Trump's Multiple Conspiracy Theories in Fox News Interview. Here Are Their Roots

The unfounded ideas have been circulating online for months.

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Biden campaign releases official yard signs for Animal Crossing that players can use to decorate their virtual homes, as politicians try to reach voters online (Makena Kelly/The Verge)

Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Biden campaign releases official yard signs for Animal Crossing that players can use to decorate their virtual homes, as politicians try to reach voters online  —  It's the campaign's latest foray into online organizing  —  Starting today, September 1st, Animal Crossing …

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Apple allows Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to sell ads, which are digital goods, in their iOS apps via direct transactions, avoiding IAP and the 30% cut (Oliver Reichenstein/iA)

Oliver Reichenstein / iA:
Apple allows Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to sell ads, which are digital goods, in their iOS apps via direct transactions, avoiding IAP and the 30% cut  —  Why should Facebook—the biggest beneficiary of the iPhone, its tools, and its infrastructure—pay $99.-, when small developers have to pay tens and hundreds of thousands?

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Zoom revenues skyrocket as profits double

The popular video conferencing app has seen a 458% jump in customer growth compared with last year.

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Walmart Announces Membership Service in Attempt to Compete With Amazon

Walmart+ will cost $98 a year to receive free shipping for orders over $35. The company hopes to build on the success of its pickup grocery business.

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Walmart unveils its new membership service Walmart+, launching Sept. 15 for $98 per year, will offer free, unlimited same-day delivery, fuel discounts, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Walmart unveils its new membership service Walmart+, launching Sept. 15 for $98 per year, will offer free, unlimited same-day delivery, fuel discounts, and more  —  Walmart today officially unveiled its new membership service and Amazon Prime rival, which it's calling “Walmart+.”

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Stanford launches Cable TV News Analyzer, a free AI-powered online service for querying the screen time of public figures or specific topics on cable TV news (Thomas Macaulay/The Next Web)

Thomas Macaulay / The Next Web:
Stanford launches Cable TV News Analyzer, a free AI-powered online service for querying the screen time of public figures or specific topics on cable TV news  —  A new AI-powered tool can show you how much screen time different public figures and topics are getting on TV.

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Walmart+ will finally launch in September. Can it compete with Amazon Prime?

The Walmart+ membership program launches September 15. Can it offer an alternative to Amazon Prime? | Walmart

One Walmart executive says the new program is “the ultimate life hack”

Walmart’s much-anticipated membership program, Walmart+, will finally launch nationwide September 15, the company announced today, about six months after the Covid-19 pandemic pushed the retailer to delay its original timing. The brick-and-mortar retail giant needs the program to be successful to stop top-spending customers from fleeing to Amazon Prime.

Walmart+ will cost $98 a year, or $12.95 a month, and focus mainly on unlimited delivery of groceries and other general merchandise from Walmart stores that will be delivered as soon as the same day they are ordered. Members also get fuel discounts at Walmart gas stations and those of partners, as well as access to “Scan & Go” technology which allows shoppers to use smartphones to scan goods at Walmart stores and exit without stopping to pay a cashier. The company says it will add more perks in the future. Recode previously reported these may include a branded credit card, early availability on product deals, and potentially access to a popular streaming video service.

Walmart wants the membership program to be “the ultimate life hack” for customers, Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside told Recode in an interview on Monday, arguing that its perks will save customers both time and money.

At the same time, Walmart+ will undoubtedly attract comparisons to Amazon’s Prime program, the ultra popular delivery and entertainment membership program that boasts more than 150 million members worldwide and has developed into a retail industry wrecking ball since its launch in 2005. Amazon Prime includes express delivery of millions of products (including groceries), video streaming of a large library of TV shows and movies, music streaming, and other perks. It now costs $119 a year, and Prime customers spend more and shop more frequently than non-Prime members.

And, most importantly for Walmart, more than half of Walmart’s top-spending families are now Prime members, as Recode previously reported. Which begs the question: Will they really subscribe to both membership programs?

When asked about comparisons to Prime on Monday, Whiteside told Recode that “we didn’t necessarily launch Walmart+ to compete with anything else.” And that answer makes sense; the head-to-head comparison between the services does not look great for Walmart when considering online customers who value the widest selection of goods or the longest list of perks.

In addition to the unlimited delivery perk — which is basically just a rebrand of Walmart’s existing Delivery Unlimited membership — Walmart+ only features two other benefits at launch. One is fuel discounts of up to 5 cents per gallon at Walmart, Murphy USA, and Murphy Express gas stations (Sam’s Club gas stations are slated to be included soon). The other perk is access to Walmart’s “Scan & Go” technology for in-store shopping, which allows shoppers to scan items with their phone, scan their phone at a self-checkout kiosk, and walk out of the store without stopping to pay. Walmart briefly tested, but discontinued the tool, two years ago. Walmart’s bet is that the mix of online, in-store, and on-the-go perks, like fuel discounts, will carry unique appeal. Whiteside said that “deepening a relationship further will mean we will get an even greater share of wallet from those customers.” Of course, some Walmart shoppers will also value the $21 difference between the annual fee of Walmart+ and Amazon Prime.

