After 20 months’ worth of data taking, the LUX experiment announces their final results for dark matter. Not finding any may be the most interesting possible outcome.

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McLaren Automotive is in the midst of an aggressive growth plan, but based on the automaker’s performance in recent years it seems the company’s lofty goals seem well within reach.

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After a five-month private beta, anonymous social app Candid launched in the iOS App Store and Google Play Thursday.  The application was built with the goal of correcting some of the mistakes that previous anonymous social networks like Secret and Yik Yak inadvertently made.  By curating and moderating content with artificial intelligence, disincentivizing negativity in comments, and offering personalization without divulging user identities, Candid is attempting to create something of a digital “safe space.”
In the social Web, user identity has always presented a problem. No matter how they are handled, anonymity and eponymity are each uniquely problematic. 
Without a real name tied to an online identity, users do not face immediate consequences for posting hateful or antisocial comments.  On the flip side, when users post under their real identities, there is a legitimate risk that they could lose their jobs, friends, or followers for opining on controversial matters.  Free speech can suffer a chilling effect as a result of these threats.
The severity of these problems has been borne out by a number of high-profile news stories.
Anonymity
Nineteen-year-old Hunter M. Park posted racially-motivated terror threats on anonymous location-based social network Yik Yak in 2015, threatening to “shoot every black person” he saw on the University of Missouri campus.  Park was later arrested and charged with a Class C felony.  In June, the former Missouri University of Science and Technology sophomore received five years of probation, barring his access to firearms and limiting his access to the Internet.
Ostensibly offering a shield of anonymity, Yik Yak opens the door for hateful content.
Eighteen-year-old Georgian Elizabeth Long was harassed so badly on the service that she posted a petition on change.org to have it shut down.
“…Users have zero accountability for their posts, and can openly spread rumors, call classmates hurtful names, send threats, or even tell someone to kill themselves — and all of these things are happening,”  Long wrote.
That sort of activity is what forced Secret to shut down.  The short-lived Silicon Valley superstar faced a ban in Brazil in late 2014 because it allegedly promoted bullying.  Less than a year later, CEO David Byttow announced Secret’s operations would be terminated.
Eponymitiy
Facebook attempts to keep user identities as real as possible.  According to the social network’s help center, Facebook “Require everyone to provide the first and last names they use in everyday life so that you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.”
An unintended side effect of this soft policy is that Facebook users face real life consequences for what they post, even if their content is anodyne.  People posting complaints about their work environment, for example, risk losing their jobs.
With a long history in social development, Candid’s CEO Bindu Reddy is trying to solve these problems.  In February 2015, Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services statistics chief Michael Allred made a joke about being groped by corrections officers that cost him his job. 
He had only held the position for a couple of weeks.
Rodney Jones, an employee of Accentia Health and Rehabilitation Center of Tampa Bay lost his job for posting photographs of himself on vacation.  Because Jones was out of work on medical leave, his employer felt his vacation constituted abuse of his privilege.
Real identities on social media demand a higher level of self-awareness and caution when sharing information.  When a user has a professional image to uphold, the need for caution rises even higher.
Candid’s Solution
Controlled anonymity and automated content moderation are the two prongs of Candid’s approach to breaking the identity conundrum.  Users sign in with their Facebook credentials, but  that login information is divorced from the user’s content.  They are told the number of Facebook friends that are on Candid, but not which ones. No IP addresses are logged, and each tweet-like post is each assigned a random username. 
Because all usernames are randomized, a user’s posts are not centrally organized and basically unsearchable to other users.
This is not to say a user’s identity is totally hidden.  Candid uses artificial intelligence and sentiment analysis to assign badges that persist across random usernames.  These badges act as a kind of warning as to what type of poster the user is.  If the site’s sentiment analysis determines you to be the kind of person who posts unsubstantiated rumor, you earn the badge of “gossip.”  If the sentiment analyzer sees your posts are full of negativity, you might earn the badge “hater.”
The “hater” badge acts as an interesting bullying deterrent.  By letting other users know that they’re reading content posted by a generally negative person, Candid is taking some of the power away from that negativity.
Bindu Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Candid, says the sentiment analysis model is really cutting through the hate of anonymous social networks.

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“Being real estate-savvy is no longer only about possession of information, but about being able to translate that information into useful insights for buyers, sellers and renters.” Says Susan Daimelr, GM of StreetEasy. Susan oversees all strategy, marketing, sales and customer divisions of Zillow Group’s New York operations, including StreetEasy and Naked Apartments. She joined Zillow in October 2012 after the company’s acquisition of Buyfolio, a co-shopping platform for real estate agents and their homebuyers, which she co-founded in 2009. Prior to Buyfolio, Susan co-founded the award-winning travel website SeatGuru, which was sold to Expedia in 2007. She has a bachelor’s in English from Johns Hopkins University and currently sits on their Board of Trustees.

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With Tinder Social, Sean Rad can expand Tinder’s membership and use cases, moving beyond dating and opening the app to couples.

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Could these be the LCD TVs we’ve been waiting for?

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Silicon Valley, famously, is as much about that over-used notion of disruption as it is about over-stated claims to making the world a better place. Both goals have the power to stir up the millennial mind, which is good for recruiting. Both, however, also have strong political overtones: disruption pulls the rug out from under the powerful; as for making the world a better place…well, isn’t that what politicians are supposed to be doing when they aren’t politicking? No wonder, despite the commonly held belief that politics and technology are like oil and water, technology, without question, is increasingly tied to political expression. In the past, this expression used to occur in subtle ways. In the present political season, that subtlety has gone out of the window. Technology seems to have embraced politics like never before.

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