Uber confirmed Monday that around 400 of the roughly 1,200 people in its marketing unit are being let go as part of a broader restructuring of the department. CNN reports: In an email sent by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to staff and seen by CNN Business, he says, “we are not making these changes because Marketing has become less important to Uber. The exact opposite is true: we are making these changes because presenting a powerful, unified, and dynamic vision to the world has never been more important.” The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes as the company faces pressure to clean up its finances following a lackluster Wall Street debut in May. Uber has a history of steep loses and its revenue growth is slowing.

Uber lost $1.01 billion in the first three months of this year, according to the company’s first earnings report as a public company. Revenue from its core ridesharing business grew just 9% from the year prior. The company is set to report its second quarter earnings results next week. The layoffs are just the latest turbulence inside Uber in the less than three months since it went public.

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Source: Slashdot – Uber Lays Off 400 People On Its Marketing Team

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it’s an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980’s to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities. These five traits are extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), openness (curious vs cautious), neuroticism (confidence vs nervous), agreeableness (compassionate vs detached) and conscientiousness (organised vs easy-going).

The researchers analysed 52 people’s phone habits between March 2010 and July 2011. Each participant was given a phone with sensing and collection software on it, which gave the researchers information on when and how much the phone was moving (accelerometer data), as well as the number and time of day of all calls and messages. The participants were also asked to complete a Big Five survey to score their personalities on the five traits. Then, the team also created a list of features related to the aspects of phone use they measured, that might potentially determine personality traits; for example, physical activity on weekend nights might predict extraversion, or the number of calls one makes might predict agreeableness. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. The phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, but had trouble predicting the other two traits, especially openness. “There’s also the issue of whether the team were actually looking at personality traits, or if the personality traits could be masked by other factors,” the report adds. “For instance, neuroticism may be associated with different regularity of activity intensity in the night, however we cannot rule out many other possible explanations (e.g. neurotic people are more prone to stress and therefore – if this is the case, anyone with different personality traits that are stressed will still exhibit the same results).”

The study has been published in the journal Computer.

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Source: Slashdot – How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality