On Computers

Harvard’s Public Health Center is using Google tracking to find restaurants that make people sick. This is how they do it: If you’ve been to “Mom’s Diner” and a few hours later start searching on terms like “vomit” and “stomach cramps,” there is a likelihood there’s a problem at Mom’s. In Harvard’s tests in Las Vegas and Chicago, health inspectors were sent out when the searches turned queasy. Over half the time, 52 percent, they found a problem at the restaurant the person had been to that day. Chicago has 38 inspectors for more than 8,000 restaurants. They find problems only 23 percent of the time, less than half the probabilities inferred by Google tracking. Reading this, you might worry […]

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Filed under: apps, art, business, Google, Internuts, maps, spam | Comments Off on GOOGLE FINDS BAD RESTAURANTS

The cat came back. Not the very next day, but it did come back. They thought he was a goner. It all happened after we wrote about a $30 security camera called “Wyze Pan Cam,” The price was right, so they bought it. The reader wrote to say that she and her husband put one in their open garage to see if they could find out where the cat went. “It took over a week, but we finally saw our beloved kitty,” she said. “He is coming regularly now. He was a feral (wild) cat to begin with, so it will take time to get him back inside, but you have no idea how helpful this is for our emotional […]

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Filed under: Internuts, phones, wireless | Comments Off on A HEART-WARMING TALE

From The Guardian, a British newspaper, we learn that one minute on the Internet looks like this: 156 million emails, 29 million text messages. Wait, we’re still not through. One point five million Spotify songs, four million Google searches, two million minutes of Skype calls, 350,000 tweets, 243,000 photos posted on Facebook, 87,000 hours of Netflix, 65,000 pictures put on Instagram, 25,000 posts on Tumblr, 18,000 matches on Tinder, and 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. If you take just the online video watched on websites, YouTube, Netflix and webcams, you have 77% of the world’s internet traffic. Whew! The Readers Bite Back We recently wrote that there’s no reason to have a terabyte drive if you don’t have […]

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Filed under: Google, health, how-to, Internet, photos, science | Comments Off on ONE MINUTE ON THE INTERNET

Hard to believe but there are still people out there thinking about getting their first smart phone. That’s a cell phone that can search the web and take selfies. About 80 people a year die while taking selfies. Sometimes they step back too far at the edge of the Grand Canyon, sometimes the flagpole on the tenth floor is slippery. Well, this has happened to us twice now. Not getting killed taking a selfie, but talking to older people who have decided they want one of those smart phone things. In one of the great marketing coups of all time, Apple has somehow made people believe that a smart phone is an iPhone. This is despite the reality that Android […]

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Filed under: apps, health, iPhone, phones, spam | Comments Off on GETTING A SMART PHONE