Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

Monday, August 19, 2019
By Oliver Roeder

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/significant-digits-for-monday-aug-19-2019/

$0.001 per image

Amazon’s Rekognition facial-recognition software had been able to place faces on a scale for seven emotional categories — “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” “surprised,” “disgusted,” “calm,” and “confused.” Last week, Amazon AI engineers added an eighth category — “fear.”

The system can detect fear at a cost of $0.001 per image, with a discount for those totally normal people who analyze more than a million images. Alexa, I’m scared. [Wired]

5 linguists

Five linguists at the City University of New York are nearing the end of a three-year project to document the “New Yawk” accent and “to catalog just what makes the dialect so distinctively New York.” The researchers employed undergrads across the five boroughs to record interviews.

They found dropped R’s, nasally A’s, and “a trademark spin on the first vowel in words like coffee, making it cawfee.” Hey, undergrad, I’m walking heeah. [New York Daily News]

“$700 million a year”

President Trump wants to buy Greenland — which, if you’ve seen “D2: The Mighty Ducks,” you know was once covered with ice and which, if you’ve followed the climate news lately, you know is less true every day. Anyway, Trump said: “Essentially, it’s a large real estate deal. A lot of things can be done. It’s hurting Denmark very badly, because they’re losing almost $700 million a year carrying it.” [Associated Press]