News Headlines - 24 August 2019
▽Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature - The Verge
Publishers are taking issue with Audible’s new Captions feature, first unveiled last month and set to go live in September through partnerships with US public schools. The feature uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones, so users can read along while they listen to an audiobook. The issue, however, is that Audible is doing this based on audiobook recordings, which have separate licenses to physical books and ebooks. The company is not apparently obtaining the necessary licenses to reproduce the written versions of these works.
Illinois officials said Friday that a person who had recently used an e-cigarette and was hospitalized with severe lung illness had died. The death appears to be the first among a spate of mysterious lung illnesses now under investigation by state and federal health officials in connection to vaping - at least 193 cases in 22 states, many in teens and young adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Reports of the number of people hospitalized for vaping-related lung illnesses have doubled in the past week, Illinois officials said in a statement. At least 22 people, ranging in age from 17 to 38, have experienced respiratory illness after using e-cigarettes or vaping, it said. State officials are working with local health departments to investigate another 12 individuals.
▽David Koch, billionaire industrialist and libertarian activist, dies at 79
David Koch, the billionaire, industrialist, philanthropist, political activist and onetime vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, died Friday. He was 79... Koch and his 83-year-old brother, Charles, ran Koch Industries, one of the nation’s largest privately held conglomerates. Its investments include subsidiaries involved with manufacturing, refining and distribution of chemicals, fibers and minerals.
Their father, Fred Koch, founded the company in 1940, the year David was born.
▽Nissan shows off self-driving tech with golf putts that never miss the cup | The Japan Times
Nissan Motor Co. said Thursday it has developed a system in which any golf putt will lead the ball into the cup, by capitalizing on its self-driving technologies... A camera in the system recognizes the location of a putted ball, which is embedded with a motor, and the cup. A computer calculates the correct trajectory for the ball by taking into account the strength of the putt and other factors, to guide it into the cup using wireless data transmissions.
▽NASA Names Record-Setting Mars Rock After The Rolling Stones | Space
The team behind NASA's InSight Mars lander has named a particularly peripatetic Red Planet rock after the legendary band.
The moniker "Rolling Stones Rock" was announced Thursday night (Aug. 22) by actor Robert Downey Jr. at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California - the home city of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages InSight's mission - just before the Stones took the stage. The unveiling came after hours of anticipation after a cryptic video Downey Jr. posted on Twitter.
