Facebook launched Libra with lofty ambitions

Facebook have lofty goals when revealing its new cryptocurrency Libra

Facebook revealed its new cryptocurrency, Libra, hoping it will "transform the global economy." The currency will launch during the first half of 2020.

At first, you will be able to send Libra inside of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, making it an intermediary for transferring traditional currencies. However, Facebook hopes Libra will become a widely accepted payment method and that others will build financial services on its blockchain-based network.

Facebook is developing the currency but intends to share control with a consortium of organisations, including venture capital firms, credit card companies, and other tech giants. However, given Facebook's reputation for disregarding privacy and its impact on political and social issues worldwide, the announcement sparked an immediate backlash from regulators.

YouTube is hiding its comment sections instead of cleaning them up

Given that the comments section on YouTube is often a war zone, the company is now working on a new feature that would hide comments by default. This move comes after creators criticised YouTube for not enforcing its policies against harassment.

Currently, you have to scroll past engagement buttons and recommended videos to find the comments. However, the new test reportedly hides the comments section entirely, and comments are instead accessible by clicking a new icon.

One question is whether viewer engagement will go down with hidden comments. In a statement confirming the test, YouTube said, "This is one of many small experiments we run all the time on YouTube, and we'll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments."

The comments section has not only been the home to bullying, harassment, and abuse. It also became exploited when a ring of paedophiles communicated through the comments to share videos and timestamps, causing YouTube to disable comments on videos with kids.

Walmart uses computer vision technology to catch everyone who forgot to scan the milk

While Amazon is using computer vision to eliminate checkout in stores altogether, Walmart is using AI-powered cameras to prevent theft at checkout lanes in more than 1,000 stores. Their surveillance program uses computer vision to help identify and reduce "shrinkage", which is the term retailers use to define losses due to scanning errors, theft, fraud, and more.

Cameras track and analyse activities at both self-checkout registers and cashier-operated registers, and AI-powered technology can notify checkout attendants, giving staff a chance to step in when an item is moving past a checkout scanner without being scanned.

After two years of trials, Walmart confidently says that shrinkage rates are declining in stores with the surveillance system in place, and Walmart spokeswoman LeMia Jenkins said, Almost everyone working with data spends too much time preparing it for analysis.

Tool of the week: Tableau Prep

Almost everyone working with data spends too much time preparing it for analysis. Tableau Prep is a tool that lets users clean, merge, or modify their data, and it's designed specifically for this use case. The idea is that you should continue working with your data in Tableau, but this is not required.

Compared with many other data processing tools, Tableau Prep is very visual. You drag and drop files and actions in a visual interface, see how your data files branch together, and view the various cleaning steps in a visual timeline.

It's so simple that anyone can use it, and I don't think I've ever said that about data analysis software.