Ah, facial recognition. It used to be that banks and phone and cable companies just stole your voice print – solely for “identification” purposes, mind (just like the ubiquitous abuse of SS##). Rights to one’s face are presumably given over by terms buried in that one-click process. These kinds of data are never used in a restrictive manner, never solely for internal privacy/liability protection purposes. They become part of the data holder’s data set and are subject to multiple commercial uses, all hidden from the supplier of that information. It’s inherent in and central to many business models.

Commercial use and abuse claims come to mind: invasion of privacy, rights to publicity. Johnny Carson and Ahnold would not accept granting their face rights to just any old vendor for the privilege of using some generic online service. Why should Joe and Jane?

Realtor friend here in the Boston area posted on Facebook about a feeding frenzy on a house in Medford, dozens of offers most above listed price. When I responded that it sounded like an indication of another looming housing bust, the comment back was “Oh, the Boston area continues to be awesome!”

Maybe I’m being negative after watching “99 Homes” and “The Big Short” recently. Still, I’ll be watching for news about the Chinese real estate market for the effects a collapse there might have on our markets here. After all, another trend I’ve been seeing is the global plutocracy’s gobbling up of prime real estate all around the world and forcing rising prices on everyone else in the market, even the ones not looking for their fifth pied a terre for an occasional weekend in a world class city.

Regarding #2 under “The Present’s no gift”, which is about Ransomware’s business model: From my experinece, Dell’s been doing that for years.

“What a surprise that a psychoactive drug combined with toxic by-products from smoking a plant product might have negative effects on pregnancy.” — Such a good Drug Warrior!

“Women who use marijuana also tend to smoke cigarettes and are more likely to use other drugs and alcohol, for whom national statistics [25] have shown that amongst Australian women aged ≥14years who used marijuana in 2010, 82.7% also consumed alcohol, and 68.5% were cigarette smokers, with similar patterns of prevalence in New Zealand [10].”

“Although the numbers are small”

“There have been inconsistent results reported from American prospective cohort studies, in which associations of marijuana use with adverse pregnancy outcomes were either found [21], [26] and [27] or not found [28], [29] and [30].”

“Whereas the results from this study are in agreement with other studies, it needs to be noted that a few American and a UK prospective cohort studies did not find an association between marijuana use and SPTB [28], [29], [30] and [40]. However, these studies have a higher percentage (>40%) of black race, whereas there are 89.9% Caucasians in this study. Although the studies have also adjusted for ethnicity, age, BMI, and other lifestyle factors, interaction tests were not performed in the analysis to examine the interaction effects of marijuana use and cigarette smoking on pregnancy outcomes.”

“Furthermore, apart from a cigarette smoking-marijuana interaction, it is also well recognised that cigarette smoking and illicit drug use are associated with low socio-economic status”

“It needs to be noted that the number of SPTB cases amongst women who reported marijuana use at 20 weeks’ gestation is small (n = 11) even in this large cohort. The use of self-reported marijuana use and cigarette smoking status may be a potential limitation, as it may be subject to participant recall bias. Furthermore, this study was undertaken in a nulliparous cohort so it may be the case that our findings apply only to nulliparous women. ”

“Further research is required to confirm these findings, and future studies should include appropriate corrections for the various important confounders (e.g. smoking, BMI, ethnicity).”