Target’s Delivery App Hate Their Algorithmically-Determined Pay

In 2017 Target bought a same-day home-delivery company called Shipt for $550 million. Shipt now services half of Target’s stores, reports Motherboard, and employs more than 100,000 gig workers. Unfortunately, they’re working for a company that “has a track record of censoring and retaliating against workers for asking basic questions about their working conditions or expressing dissent,” reports Motherboard. For example,…

The Municipal Bond Market Is Using Geospatial Data For Climate Risk Evaluation

mikeebbbd shares a report from Los Angeles Times: The $3.8-trillion municipal-bond market has found a new tool in its effort to understand the effects of climate change: satellites orbiting Earth. Assessing climate risks is a particularly vexing problem given that U.S. state and local governments tend to give investors information that’s too little or just too late. But the use of…

Uber Officially Bans Drivers From Carrying Firearms, But Company’s Business Model Prevents Enforcement

Iwastheone shares a report from The Atlantic, written by Sidney Fussell: Uber has banned guns in cars, for both drivers and passengers, since 2015. But over email and Facebook Messenger, four current and four former drivers told me they carry firearms on the job. In explaining why, they each cited the same self-determinalist rhetoric Uber has slapped on subway ads to…

Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Service Is Becoming More Popular Than Amazon’s AWS At Big Companies

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been focusing the company on cloud services — and CNBC reports on the results: A Goldman Sachs survey of technology executives at large companies last month showed that Microsoft remained the most popular supplier of public cloud services, even as Amazon leads the market overall in terms of revenue. Goldman Sachs based its latest findings on…

Ferocious fires in Australia intensified this week

The outlook for the bushfire situation in Australia continues to be grim. This post is an update via NASA, containing NOAA-NASA satellite images of actively burning fires and the resultant billowing smoke. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/ferocious-fires-in-australia-intensified-this-week…

Death Stranding makes me rethink the morality of the gig economy

Playing Death Stranding, a new game set in a post-apocalypse US, helps me understand how it feels to be a gig worker dependent on good user ratings, says Jacob Aron in his latest column Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432600-500-death-stranding-makes-me-rethink-the-morality-of-the-gig-economy/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Black Friday Shoppers: Beware of Fake Five-Star Reviews

As shopping takes off for the holiday season, so do phony reviews — and pressure is mounting on major retailers to fight back. From a report: More than a third of online reviews on major websites, including those on Amazon.com, Walmart and Sephora, are fake, meaning they are generated by robots or people paid to write them, according to Fakespot, which…

Apple Pulls All Customer Reviews From Online Apple Store

Apple has removed the “Ratings & Reviews” section from all product pages on its website. The changes were apparently made between November 16 and 17, and it’s “currently unclear what has prompted this decision, nor when Apple will bring back the option to read the opinions of other customers at the time of purchase,” reports AppleInsider. From the report: AppleInsider received…