Amazon has made moves in recent years for Prime to appeal to households with less disposable income that historically have favored shopping at Walmart. Amazon added a monthly payment option for Prime fees in 2016, a 45 percent Prime fee discount for those on government assistance in 2017, and most recently, ways for Prime customers to pay for orders with cash. By early 2017, Amazon Prime membership growth was strongest in the US for households making less than $50,000 a year, according to a study by Robert W. Baird & Co.

The success of Walmart+ will likely hinge on how many customers are attracted to the core grocery delivery component of it. While Walmart’s overall grocery business is larger than Amazon’s and its prices are often cheaper, one fear is that top Walmart customers could eventually turn to Amazon for groceries as they get sucked further into the Prime suite of perks. Sources previously told Recode that some Walmart execs believe that top-spending Walmart families that subscribe to Amazon Prime will still be attracted to Walmart+ because its fresh grocery prices are often lower than those Amazon offers.

In the past, some Walmart executives have opposed a paid membership program, seeing Walmart’s competitive advantage as giving shoppers everyday low prices without the need to splurge on a membership fee. Whiteside promised that the low prices will remain even for those who don’t splurge for the bonus services.

“In no way does this membership program take anything away from customer who don’t choose to, or can’t afford to, engage with this,” he said.

On the company’s earnings call earlier this month, CEO Doug McMillon stressed the flexibility of Walmart’s customer offerings.

“We’re going to have multiple ways to serve them, and those families will decide in that moment how they want to shop,” McMillon said. “And sometimes they’ll be in the store, and sometimes they’ll do pickup, and sometimes they’ll do delivery, and many of them will buy a membership, and when they do they’ll get benefits from that.”

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Bella Thorne, OnlyFans and the battle over monetising content

Content creators say OnlyFans has slashed incomes by placing caps on prices charged on the platform.

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Facebook threatens news sharing ban in Australia

The social media giant is preparing for a new law that would force it to pay publishers for news articles.

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Making health care more personal

The health care system today largely focuses on helping people after they have problems. When they do receive treatment, it’s based on what has worked best on average across a huge, diverse group of patients.

Now the company Health at Scale is making health care more proactive and personalized — and, true to its name, it’s doing so for millions of people.

Health at Scale uses a new approach for making care recommendations based on new classes of machine-learning models that work even when only small amounts of data on individual patients, providers, and treatments are available.

The company is already working with health plans, insurers, and employers to match patients with doctors. It’s also helping to identify people at rising risk of visiting the emergency department or being hospitalized in the future, and to predict the progression of chronic diseases. Recently, Health at Scale showed its models can identify people at risk of severe respiratory infections like influenza or pneumonia, or, potentially, Covid-19.

“From the beginning, we decided all of our predictions would be related to achieving better outcomes for patients,” says John Guttag, chief technology officer of Health at Scale and the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. “We’re trying to predict what treatment or physician or intervention would lead to better outcomes for people.”

A new approach to improving health

Health at Scale co-founder and CEO Zeeshan Syed met Guttag while studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Guttag served as Syed’s advisor for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. When Syed decided to pursue his PhD, he only applied to one school, and his advisor was easy to choose.

Syed did his PhD through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). During that time, he looked at how patients who’d had heart attacks could be better managed. The work was personal for Syed: His father had recently suffered a serious heart attack.

Through the work, Syed met Mohammed Saeed SM ’97, PhD ’07, who was also in the HST program. Syed, Guttag, and Saeed founded Health at Scale in 2015 along with  David Guttag ’05, focusing on using core advances in machine learning to solve some of health care’s hardest problems.

“It started with the burning itch to address real challenges in health care about personalization and prediction,” Syed says.

From the beginning, the founders knew their solutions needed to work with widely available data like health care claims, which include information on diagnoses, tests, prescriptions, and more. They also sought to build tools for cleaning up and processing raw data sets, so that their models would be part of what Guttag refers to as a “full machine-learning stack for health care.”

Finally, to deliver effective, personalized solutions, the founders knew their models needed to work with small numbers of encounters for individual physicians, clinics, and patients, which posed severe challenges for conventional AI and machine learning.

“The large companies getting into [the health care AI] space had it wrong in that they viewed it as a big data problem,” Guttag says. “They thought, ‘We’re the experts. No one’s better at crunching large amounts of data than us.’ We thought if you want to make the right decision for individuals, the problem was a small data problem: Each patient is different, and we didn’t want to recommend to patients what was best on average. We wanted what was best for each individual.”

