Time spent consuming messages by technology type in the United States

Source: McKinsey Global Institute Report - The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

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“Top 10 Industries Producing U.S. Billionaires

1. Investments: 100 billionaires
2. Technology: 51 billionaires
3. Media: 37
4. Energy: 35
5. Food and Beverage*: 31
5. Service*: 31
7. Fashion and Retail: 28
8. Real Estate: 27
9. Manufacturing: 18
10. Sports: 15

Worldwide, the industry rankings look a lot different: investments retains the number one spot (as it does in the U.S.) with 143 billionaires, followed by fashion and retail (123 billionaires) and real estate (102 billionaires). Tech ranks number 5. (See the full list at bottom).

But even that number is greatly skewed by Americans. Of the 90 tech billionaires in the world, 57% are Americans. Looked at another way: While 12% of U.S. billionaires made their fortunes in tech, just 5% of non-American billionaires did.”

How America’s Wealthiest Get Rich on Forbes

theatlantic:

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying

With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. 

The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutes

The Internet never forgets a face. Read more at The Atlantic

Imagine navigating the world without sight.

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