U.S. Weather Computers Are a Little More Super Today Than Yesterday

If it seems, over the course of the next few weeks, that weather predictions are a little more accurate, then it's probably not your imagination. It's just that the computers that the U.S. Federal Government uses to predict the weather have gotten a lot smarter.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, switched over to using two new IBM-made supercomputers, according to an interesting story from IDG's Computerworld.

The new machines are capable of 213 teraflops, or 213 trillion floating point operations per second. That's almost three times the power of the prior systems, which were capable of 74 teraflops. One will be in Reston, Va., and one will be in Orlando, Fla. The systems were "turned on" during a press event in College Park, Md..

While that's definitely some serious computing horsepower, it's well shy of the world's current supercomputing champ, China's Tianhe-2, which boasts a scorching 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

How will you notice the difference? Since these computers will be the source of pretty much every weather forecast you're likely to see, including those found on all the weather apps on your smartphone, you may start noticing temperature predictions that are more accurate, especially in the extended forecasts.

Another - and probably more important - change should come in the accuracy of hurricane modeling. Last year, during Hurricane Sandy (pictured), there were criticisms that European forecasters used more accurate computer models to predict where the storm was heading.

As it turns out, there is a bit of a friendly competition going on between NOAA and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which had those better computer models. It's not sitting still, either. It just purchased a set of new Cray supercomputers, but hasn't yet disclosed their performance.

L.A. Unified School District Wants iPads for All 640,000 Students

Back in June, the Los Angeles Unified School District awarded Apple a $30 million contract to provide its students with iPads. Under its terms, the company will supply about 31,000 iPads to 47 LAUSD schools, each preloaded with a bunch of educational software. But evidently that's just the first phase of the program.

According to an LAUSD representative, the nation's second-largest school district hopes to provide iPads to all 640,000 students by late 2014. Which means it's going to buy a few hundred thousand more iPads over the next year - though it's not yet sure how it's going to do it. "We're hoping that we will get a lot of private donors," Mark Hovatter, chief facilities executive for LAUSD, told CITEworld.

That's very good news for Apple. If LAUSD is able to pull together the money to realize this plan, it will be purchasing hundreds of thousands of additional iPads. Which potentially means another big iPad contract in the offing, and the chance to expose thousands of kids to the iOS ecosystem.

Mark Zuckerberg to Speak on Immigration Issues at S.F. Film Premiere

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to deliver an address on immigration issues in early August, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the first time he has spoken publicly on the matter.

The speech will include the San Francisco premiere of a new film, "Documented," which chronicles the struggles of undocumented immigrants entering the United States.

The film was written and directed by Jose Antonio Vargas, a writer and immigration rights activist who revealed his own status as an undocumented immigrant in a widely circulated New York Times Magazine article in 2011. (Vargas also wrote a lengthy profile of Zuckerberg for the New Yorker a few years ago.)

The premiere is sponsored by and ties in perfectly with FWD.us, the sometimes controversial Zuckerberg-backed political action group focused on U.S. immigration reform. The issues that FWD.us supports are felt by many tech companies in Silicon Valley; in particular, the focus on changing certain legislation which would allow for more annual H-1B visas, ultimately granting more foreign workers entry into the U.S.

But, as the Chronicle notes, the premiere will be the first time Silicon Valley will enter the wider debate on immigration reform as a whole, rather than just focus on the expansion of visa programs in order to recruit international engineering talent.

The film debuts at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Aug. 5.

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Pinterest Now Tracks Everybody by Default, but You Can Opt Out

Pinterest will now compile profiles of people who visit sites that contain Pinterest buttons, so their social bookmarking experience can be automatically personalized around interests that correspond to those sites.

This will happen both for people who are currently logged in to the Pinterest website, and for people who have never even joined Pinterest, via anonymized tracking.

"So, if you're planning a party and have gone to lots of party sites recently, we'll try to suggest boards to make your event a hit," Pinterest software engineer Ke Chen explained in a blog post.

"Pin It" buttons and other Pinterest widgets are used on just about every page of major sites, including Amazon, eBay, Nordstrom, REI and Bon Appetit.

Their original purpose was so that that shoppers and other users could easily save items they come across to their Pinterest boards. Since Pinterest sends lots of traffic back to the sites, the buttons are all over the place.

People who want to opt out of Pinterest tracking can enable "Do Not Track" on their browser, change their account settings, or tell Pinterest not to use that data when they sign up.

Pinterest announced the initiative today by emphasizing its support for Do Not Track, a privacy initiative that has had trouble getting off the ground because people can't agree how to implement it, and tracking users is a key ingredient for personalizing services and targeting advertising. As an emerging Internet giant, Pinterest's endorsement for the standard is important.

However, the more notable aspect of today's news doesn't seem to be Do Not Track - it's that Pinterest is tracking people who don't even use the service.

That's because Pinterest wants to provide a good experience for new users the first time they visit, said company spokesperson Malorie Lucich.

"One of our hopes is that, when people join Pinterest, we'll be able to suggest better content to them, so they have a good new-user experience (and see stuff that interests them)," she said. "As part of the sign-up process, they can tell us not to use that type of data. (There is a clear check-box.)"

Data collected about users who are logged out of Pinterest will be anonymized, she said.

Lucich explained, "We think the websites you visit are a good indicator of your interests (and Pinterest is all about your interests). So as people visit sites with the Pin It button (or other Pinterest widgets), we can use that information (if they're interested) to recommend better boards to follow."

She compared the Pinterest feature to one that Twitter launched in 2012, which suggests accounts for new users to follow.

The Twitter suggestions are said to be based on monitoring people who visit sites with Twitter widgets on them, to see what accounts they commonly follow. If the new user has also visited one of those sites in the past 10 days, some of those accounts will be suggested.

Both moves are a little creepy when you think about it - some site that you've never even joined is ready and waiting to personalize itself for you, whenever you show up.

That said, this is not uncommon. Tracking cookies are used all over the Web, and few people know or care about them.

Pinterest said it would be adding the features "in the next few weeks."

Google Suggests Web-TV Thingies You Can Buy Instead of Google's Sold-Out Chromecast

Google has not only sold out of Netflix giveaways to bundle with its Chromecast device, but it doesn't have any Chromecasts to sell right now, period. If you place an order on Google's site, you'll be told there is a two- to three-week wait before one will ship.

As a helpful AllThingsD reader points out, as of this morning, you could still buy a Chromecast from Best Buy's website. That's no longer the case, either.

But if you do end up looking for a Chromecast on BestBuy.com, you will find a list of other ways you can watch Web video on your TV.

The list is provided by Google, via its AdSense ad units, which means that, even if Google can't sell you a gadget, it might still make money by getting you to click on a link.

The list will change over time, and will vary depending on your browsing history. Here's one I just saw:

If you're in the market for a Chromecast, you might very well have heard of Roku, which offers gadgets that do similar things, but at a higher price point.

It's interesting to note that Google's auction/algorithm thinks you might also want to check out devices from Western Digital, which has had a hard time getting attention for its streaming boxes. It's also interesting to see that Aereo, a subscription service that can't show up on your TV without help from Apple TV, Roku (or, theoretically, Chromecast), is on the list, too.