Facebook Plans to Create New Oversight Board
Facebook has decided to create an independent board of overseers to create new regulations and decisions about Facebook’s policies and content. After recently receiving much scrutiny about their advertisements and content, CEO and primary shareholder Mark Zuckerburg thought it best to create a “supreme court” of sorts to avoid Facebook making these types of decisions on its own.
The court will start hearing cases in 2020 and will begin with no fewer than 11 part-time members, eventually making its way up to 40 members from around the world. Although Facebook will decide which cases to submit to the board, the panel members will have oversight over which cases are actually heard. The cases heard will primarily be written, with the occasional face-to-face meetings, and will amount to a couple dozen a year or so. Priority will go to cases that have the potential to provide the most public benefit.
The hope is to create a fairer system of dealing with content issues, and to avoid the scrutiny of the public eye falling squarely on Facebook’s shoulders.
(Source: BBC)
FedEx Profits Tank After Amazon Split
FedEx’s profits fell last quarter as a result of its split from online retailer Amazon. What used to be a profitable relationship between Amazon and FedEx Express came to an end on June 30.
Since then, the entirety of the FedEx company, not just their Express division, has seen their profits suffer. They are now working on cost-cutting measures and have lowered their delivery outlook for the rest of the year to deal with these issues.
Add in trade tensions and policy uncertainty and FedEx is predicting lower revenue and per-share earnings than in prior years.
(Source: WSJ)
India Plans Incredibly Accurate Digital Mapping with Latest Technology
A few months ago, the Survey of India, a part of the Indian Department of Science and Technology, made plans to digitally map the entire country using Artificial Intelligence (AI), drones, and satellite data. This is shaping up to be one of the most accurate digital mappings created, with 10 cm resolution (a major improvement from GPS’s accuracy of a few meters) and a reference point every 20 km.
This mapping captures the curvature, the types of geographic features, and the natural and man-made structures of the land. It will be used to plan anything and everything from where to lay train tracks to where to build new hospitals to how to go about cleaning up the Ganga River. This planning is possible because the data will be made available to Gram Panchayats, which are local small-town and village-level governances under single elected heads, and local governing bodies. In addition, citizens can gain access to the data to use it for their own projects.
The effort is slated to take two years and is currently being used in Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra, and the Ganga basin.
(Source: Gadgets 360)
