Month: August 2022

Enlarge (credit: Elena Lacey | Getty Images)

If you have paid casual attention to crypto news over the past few years, you probably have a sense that the crypto market is unregulated—a tech-driven Wild West in which the rules of traditional finance do not apply.

If you were Ishan Wahi, however, you would probably not have that sense.

Wahi worked at Coinbase, a leading crypto exchange, where he had a view into which tokens the platform planned to list for trading—an event that causes those assets to spike in value. According to the US Department of Justice, Wahi used that knowledge to buy those assets before the listings, then sell them for big profits. In July, the DOJ announced that it had indicted Wahi, along with two associates, in what it billed as the “first ever cryptocurrency insider trading tipping scheme.” If convicted, the defendants could face decades in federal prison.

Enlarge (credit: Kentaroo Tryman | Getty Images)

Small businesses are cutting back marketing spending due to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes that have made it harder to target new customers online, in a growing trend that has led to billions of dollars in lost revenues for platforms like Facebook.

Apple last year began forcing app developers to get permission to track users and serve them personalized ads on iPhones and iPads in changes that have transformed the online advertising sector.

Many small companies that are reliant on online ads to attract new customers told the Financial Times they did not initially notice the full impact of Apple’s restrictions until recent months, when price inflation squeezed consumer demand in major markets worldwide.

Enlarge / Ahhh, the easy button! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

This is the second episode in our exploration of "no-code" machine learning. In our first article, we laid out our problem set and discussed the data we would use to test whether a highly automated ML tool designed for business analysts could return cost-effective results near the quality of more code-intensive methods involving a bit more human-driven data science.

If you haven't read that article, you should go back and at least skim it. If you're all set, let's review what we'd do with our heart attack data under "normal" (that is, more code-intensive) machine learning conditions and then throw that all away and hit the "easy" button.

As we discussed previously, we're working with a set of cardiac health data derived from a study at the Cleveland Clinic Institute and the Hungarian Institute of Cardiology in Budapest (as well as other places whose data we've discarded for quality reasons). All that data is available in a repository we've created on GitHub, but its original form is part of a repository of data maintained for machine learning projects by the University of California-Irvine. We're using two versions of the data set: a smaller, more complete one consisting of 303 patient records from the Cleveland Clinic and a larger (597 patient) database that incorporates the Hungarian Institute data but is missing two of the types of data from the smaller set.

Enlarge / All these Ferraris have to be recalled because of a faulty brake fluid reservoir cap. (credit: Ferrari)

Spare a thought for Ferrari. Not its F1 team, repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as rival Red Bull romps away with the championships, but the road car division, which is in the process of recalling nearly every car it has sold since 2005.

The problem is the cap of the brake fluid reservoir. It's designed to vent pressure if necessary, but evidently that design isn't so hot. Venting can fail to happen, causing a vacuum to build up, resulting in a possible leak of brake fluid. And if you don't have any brake fluid in your brake lines, you aren't going to be able to slow down or stop (without hitting something large and solid).

The fix is therefore pretty simple—a new brake fluid reservoir cap, and a software patch that lets a driver know if their brake fluid reservoir is running low. (Should this occur, Ferrari says pull over immediately and get the car towed.)