from Fast Company When Houston hit 109 degrees in late August—tying an all-time temperature record for the city—26 of the previous 27 days had been over 100 degrees. As the hot city gets even hotter because of climate change, it also keeps using more energy for air conditioning. But in the suburb of Conroe, one new building is pioneering a strategy to stay cooler: “self-cooling” concrete walls with a scalloped shape that helps repel heat. The deep grooves in the corrugated pattern give more surface area for heat to move away from the wall “In a way, the wall is […]
Continue readingLife and Death in America’s Hottest City
from The New Yorker The record-setting heat wave in Phoenix this summer, thirty-one consecutive days of temperatures exceeding a hundred and ten degrees, finally broke on Monday, July 31st. But, by the following Friday, August 4th, the thermometer was creeping up toward a hundred and fifteen degrees. Residents liked to joke that anything below the “teens” was comfortable. Jessica Lindstrom, who was thirty-four, was no longer a resident. She and her husband, Daniel, had bought a house in Central Point, Oregon, in 2015. But she had grown up in greater Phoenix and, that week, had brought her expanding family to […]
Continue readingNYPD Using Drones To Check Out Noisy Backyard Parties Over Labor Day Weekend
from ars TECHNICA The New York City Police Department said it will use drones to check out backyard parties when neighbors call to complain about large crowds this weekend. “The drones are going to be responding to non-priority calls and priority calls,” NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry said at a press conference yesterday. “For example, if we have any 311 calls on our non-emergency line where if a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in the backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up, to go check on the party, to make sure if […]
Continue readingCourt Tosses Arkansas Age Verification Law For Violating The 1st Amendment
from TechDirt Just after a judge granted an injunction against Texas’ adult content age verification law on 1st Amendment grounds, a judge in Arkansas did the same to that state’s social media age verification law. Trade organization NetChoice had challenged the law, and the court basically gave them a complete and total victory. Just like the ruling in Texas, the opinion here is a good read. As with Texas, Arkansas relied on Tony Allen, who represents the age verification providers, to claim that the technology works great and the laws are fine. As in Texas, the court here is not […]
Continue readingOnce-Suspended Twitter User Argues California Violated His First Amendment Rights
from SCOTUSblog Last week the federal government encouraged the justices to review a pair of petitions involving two nearly identical laws in Florida and Texas that seek to regulate how large social media platforms can block, remove, or demonetize user content. Lawmakers in both states passed the bills to address what they perceive as censorship of conservative viewpoints; the platforms countered that the laws violate their own First Amendment rights. This week, we highlight cert petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, a First Amendment challenge against efforts by another populous state, California, to regulate online content. […]
Continue readingX (née Twitter) Wants To Collect Your Biometric Data And Employment History
from ars TECHNICA X, the social network that you can access at twitter.com, is planning to collect users’ biometric information, employment history, and educational history, according to an updated privacy policy. “Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the new policy says. X posted the new version of its privacy policy yesterday, saying it will go into effect on September 29. The current privacy policy that doesn’t include collecting biometric data and employment history will remain in effect until September 29. More here.
Continue readingMicrosoft Cut A Key AI Ethics Team
from ars technica An entire team responsible for making sure that Microsoft’s AI products are shipped with safeguards to mitigate social harms was cut during the company’s most recently layoff of 10,000 employees, Platformer reported. Former employees said that the ethics and society team was a critical part of Microsoft’s strategy to reduce risks associated with using OpenAI technology in Microsoft products. Before it was killed off, the team developed an entire “responsible innovation toolkit” to help Microsoft engineers forecast what harms could be caused by AI—and then to diminish those harms. More here.
Continue readingWhy China Could Dominate the Next Big Advance in Batteries
from NYTs In Changsha, deep in China’s interior, thousands of chemists, engineers and manufacturing workers are shaping the future of batteries. The city’s Central South University churns out the graduates who are advancing the technology, much as Stanford University molded the careers of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who pioneered microchips. Across the Xiang River, vast factories mix minerals into the highly processed compounds that make rechargeable batteries possible. These batteries, mostly made of lithium, have powered the rise of cellphones and other consumer electronics. They are transforming the auto industry and could soon start doing the same for solar panels and […]
Continue readingA Generative AI Copilot for Lawyers (with Demo)
from Synthedia “Spellbook is like a GitHub Copilot for lawyers or an AI copilot for lawyers,” said Scott Stephenson, the CEO of Rally. He added, “GitHub Copilot was the inspiration … I remember very well the first time I used it.” Rally created Spellbook by fine-tuning GPT-3 on legal documents. Stephenson said the company also uses some of Cohere’s models and others they have developed in-house. The software suggests language for contacts and also helps review contracts. “You can ask questions about documents, find missing clauses, unusual terms, and things like that … You can also ask freeform questions like […]
Continue readingWhen Your Boss Is an App
from NYTs Brenda Handy started doing temp work nearly 40 years ago. Back then, landing jobs took time and effort, even for a licensed practical nurse. In the 1990s she lived in Tampa, Fla., with her three children, but got her work through a man named Tony Braswell, who had his offices a half-hour away, in St. Petersburg. Braswell would call nurses with the details of their next jobs. Handy would learn her assignment and drive the family van an hour south to Sarasota, or maybe 40 minutes east to Lakeland, to reach one of the care facilities that contracted […]
Continue readingHow Much Is Your Boss Spying On You (And Can You Do Anything About It)?
