Some Sentimental News...

Happy Friday!

Welcome to the second edition of the Quantumics Weekly Roundup. This week, we’ll focus on exploring the Tory leadership race and how we can use data to estimate sentiment for various party candidates.

We’ll also explore the latest news and information in data and AI, business and tech. Let’s go! ??

Data Titbits ??

The Tory leadership race is heating up in the United Kingdom, after Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week. After two rounds of internal voting conducted by Tory MP’s, Rishi Sunak came out on top with 101 votes, followed by Penny Mordaunt with 83 votes and Liz Truss with 64 votes. However, despite running up in the internal ballots, Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, viewed in the party as having strong pro-Brexit credentials, charisma and good leadership qualities, is the favourite to succeed Johnson according to?Sky Bet, with odds at 4/6. Ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak is the platform’s second most likely candidate at 3/1.

But what does the public think of the top three contenders, Rishi, Penny and Liz? To find out, we used?Sentiment Viz, a Twitter Sentiment Analysis tool created at North Carolina State University. The tool pulls tweets with specific keywords (in our case?Rishi Sunak,?Penny Mordaunt?and?Liz Truss) and uses a sentiment dictionary to estimate sentiment. Also shown is a tag cloud, in which common words from the emotional spectrum are shown, words that are more frequent are shown larger.

Here’s what we found:

Rishi Sunak:

Penny Mordaunt:

Liz Truss:

• Last week, we had a look at?Dall-E Mini, a text-to-image AI app that allows anyone to use exciting new machine learning technology to create fascinating and often bizarre art.?Carrying on with the AI Art theme, here’s?Make-A-Scene, Meta’s new artificial intelligence (AI) research concept that lets people use text and simple sketches to generate digital imagery. Similar to Dall-E, Meta’s AI tool allows users to input keywords, but additionally requires users to draw a simple sketch of their desired artwork. This allows the tool to create a more accurate image of what the user had imagined.
• Amazon's smart-doorbell company, Ring, has provided surveillance footage to law enforcement?without a warrant or the consent of doorbell-owners 11 times?this year alone, according to a letter Amazon sent to Congress earlier this month. In each of the 11 cases this year, Amazon's VP of Public Policy Brian Huseman wrote, Ring determined that the police requests met the imminent-danger threshold and provided the information "without delay."

Tech News ??

NASA on Tuesday released a full batch of images and data from the?James Webb Space Telescope, providing an astounding first look at the cosmic mysteries that could be untangled in the years ahead by humanity's largest and most powerful space observatory. In case you don’t know, the James Webb Space Telescope will find the?first galaxies?that formed in the early universe and?peer through?dusty clouds?to see stars forming?planetary systems.

• Netflix?has been losing customers?lately, and one of the measures to counter the trend it to offer them to come back with an even?cheaper, ad-supported tier. Now we know this is happening, as the streaming platform revealed Microsoft will be its “global advertising technology and sales partner.” Although the partnership is still in its early days, Netflix and Microsoft plan on bringing a cheaper Netflix subscription package, with advertisements displayed presumably similar to YouTube.
• OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer?revealed this afternoon?that the NFT marketplace is laying off about 20 percent of its employees.?A?Forbes?article?in January celebrating Finzer and his co-founder Alex Atallah’s $2.2 billion net worth (each) said the company employed more than 70 people, but an OpenSea spokesperson tells?The Verge?that 230 people will remain with the company.

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Market News ??

• JPMorgan opened earnings season with a tough Q2 report, which sent cautionary vibes rippling across Wall Street yesterday. Profits at the country’s largest bank?declined 28%?from the year before, and it suspended share buybacks.
• The crypto market has been going through a downward trend with a sharp decline in prices since the beginning of this year. Even though all corrections are different and are caused by various factors, the current situation can be compared with the period between 2018 to 2020, which is commonly referred to as the ‘crypto winter’ in the market.?Here’s what you need to know.