An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Do a search on Google's Play Store in Europe and you'll find the company's own Gboard app has an age rating of PEGI 3 -- aka the pan-European game information labelling system which signifies content is suitable for all age groups. PEGI 3 means it may still contain a little cartoon violence. Say, for example, an emoji fist or middle finger. Now do a search on Play for the rival Fleksy keyboard app and you'll find it has a PEGI 12 age rating. This label signifies the rated content can contain slightly more graphic fantasy violence and mild bad language.

The discrepancy in labelling suggests there's a material difference between Gboard and Fleksy -- in terms of the content you might encounter. Yet both are pretty similar keyboard apps -- with features like predictive emoji and baked in GIFs. Gboard also lets you create custom emoji. While Fleksy puts mini apps at your fingertips. A more major difference is that Gboard is made by Play Store owner and platform controller, Google. Whereas Fleksy is an indie keyboard that since 2017 has been developed by ThingThing, a startup based out of Spain. Fleksy's keyboard didn't used to carry a 12+ age rating -- this is a new development. Not based on its content changing but based on Google enforcing its Play Store policies differently. The Fleksy app, which has been on the Play Store for around eight years at this point -- and per Play Store install stats has had more than 5M downloads to date -- was PEGI 3 rating until earlier this month. But then Google stepped in and forced the team to up the rating to 12. Which means the Play Store description for Fleksy in Europe now rates it PEGI 12 and specifies it contains "Mild Swearing." According to Google, the reason for the rating is because Fleksy's latest app update contains the middle finger emoji... even though Google's own Gboard app also contains the middle finger emoji.

"That's not the end of the saga, though," writes Natasha Lomas via TechCrunch. "Google's Play Store team is still not happy with the regional age rating for Fleksy -- and wants to push the rating even higher -- claiming, in a subsequent email, that 'your app contains mature content (e.g. emoji) and should have higher rating.'" When the Fleksy team pointed out to Google that the middle finger emoji can be found in both keyboard apps -- and asked them to drop Fleksy's rating back to PEGI 3 like Gboard -- the Play team didn't respond.

The conventional wisdom that liberal arts majors earn less than compsci majors may be true for the first job, but not necessarily for an entire career, reports the New York Times, in an article shared by jds91md (and republished by Indiana State's College of Arts and Sciences). "By age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up." This happens for two reasons. First, many of the latest technical skills that are in high demand today become obsolete when technology progresses. Older workers must learn these new skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.

Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don't create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.
Some other interesting stats from the article:

• STEM salaries grew more slowly -- and the field experienced a higher exit rate. "Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills."

• High-paying jobs in management, business and law raise the average salary of all social science/history majors.

An anonymous reader quotes the Economist: In its latest software release, Apple has made it possible for iPhone users to send all unknown callers to voicemail automatically.

Although the feature will no doubt prove useful to the millions of customers whose peaceful suppers are ruined by fake calls, it could be disastrous for the faltering public-polling industry. The challenges telephone pollsters face have been growing. Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped.

Back in the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%, according to SSRS, a market research and polling firm. But the Pew Research Centre estimates that it received completed interviews from a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018. Although polls with low response rates can still be accurate, their costs increase dramatically as pollsters must spend more time and money calling more people.

An anonymous reader quotes NBC News: An analysis of weather disasters that did more than $1 billion in damage from the National Centers for Environmental Information finds that such high-cost events are up markedly since the 1980s. (The dollar figures for the events were adjusted for inflation.) There have been 250 such events since 1980 and almost half them, 111, have occurred in the current decade. And the 2019 figure does not include any events after May, so Hurricane Dorian is not on the list yet. There were only 28 billion-dollar weather events in the 1980s.

There is a wide range of events in that extreme weather calculation. Besides hurricanes, it includes floods, droughts, freezes, severe storms, wildfires and winter storms. And there are some trends in the data. For instance, there were seven freeze/winter storm events on the list in the 1980s, but only six (so far) in the current decade. But there were only seven severe storms on the 1980s list and 64 in the current decade...

The 28 high-impact weather events in the 1980s cost a total of about $172 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. But the current set of 111 storms this decade has cost a total of more than $761 billion dollars. Again, that does not include the costs of Dorian and of two other events on the list -- the March floods in the Midwest and May floods of the Southern Plains. When you tally it all up, the costs are likely to end up at three-quarters of a trillion dollars or more. And that's just for this decade. At this pace, the number seems all but certain to climb over the trillion-dollar mark in the 2020s.

And then there are the human costs. The number of fatalities from these extreme weather events has largely been climbing -- from 2,800 in the 1980s to almost 5,200 this decade (again before Dorian's damage is added in).

A SaaS "price transparency" site at Capiche.com writes that "It's not just you: software has gotten far more expensive," citing their survey of 100 business applications. Software prices went up 62% on average over the past decade -- over three times faster than inflation, outpacing even rent and healthcare. Today's iPhone XR, by comparison, costs 25% more than 2009's iPhone 3GS (or 67% more if comparing the iPhone XS). Some apps went up far more drastically, though even if you removed the ones whose price went up more than 200%, software still on average went up 42% -- or over double the average inflation rate... [I]f you paid $9.99 a month for business software in 2009, there's a good chance you pay $16.18 for it today -- if not $19.78.

Of the hundred business apps we surveyed, sixty-seven raised their prices an average of 98% in the decade between 2009 and 2019. Fourteen lowered their prices an average of 28%, and nineteen apps kept their prices the same... Notably, if the apps you used raised their prices, odds are their prices nearly doubled over the past decade. That's perhaps even more noticeable than if all of your apps went up a few percent...

in an industry where we were long accustomed to getting more for less -- an industry where that still holds for most physical products -- software has gone up in price three times faster than inflation. That's hard to ignore.
All of their data is available in a public spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and they ultimately argue that today free "most often a strategy, a means not an end. Apple gives away software to sell devices; Google gives away storage to get you to store more so you'll upgrade."

"A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more," reports NPR: That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length -- such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say... The study included 69,744 women and 1,429 men. Both groups completed survey measures to assess their level of optimism, as well as their overall health and health habits such as diet, smoking and alcohol use.

In the survey, study participants were asked if they agreed with statements such as "in uncertain times I usually expect the best" or "I usually expect to succeed in things that I do." Health outcomes from women in the study were tracked for 10 years, while the men's health was followed for 30 years. Researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11-15% longer lifespan, and had far greater odds of reaching 85 years old, compared to the least optimistic group.

Windows Central reports: AMD surpassed NVIDIA when it comes to total GPU shipments according to new data from Jon Peddie Research (via Tom's Hardware). This is the first time that AMD ranked above NVIDIA in total GPU shipments since Q3 of 2014. AMD now has a 17.2 percent market share compared to NVIDIA's 16 percent according to the most recent data. John Peddie Research also reports that "AMD's overall unit shipments increased 9.85% quarter-to-quarter."

AMD gained 2.4 percent market share over the last year while NVIDIA lost 1 percent. Much of AMD's growth came in the last quarter, in which AMD saw a difference of 1.5 percent compared to NVIDIA's 0.1 percent.
The Motley Fool points out that "NVIDIA doesn't sell CPUs, so this comparison isn't apples-to-apples."

But meanwhile, TechSpot reports: German hardware retailer Mindfactory has published their CPU sales and revenue figures, and they show that for the past year AMD had sold slightly more units than Intel -- until Ryzen 3000 arrived. When the new hardware launched in July, AMD's sales volume doubled and their revenue tripled, going from 68% to 79% volume market share and 52% to 75% revenue share -- this is for a single major PC hardware retailer in Germany -- but the breakdown is very interesting to watch nonetheless...

Full disclaimer: German markets have historically been more biased towards Ryzen than American ones, and AMD's sales will fall a bit before stabilizing, while Intel's appear to have already plateaued.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert: Among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there's a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent "extreme self-citations and 'citation farms' (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other's papers)," explain the authors of the new study, led by physician turned meta-researcher John Ioannidis from Stanford University.

Ioannidis helps to run Stanford's meta-research innovation centre, called Metrics, which looks at identifying and solving systemic problems in scientific research. One of those problems, Ioannidis says, is how self-citations compromise the reliability of citation metrics as a whole, especially at the hands of extreme self-citers and their associated clusters. "I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe," Ioannidis told Nature. "Those with greater than 25 percent self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed."

YouTube is making a change to its copyright enforcement policies around music used in videos, which may result in an increased number of blocked videos in the shorter term -- but overall, a healthier ecosystem in the long-term. From a report: Going forward, copyright owners will no longer be able to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music via YouTube's "Manual Claiming" tool. Instead, they can choose to prevent the other party from monetizing the video or they can block the content. However, YouTube expects that by removing the option to monetize these sorts of videos themselves, some copyright holders will instead just leave them alone. "One concerning trend we've seen is aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos. These claims can feel particularly unfair, as they transfer all revenue from the creator to the claimant, regardless of the amount of music claimed," explained YouTube in a blog post.

To be clear, the changes only involve YouTube's Manual Claiming tool which is not how the majority of copyright violations are handled today. Instead, the majority of claims are created through YouTube's Content ID match system. This system scans videos uploaded to YouTube against a database of files submitted to the site by copyright owners. Then, when a match is found, the copyright holder owner can choose to block the video or monetize it themselves, and track the video's viewership stats.

Apple and Spotify are in talks about potentially enabling Siri to play songs, albums, and playlists from the leading subscription music service. The Verge: A new report from The Information confirms that Spotify would be taking advantage of new capabilities that Apple is introducing in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, which allow other apps to be on equal footing with Apple Music when making music requests through the company's Siri voice assistant. If Spotify takes advantage of the new tools, you'll be able to play music without having to open the app on your iPhone or iPad. The integration could be a sign of progress between two companies that have butted heads to a more heated degree than ever before over the last year. In March, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the EU that accused Apple of disadvantaging third-party services that compete with its own apps. Among other gripes (such as Apple's subscription tax), Spotify pointed to hands-free Siri compatibility as one convenient feature that Apple was reserving for its own Apple Music service. Further reading: Apple Says Spotify Wants 'the Benefits of a Free App Without Being Free'; and Apple Cites Irrelevant Spotify Subscription Stats In New Antitrust Defense.

One 2016 human resources study found that 48% of American businesses -- and 57% of U.K. businesses -- used personality questionnaires for hiring decisions, a new article reports. They add that the personality test industry may now be bringing in up to $4 billion a year.

But "By relying on these tests, employers can ask questions that would be inappropriate -- or at best bizarre -- in a traditional interview." For example, in 2017 the crafts store Michael's was asking job-seekers whether they strongly agreed with these statements:

- "I am always happy."
- "When I look at the world around me, I have little hope for mankind."
- "Over the course of the day, I can experience many mood changes."
- "When I am in a bad mood, it affects my work."

An anonymous reader quotes an investigative report from The Walrus: Bad hires can be costly for companies, and the tests are now used to screen everyone from minimum-wage employees to consultants and top-level executives. But there is the risk that people saddled with the wrong scores will be screened out en masse without a chance to prove themselves. As part of an attempt to build a perfect capitalist meritocracy, algorithms are effectively monitoring the workforce to decide which traits are deemed desirable -- and who gets left behind...

[S]ome critics say personality tests give companies too much power. Elizabeth D. De Armond, a professor of legal research and writing at Chicago-Kent College of Law, likens personality tests to an "MRI scan of the soul" and suggests banning them, except in cases where a business can convincingly argue that hiring for a certain personality is essential (police officers must be able to handle highly stressful situations, for example). The tests seek "to observe not just what an employee does, but how that employee thinks -- processes that pertain not just to the employee's presence on the job, but the employee's being at all times," De Armond wrote in 2012.
Merve Emre, who recently published a history of the Myers-Briggs Indicator, argues that "All of these tests are registering the interests of power, and capitalist power specifically. Just because that power is being routed through and sanitized by a scientific proof doesn't mean it's not power."

The article also includes comments from an executive at the company that created the personality test for Michael's who argues that the tests eliminate human biases from hiring based solely on an in-person interview.

Their test even check for people who answered too quickly or answered "strongly agree" too often, according to the article -- and if they did, flag their responses with an "authenticity alert."

Backblaze: As of June 30, 2019, Backblaze had 110,640 spinning hard drives in our ever-expanding cloud storage ecosystem. Of that number, there were 1,980 boot drives and 108,660 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers.

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: AMD's Ryzen 3000 series processors, spearheaded by the Ryzen 7 3700X, have led what looks like an unprecedented assault on Intel's CPUs, at least going by the figures from one component retailer. The latest stats from German retailer Mindfactory (as highlighted on Reddit) for the month of July show that AMD sold an incredible 79% of all processor units, compared to 21% for Intel.

AMD's top-selling chip was the Ryzen 7 3700X, and get this: sales of that one single processor weren't far off equaling the sales of Intel's entire CPU range (at around the 80% mark of what Intel flogged). In June, AMD's overall market share was 68% at Mindfactory, so the increase to 79% represents a big jump, and the highest proportion of sales achieved by the company this year by a long way.

To put this in a plainer fashion, for every single processor sold by Intel, AMD sold four.

Ryzen 3rd-gen offerings have seemingly sold up a storm in the first couple weeks on shelves, and then slowed down, although that slippage is likely due to stock shortages rather than falling demand (the new flagship Ryzen 9 3900X chip is vanishingly thin on the ground, for example, and is therefore being flogged for extortionate prices on eBay in predictable fashion)... [W]e can throw in as many caveats as we like, but the plain truth (at least from this source) is that AMD's doing better than ever, and grabbing a truly startling proportion of CPU market share -- even with apparent stock issues providing some headwind.

One of America's top foodservice distributor's recently surveyed 1,518 customers of food-delivery services -- and then also surveyed 500 delivery drivers. Restaurant Business magazine shares one surprising result: About 21% of delivery customers worry the driver may have nibbled their order en route -- and with good reason, according to a new study of delivery gripes. Some 28% of drivers say they were unable to resist taking a bite...

Overall, the research uncovered a wariness on the part of consumers about the drivers who cart their meals. More than 4 out of 5 (85%) said they would like restaurants to adopt tamper-proof packaging. The consumer respondents were given a hypothetical situation: "If you ordered a burger and fries, and the deliverer grabbed a few fries along the way, how upset would you be?" On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being an attitude of "no big deal" and 10 representing "absolutely unacceptable," the average score was 8.4.

They also readily cited service snafus. 34% of respondents said they'd experienced a driver refusing to leave his or her car to hand over the meal. 29% said a driver refused to walk all the way to their door for the delivery. Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) reported that a driver had dropped the food at the door and left, without any interaction.
Meanwhile, though 95% of customers said they tip regularly, insufficient tipping was a "consistent" complaint for 60% of the drivers -- and in fact, the survey showed the drivers had much higher rates of consistent irritation. 52% complained their restaurants didn't have their orders ready on time, though many also complained about customers leaving unclear instructions in the app (39%), taking to long to answer the door (33%), not answering their phone (37%), or messaging the deliverer with questions or complaints (34%).

And a full 54% of drivers said they were "often tempted" by the smell of food they delivered.

Despite having insignificant market shares and being marginal players in mainland China, western tech giants have a very high brand awareness among Chinese consumers, a market survey published last week revealed. From a report: The survey, which factored in answers from more than 2,000 respondents, showed that for the most part, top western tech companies have established themselves in the consciousness of the Chinese public. The survey, carried out by market research firm Statista, found that Apple had a 91% brand awareness among Chinese users, one percent behind the brand awareness leaders -- local tech firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. However, less than half (48%) of the respondents said they used Apple products, while daily usage for the three top Chinese firms was 74%, 82%, and 82%, respectively. Similar stats were also recorded for four other western tech giants, with consumers being aware of their business, but rarely using their products -- Google (87% brand awareness, 45% consumer usage), Microsoft (86% and 62%), Amazon (82% and 32%), and Facebook (66% and 17%).

Microsoft is finally revealing exactly how many people are using its Slack competitor Microsoft Teams. From a report: The software maker says that more than 13 million people are using Microsoft Teams daily, along with more than 19 million weekly active users. This is the first time Microsoft has revealed an active user count, and the company's previous update was that 500,000 organizations were using the service back in March. This figure is above the more than 10 million people who use Slack daily. Slack revealed its 10 million daily active user count earlier this year, and it used the same figure back in April in a financial filing. Team communication service Slack, which has been around for much longer, was valued at north of $20 billion when it went public last month.

Further reading: Microsoft Might Crush Slack Like Facebook Crushed Snapchat.

