Recommended Reads on the Mobile Beat This Week
Foursquare CEO Steps Down as Valuation Plummets
This Wall Street Journal story details the struggles facing Foursquare, which started out as a hot location-sharing app in 2009 but is now facing lots of competition and hasn’t been able to transform into a profitable business. In addition to the leadership change, the company announced that it raised $45 million in new funding, which marks its second so-called “down round.”
Most People See Connected Devices as a Privacy Problem
A Fortune article discusses the results of a new Pew Research Center study about how Americans feel regarding privacy and information sharing.
Why Doesn’t Apple HealthKit Include Mental Health Tracking?
A Fast Company article explains why Apple’s health and fitness tracking service, HealthKit, doesn’t currently let users log mental-health data. One reason, according to this piece: there isn’t a lot of research finding a connection between mental health and data collected by your smartphone.
Data from Your Smartwatch Might Let Hackers Figure Out Your PIN Numbers
An article in Slate describes how a researcher at IT University of Copenhagen used deep learning to analyze accelerometer and gyroscope data in order to figure out a smartwatch wearer’s PIN number (spoiler: it seemed to work in some situations but still isn’t all that accurate).
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This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting
With plans to create realistic synthetic embryos, grown in jars, Renewal Bio is on a journey to the horizon of science and ethics.
VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence
On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subjects who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms.
This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.
Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso.
This nanoparticle could be the key to a universal covid vaccine
Ending the covid pandemic might well require a vaccine that protects against any new strains. Researchers may have found a strategy that will work.
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