(C) Reuters. China Is Days Away From Revealing If It Dumped Its GDP Growth Target (Bloomberg) — When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers his annual report on economic policy this Friday, there’s a chance that the document’s most important number will be missing. The target for gross domestic product growth […]
More than 8% of U.S. mortgages now in forbearance: MBA weekly survey
Economic Indicators19 hours ago (May 18, 2020 04:15PM ET) (C) Reuters. A home stands behind a real estate sign in a new development in York County, South Carolina WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Roughly 4.1 million U.S. mortgage borrowers have had their payments paused or reduced as the novel coronavirus outbreak hits […]
U.S. homebuilder confidence rises in May
Economic Indicators13 hours ago (May 18, 2020 10:05AM ET) (C) Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A new apartment building housing construction site is seen in Los Angeles WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Confidence among U.S. single-family homebuilders rose in May, potentially signaling that the worst of the economic downturn was probably over as the […]
Chile’s economy grows 0.4% in first quarter 2020, boosted by mining: central bank
Economic Indicators14 hours ago (May 18, 2020 09:35AM ET) (C) Reuters. FILE PHOTO: An empty street in a commercial sector of Santiago, during a preventive quarantine following the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Chile’s gross domestic product grew 0.4% percent in the first quarter of 2020 compared […]
How School Shutdowns Have Longterm Effects on Children
It’s impossible to know how much each child is learning in lockdown. But according to survey data from the Sutton Trust and Teacher Tapp, a teacher polling app, private school students in the UK are twice as likely as state school students to be accessing online lessons every day. Similarly, […]
This Robot Can Guess How You’re Feeling by the Way You Walk
In order to understand how a gait looks, though, the robot needs objective data, not subjective judgements. So the researchers used algorithms that analyzed videos of the people walking, with each person’s image overlaid by a skeleton with 16 joints, including at the neck, shoulders, and knees. Then, they used […]
How Smart City Planning Could Slow Future Pandemics
The cities of the world are sick. As the coronavirus pandemic continues, people living in metropolitan areas have been among the worst hit, unable to socially distance effectively and sometimes plagued with preexisting conditions that their cities helped create. Many municipalities weren’t built with highly transmissible infectious disease–or human health–in […]
Here’s What an Antitrust Case Against Google Might Look Like
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal and state officials are likely to file antitrust lawsuits against Google later this year, focusing on the company’s dominance of the digital advertising industry. This morning, thanks to a pair of former Obama administration officials, we got our best look […]
How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting–and Surveillance–Easy
Fun is also a means of subversion in China, especially when it comes to language. In the early 2000s, as online censors banned certain characters, computer users got around the state by switching to homophones. To mock the notion of a “harmonious society,” a Maospeak phrase popularized during Hu Jintao’s […]
China Jan-April fiscal revenues down 14.5% year-on-year: finance ministry
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