from Fast Company Despite the shift we felt toward worker empowerment, flexibility, and a more humane way of working, there can still be a lot about living and working in 2023 that feels slightly dystopian. The news is filled with layoffs, economic uncertainty, and the rise of artificial intelligence impacting fields and skills once thought to be the domain of human-exclusive knowledge work. Add to those concerns the rise in so-called bossware monitoring software that companies use to ensure that employees are staying productive. It’s not an anomaly at a few companies. Research found that eight of the ten largest […]
Continue readingThe A.I. Chatbots Have Arrived. Time to Talk to Your Kids.
from NYTs The race is on. Companies are pouring billions of dollars into powerful online chatbots and finding new ways to integrate them into our daily lives. Are our children ready for this? Are any of us? ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to instantly respond to complex questions. It can write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages, among other tasks, all within seconds. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images (and ace the Bar Exam). On Tuesday, Google released Bard, its […]
Continue readingWhy Latin America Keeps Talking About a Common Currency
from The Atlantic “Nothing is more emancipating than the fraternity of nations,” the presidents of Argentina and Brazil declared earlier this year, “coming together from the depths of history to make the future theirs.” This sonorous language—of emancipation and brotherhood—evoked the aspirations of South America’s great independence hero, the statesman Simón Bolívar. The reality was more humdrum: a fancy way of saying they’d like to create a common currency, known as el sur. The plan for a currency union is merely the latest in a long history of treaties and proposals for creating a closer bloc in the region. “The […]
Continue reading“I Don’t Know”
from Seth’s Blog Particularly when it comes to the future. And perhaps about the past. More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we don’t know. Where we can’t know. That’s a given. More here.
Continue readingWhat Happens When A Metaverse Disappears?
from Fast Company A bugle played Taps. The crowd fell silent. Then, a coffin began floating down the aisle, as if carried by invisible pallbearers, until coming to a stop at a makeshift altar adorned with candles and flowers. The coffin was propped up, revealing under its transparent lid the iconic AltspaceVR robot avatar, and a short ceremony began. This scene unfolded on the social VR platform AltspaceVR last weekend, where roughly 40 users and creators had come together to mourn its impending demise. Microsoft, which had acquired the VR platform in 2017, shut down AltspaceVR on Friday, March 10. […]
Continue readingDeepmind’s New Model Gato Is Amazing!
from Louis Bouchard Gato from DeepMind was just published! It is a single transformer that can play Atari games, caption images, chat with people, control a real robotic arm, and more! Indeed, it is trained once and uses the same weights to achieve all those tasks. And as per Deepmind, this is not only a transformer but also an agent. This is what happens when you mix Transformers with progress on multi-task reinforcement learning agents. As we said, Gato is a multi-modal agent. Meaning that it can create captions for images or answer questions as a chatbot. You’d say that […]
Continue readingThe Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned
from NYTs For Emily Zurek Small, college did what it’s supposed to do. Growing up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, she had career and intellectual ambitions for which college is the clearest pathway. “I just kind of always wanted to learn,” she told me recently. “I wanted to be able to have intelligent conversations with people and know about the world.” She enrolled at a small nearby Catholic college, majored in neuroscience and in 2016 became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree — and later, a master’s. She now works as a school […]
Continue readingHappy Pi Day!
Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant pi. Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day format) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant figures of ?. It was founded in 1988 by Larry Shaw, an employee of the Exploratorium. Celebrations often involve eating pie or holding pi recitation competitions. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. Visit here if you are interested in different ways to use Pi.
Continue readingWhy ‘I Don’t Know’ Can Be The Smartest Answer
from Fast Company Ignorance may be bliss, but saying “I don’t know” out loud is often hard to do. It can be especially difficult if you’re in a position of leadership and your team comes to you for answers. However, saying “I don’t know” can actually be empowering if you reframe the concept, says Lizette Warner, author of Power, Poise, and Presence: A New Approach to Authentic Leadership. “Any statement that starts with ‘I don’t know’ means that you’re open to knowing and it leads to discovery,” she says. “‘I don’t know’ is the first path to wisdom. It’s what […]
Continue readingNew Zealand Faces a Future of Flood and Fire
from Wired NEW ZEALAND IS grappling with two consecutive extreme weather events—massive flooding followed by a cyclone—that have claimed at least 12 lives and left hundreds of thousands of people without power. The high winds and waters of Cyclone Gabrielle have washed away coastal roads on the north island and left bridges splintered and broken. Landslides have covered tarmac with slick mud, and houses and streets across have been left under feet of water, only weeks after heavy rain also caused widespread floods. The country has declared a national state of emergency for just the third time in its history. New Zealand’s […]
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