As stand-up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. From a report: There are no comprehensive statistics available but a rough count by The Associated Press of media reports turned up at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Nine were on rented scooters and two on ones the victims owned. With summer fast approaching, the numbers will undoubtedly grow as more riders take to the streets. Despite the risks, demand for the two-wheeled scooters continues to soar, popularized by companies like Lime and Bird. In the U.S. alone, riders took 38.5 million trips on rentable scooters in 2018, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Riders adore the free-flying feel of the scooters that have a base the size of a skateboard and can rev up to 15 miles per hour. They're also cheap and convenient, costing about $1 to unlock with a smartphone app and about 15 cents per minute to ride. And in many cities, they can be dropped off just about anywhere after a rider reaches their destination. But pedestrians and motorists scorn the scooters as a nuisance at best and a danger at worst.

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Facebook shut down its Research and Onavo programs after a report exposed how the company paid teenagers for root access to their phones to gain market data on competitors. Now Facebook is relaunching its paid market research program, but this time with principles -- namely transparency, fair compensation, and safety. From a report: The goal? To find out what other competing apps and features Facebook should buy, copy, or ignore. Today Facebook releases its "Study From Facebook" app for Android only. Some adults 18+ in the US and India will be recruited by ads on and off Facebook to willingly sign up to let Facebook collect extra data from them exchange for a monthly payment. They'll be warned that Facebook will gather what apps are on their phone, how much time they spend using those apps, the app activity names of features they use in other apps, plus their country, device, and network type.

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Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you're listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. From a report: Acquired by Apple for $400 million last year, the company introduced a feature called 'Pop-Up Shazam' to its Android app recently, which when enabled, works with any other Android app to track and identify songs playing externally or internally on the phone. It's a feature that many users have requested for years. Prior to this, when a user would chance upon a music track in say a YouTube video, they only had two inconvenient ways to shazam the song. They could either unplug the earphones from the phone and let the audio play through the built-in speakers, or draw an earpiece close to the mic of the phone. The new feature enables Shazam to track the audio signal beaming off of other apps, thereby not completely relying on just output from the surrounding and a phone's speaker. The app is tapping the audio signal by using a persistent notification that floats around and could be dragged -- like the ones from Facebook Messenger -- and can be activated by a single tap.

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Radiohead have released a vast collection of unreleased tracks made during the sessions for 1997 album OK Computer, after a MiniDisc archive owned by frontman Thom Yorke was hacked last week by an unnamed person, who reportedly held the recordings to ransom for $150,000. From a report: The band have now made the 18 MiniDisc recordings, most of them around an hour in length, available on Bandcamp for $23. Proceeds will go to climate activists Extinction Rebellion. The band's guitarist Jonny Greenwood confirmed the hack, and said: âoeInstead of complaining -- much -- or ignoring it, we're releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion. Just for the next 18 days. So for $23 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom. Never intended for public consumption (though some clips did reach the cassette in the OK Computer reissue) it's only tangentially interesting. And very, very long. Not a phone download." Thom Yorke wrote of the 1.8 gigabyte collection: "It's not v interesting. There's a lot of it 0... as it's out there it may as well be out there until we all get bored and move on."

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