In response to Spotify's antitrust complaint, Apple claims that Spotify has greatly exaggerated how much money is being taken by the App Store. "Apple says that it's currently taking a 15 percent cut of subscription fees for around 680,000 Spotify subscribers, representing 0.5 percent of Spotify's total subscribers, and that Spotify is not paying a 30 percent cut on anything," reports The Verge, citing Der Spiegel. From the report: The takeaway message is supposed to be that Spotify is blowing its complaint way out of proportion, but those small numbers don't tell the full story -- they basically don't matter, because Spotify gave up on App Store subscriptions years ago. Spotify only offered subscriptions through the App Store between 2014 and 2016. That means subscription numbers have had years to dwindle. In 2016, Apple also reduced the cut it takes from subscriptions after they've been active for more than a year, bringing it down from 30 percent to 15 percent. That means Apple is only taking the lower number from Spotify, because Spotify hasn't signed up any new subscribers in years. The complaint that Spotify filed in March with the EU's antitrust arm says that Apple requires it to "pay a 30 percent tax on purchases" made through iOS. Even if Spotify isn't currently paying 30 percent because it stopped offering subscriptions through iOS in order to avoid the fee, that 30 percent tax is still true.

Millions of golfer records from the Game Golf app, including GPS details from courses played, usernames and passwords, and even Facebook login data, were all exposed for anyone with an internet browser to see -- a veritable hole-in-one for a cyberattacker looking to build profiles for potential victims, to be used in follow-on social-engineering attacks. Threatpost reports: Security Discovery researcher Bob Diachenko recently ran across an Elastic database that was not password-protected and thus visible in any browser. Further inspection showed that it belongs to Game Golf, which is a family of apps developed by San Francisco-based Game Your Game Inc. Game Golf comes as a free app, as a paid pro version with coaching tools and also bundled with a wearable. It's a straightforward analyzer for those that like to hit the links -- tracking courses played, GPS data for specific shots, various player stats and so on -- plus there's a messaging and community function, and an optional "caddy" feature. It's popular, too: It has 50,000+ installs on Google Play.

Unfortunately, Game Golf landed its users in a sand trap of privacy concerns by not securing the database: Security Discovery senior security researcher Jeremiah Fowler said that the bucket included all of the aforementioned analyzer information, plus profile data like usernames and hashed passwords, emails, gender, and Facebook IDs and authorization tokens. In all, the exposure consisted of millions of records, including details on "134 million rounds of golf, 4.9 million user notifications and 19.2 million records in a folder called 'activity feed,'" Fowler said. The database also contained network information for the company: IP addresses, ports, pathways and storage info that "cybercriminals could exploit to access deeper into the network," according to Fowler, writing in a post on Tuesday. No word on whether malicious players took a swing at the data, as it were, but the sheer breadth of the information that the app gathers is concerning, Fowler noted.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fun as the element of surprise may be, matches in PUBG might be less dynamic than they seem. That's the assertion of researchers at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Georgia, who tested several AI algorithms to predict final player placement in PUBG from in-game stats and initial rankings. As the coauthors explain, each PUBG game starts with players parachuting from a plane onto one of four maps containing procedurally generated weapons, vehicles, armor, and other equipment. To train their AI models, the team sourced telemetry data recorded and compiled by Google-owned Kaggle, an online machine learning community. In total, it contained 4.5 million instances of solo, duo, and squad battles with 29 attributes, which the researchers whittled down to 1.9 million with 28 attributes.

Most players don't rack up any kills, the team notes, and only a small fraction manage to win with a pacifistic strategy. In fact, 0.3748% of the players in the corpus won kill-free, out of which 0.1059% players won without a kill and without dealing damage. They also observed that players who actively traverse maps -- i.e., walk more -- increase their chances of winning; that 2.0329% players in the sample set died before taking a single step; and that with players with fewer kills who prefer to battle solo or in pairs had higher chances of winning compared with players who played in a squad.

AmiMoJo writes: Backblaze's hard drive reliability stats for Q1 2019 are out, and show that Seagate has been improving for some time. It still can't match the long time leader, Hitachi, and had a nasty blip with 4TB drives. The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for all the hard drives tested in Q1 was 1.56%. That's as high as the quarterly rate has been since Q4 2017 and its part of an overall upward trend we've seen in the quarterly failure rates over the last few quarters..