The company’s first models helped recommend skilled nursing facilities for post-acute care patients. Many such patients experience further health problems and return to the hospital. Health at Scale’s models showed that some facilities were better at helping specific kinds of people with specific health problems. For example, a 64-year-old man with a history of cardiovascular disease may fare better at one facility compared to another.

Today the company’s recommendations help guide patients to the primary care physicians, surgeons, and specialists that are best suited for them. Guttag even used the service when he got his hip replaced last year.

Health at Scale also helps organizations identify people at rising risk of specific adverse health events, like heart attacks, in the future.

“We’ve gone beyond the notion of identifying people who have frequently visited emergency departments or hospitals in the past, to get to the much more actionable problem of finding those people at an inflection point, where they are likely to experience worse outcomes and higher costs,” Syed says.

The company’s other solutions help determine the best treatment options for patients and help reduce health care fraud, waste, and abuse. Each use case is designed to improve patient health outcomes by giving health care organizations decision-support for action.

“Broadly speaking, we are interested in building models that can be used to help avoid problems, rather than simply predict them,” says Guttag. “For example, identifying those individuals at highest risk for serious complications of a respiratory infection [enables care providers] to target them for interventions that reduce their chance of developing such an infection.”

Impact at scale

Earlier this year, as the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic was becoming clear, Health at Scale began considering ways its models could help.

“The lack of data in the beginning of the pandemic motivated us to look at the experiences we have gained from combatting other respiratory infections like influenza and pneumonia,” says Saeed, who serves as Health at Scale’s chief medical officer.

The idea led to a peer-reviewed paper where researchers affiliated with the company, the University of Michigan, and MIT showed Health at Scale’s models could accurately predict hospitalizations and visits to the emergency department related to respiratory infections.

“We did the work on the paper using the tech we’d already built,” Guttag says. “We had interception products deployed for predicting patients at-risk of emergent hospitalizations for a variety of causes, and we saw that we could extend that approach. We had customers that we gave the solution to for free.”

The paper proved out another use case for a technology that is already being used by some of the largest health plans in the U.S. That’s an impressive customer base for a five-year-old company of only 20 people — about half of which have MIT affiliations.

“The culture MIT creates to solve problems that are worth solving, to go after impact, I think that’s been reflected in the way the company got together and has operated,” Syed says. “I’m deeply proud that we’ve maintained that MIT spirit.”

And, Syed believes, there’s much more to come.

“We set out with the goal of driving impact,” Syed says. “We currently run some of the largest production deployments of machine learning at scale, affecting millions, if not tens of millions, of patients, and we  are only just getting started.”

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Google quietly updates its AdMob Help Center with iOS 14 information, says it will use Apple's ATT API for triggering the IDFA opt-in notice (Allison Schiff/AdExchanger)

Allison Schiff / AdExchanger:
Google quietly updates its AdMob Help Center with iOS 14 information, says it will use Apple's ATT API for triggering the IDFA opt-in notice  —  Like all companies invested in the mobile ecosystem, Google is getting ready for iOS 14.  But the company is playing its cards close to the vest.

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Facebook threatens to remove news from its platform in Australia - CNET

Users could be blocked from sharing news, Facebook claims, if new draft regulations are put in place.

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US hotel operator MCR Development to buy StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, for $46M, after Trump said StayNTouch's Chinese owners threaten US security (Katy Stech Ferek/Wall Street Journal)

Katy Stech Ferek / Wall Street Journal:
US hotel operator MCR Development to buy StayNTouch, a cloud platform for hotels, for $46M, after Trump said StayNTouch's Chinese owners threaten US security  —  MCR Development's planned acquisition comes after Trump said ownership of StayNTouch by Beijing Shiji Information Technology threatens U.S. security

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No, Microsoft has not made 825,000 carbon-neutral Xbox Series X consoles - CNET

A Microsoft sustainability campaign creates confusion.

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Chadwick Boseman, star of Black Panther, dead at 43: 'A king on and off screen' - CNET

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan, the Russo brothers, Marvel Studios and many others honor the actor, who died after a four-year fight with colon cancer.

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15 best TV shows to stream on Amazon Prime Video - CNET

Searching for a great show to watch tonight? Let's round up Amazon's best gems.

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SpaceX Starlink: How to watch Falcon 9 launch next batch of satellites - CNET

Weather postponed the launch Sunday, but SpaceX will go for its 10th Starlink launch in 2020 on Thursday.

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The best drones for 2020 - CNET

Everything you need to know before you take off.

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Watch Marvel's touching tribute to Chadwick Boseman - CNET

The studio remembers the Black Panther actor, who died Friday at 43.

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