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    • Pew survey of 743 US teens: 81% feel social media makes them more connected, 69% say it helps diversify friend groups; 26% say it makes them feel worse (Katie Notopoulos/BuzzFeed News)

    Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News: Pew survey of 743 US teens: 81% feel social media makes them more connected, 69% say it helps diversify friend groups; 26% say it makes them feel worse  —  The vast majority of teens in a new survey believe social media is actually good for them, a Pew Research Center

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    • Silicon Valley should move past its glowing perception of the Zuckerberg-Sandberg paradigm, where the challenges created by a brash CEO are tackled by the COO (Jessi Hempel/LinkedIn)

    Jessi Hempel / LinkedIn: Silicon Valley should move past its glowing perception of the Zuckerberg-Sandberg paradigm, where the challenges created by a brash CEO are tackled by the COO  —  Sheryl Sandberg had been working at Facebook for just 13 days the first time we sat down for an interview. Silicon Valley should move past

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    Homebrew Battery Discharger

    Rechargable batteries are great – they save money and hassle when using portable devices. It’s pretty common to want to recharge a battery, but less common to intentionally discharge one. Regardless, [Pawel Spychalski] is working on a device to do just that – in a controlled fashion, of course. [Pawel] himself notes that the device

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    • Amazon announces AWS Outposts, in partnership with VMware, to let customers order and run data center hardware seamlessly alongside their cloud servers (Tom Krazit/GeekWire)

    Tom Krazit / GeekWire: Amazon announces AWS Outposts, in partnership with VMware, to let customers order and run data center hardware seamlessly alongside their cloud servers  —  GeekWire is reporting this week from Amazon’s signature cloud technology conference in Las Vegas, as the public cloud giant announces new products … Amazon announces AWS Outposts, in

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    • Amazon launches an automated data labeling service called SageMaker Ground Truth to boost its machine learning toolset, available today (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

    Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: Amazon launches an automated data labeling service called SageMaker Ground Truth to boost its machine learning toolset, available today  —  You can’t build a good machine learning model without good training data.  But building those training sets is hard, often manual work … Amazon launches an automated data labeling service called

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    • Amazon announces an autonomous car racing league, starting next year, and AWS DeepRacer, a $399 1/18th scale radio-controlled self-driving car, coming in March (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

    Taylor Soper / GeekWire: Amazon announces an autonomous car racing league, starting next year, and AWS DeepRacer, a $399 1/18th scale radio-controlled self-driving car, coming in March  —  GeekWire is reporting this week from Amazon’s signature cloud technology conference in Las Vegas, as the public cloud giant announces … Amazon announces an autonomous car racing

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    • AWS announces Inferentia, a new dedicated machine learning chip coming next year, to compete with Nvidia's chips and Google's TPU efforts (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)

    Ron Miller / TechCrunch: AWS announces Inferentia, a new dedicated machine learning chip coming next year, to compete with Nvidia’s chips and Google’s TPU efforts  —  AWS is not content to cede any part of any market to any company.  When it comes to machine learning chips, names like Nvidia or Google come to mind

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    • Catering to Millennials by Improving Those Outdated CRM Models

    Millennials are notoriously discerning when it comes to evaluating emerging apps and technologies. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) of major industries from airlines to hotels are increasingly emphasizing how to reach the millennial generation better as it expands its presence in the global workforce and consumer markets. A primary target of improving CRM for millennials is

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    • Sources: a group of Google workers is campaigning to get recent sexual harassment changes, like ending forced arbitration, applied to its temporary workforce (Ellen Huet/Bloomberg)

    Ellen Huet / Bloomberg: Sources: a group of Google workers is campaigning to get recent sexual harassment changes, like ending forced arbitration, applied to its temporary workforce  —  Temporary workers had been largely excluded from policy changes announced earlier this month  —  In a victory for thousands … Sources: a group of Google workers is

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    • The FTC is investigating loot boxes — but not for the right reasons

    The American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday joined the ongoing battle of attrition between regulators and game developers over the thorny topic of loot boxes. Last we heard about loot box legislation, a collection of European regulators were teaming up to investigate loot boxes and other maybe-kinda-sorta gambling practices, with one American entity joining in:

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