From Cover-Ups To Secret Plots: The Murky History Of Supreme Justices' Health

For the first time in her 25-year career on the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not on the bench to start the new year. After the 85-year-old justice was operated on for lung cancer, she decided to work from home rather than return to the court two weeks after surgery. She's expected to make a full recovery and be back at the court soon. A fair amount is known about Ginsburg's cancers and surgery, but the history of Supreme Court justices and their health is murkier. That's, in part, because the justices — to this day — prefer to keep these matters to themselves as much as possible. But also justices didn't used to be as public facing as they are today, what with writing books and doing interviews, let alone appearing in Oscar-nominated documentaries or having feature films based on their lives.

Justices like their privacy, too Ginsburg has been more transparent than most, revealing the basic details of each of her three bouts with cancer — in 1999, 2009 and now — and disclosing other, less dire health issues from time to time. Other justices, however, have been less open about their health. Justice Anthony Kennedy's 2005 heart stent was only disclosed after it had to be fixed a year later. Justice Antonin Scalia had health issues that only became publicly known after his sudden death in 2016. And Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired at age 90, only recently disclosed that he made the decision to step down after a fumbled dissent from the bench prompted a visit to his doctor and news that he had suffered a mini-stroke.

While modern Supreme Court justices can and do sometimes hide their ailments, it is much harder to do now than in earlier eras — and when something is wrong, it shows. In 2005, it was painfully clear for most of the court term that Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had been operated on for thyroid cancer, was mortally ill. Throughout the term, Rehnquist released almost no information about his health, and, at the end of the term, he decided against retiring, only to die during the court's summer break.

http://www.wunc.org/post/cover-ups-secret-plots-murky-history-supreme-justices-health

Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones

Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It’s an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They’re not completely sure where the data is coming from.

Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, “Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school).” To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations — creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city’s real-world patterns but that “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people,” as Bowden told The Intercept. The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/28/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labs-replica-cellphone-data/

>>4948294

I hear you..maybe the family members didn't have a choice..especially if she had a living will or some other type document that took any say or control out of their hands.

>>4948518

MGW and the word minus, instead of - symbol, hmm