AI-generated comic artwork loses US Copyright protection

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AI-generated comic artwork loses US Copyright protection On Tuesday, the US Copyright Office declared that images created using the AI-powered Midjourney image generator for the comic book Zarya of the Dawn should not have been granted copyright protection, and the images' copyright protection will be revoked. Continued here

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Oral bacteria trigger rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups Periodontal (gum) disease affects up to 47% of the U.S. adult population and is thought to be linked to a wide variety of adverse health outcomes, from dementia to pancreatic cancer. It was suspected that oral health also plays a role in the development of rheumatoid arthritis, and now, a team led by scientists at Stanford University have discovered a possible mechanism: Oral bacteria infiltrate the bloodstream and trigger the production of antibodies that target both the microbial invaders as well as healthy proteins found in human joints. Their results were reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Periodontal disease (PD) deteriorates the gums, which are responsible for holding your teeth in place and keeping oral bacteria from entering the bloodstream, where they can cause systemic inflammation. Furthermore, PD is more common in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. These and other clues led Stanford researchers to speculate that the disease could somehow trigger immune pathways that drive chronic inflammation in joints. Continued here

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A world of hurt for Fortinet and Zoho after users fail to install patches Organizations around the world are once again learning the risks of not installing security updates as multiple threat actors race to exploit two recently patched vulnerabilities that allow them to infect some of the most critical parts of a protected network. Continued here

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Building Resilience in the Face of Climate Change [Sponsored] Successfully mitigating the impacts of climate change will rely heavily on innovation in science and technology. This podcast was produced for Battelle by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors. Continued here

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How the U.S. Is Planning to Boost Floating Wind Power The Biden administration is eyeing a 70 percent cut in the cost of floating offshore wind power by 2035 CLIMATEWIRE | The Biden administration announced initiatives yesterday to prepare states for floating offshore wind — a young but fast-emerging type of power that some say could revolutionize renewables on the West Coast. Continued here

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7 Greek philosophers and their brilliantly flawed explanations of nature The ancient Greek philosophers produced a vast array of ideas. While thoughts on how to live occupied much of their attention, they also wondered exactly what constitutes the world around us. It doesn’t matter that many of their conjectures turned out to be several leagues wide of the mark — they still blazed a conceptual trail for humankind and our attempts to understand the nature of reality. For Aristotle, Thales was the OG: the very first philosopher. Living in Miletus — an ancient Greek city located in modern-day Turkey — during the 6th century BC, Thales is known for his work in philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. Continued here

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Generative AI Won't Revolutionize Search -- Yet Generative AI has the potential to drastically change what users expect from search, and companies such as Microsoft and Google are placing big bets on what it might yield. But despite the hype around ChatGPT — and generative AI overall — there are major practical, technical, and legal challenges to overcome before these tools can reach the scale, robustness, and reliability of an established search engine such as Google. These include problems of keeping large language models up to date, issues around sourcing, and convincing fabrications by the AIs. That said, these tools might be strong fits for narrower, more specialized forms of search. Continued here

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Valve used secret memory access "honeypot" to detect 40K Dota 2 cheaters In a blog post this week, Valve revealed the existence of this trap, which was released as part of an earlier update to the game. Valve says that update included "a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay." But that memory could be read by third-party cheat tools that used exploits to sniff out (and share) internal data normally invisible to players. Continued here

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EU seeks input on making tech companies pay for ISPs' network upgrades The European Union government is seeking public input on a controversial proposal to make online platforms pay for telecom companies' broadband network upgrades and expansions. If it goes forward, tech companies like Google and Netflix and possibly many others could have to make payments toward the financing of broadband network deployment. Continued here

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Netflix Is No Longer Chill The promise of streaming TV was that you could watch whatever you wanted, when you wanted. And for a while, that was mostly true. But recently, streaming services have started to dial back the nice-guy stuff and reel in the freebies. Companies across the stream-o-sphere are tweaking subscription tiers, raising prices, and canceling unprofitable shows. Netflix has introduced an ad-supported tier to its formerly ad-free service, and even started cracking down on people sharing account credentials. And corporate shake-ups at HBO Max have resulted in gobs of stuff being removed from that platform entirely. This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter joins us to talk about why the streaming ecosystem has grown so complicated and hostile toward its customers. Continued here

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Tax Repatriation: What Multinational Business Owners Need to Know Use these strategies to avoid an oversized tax bill when bringing foreign earnings back stateside. Continued here

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It's Fine to Never Meet IRL My cheeks flush at the question, and I feel a combination of frustration and shame not dissimilar to when someone questions why I'm still masking, avoiding indoor gatherings, and taking other precautions to dodge reinfection. The question is flawed though, because, of course, Angela M. Vázquez and I have met. We first met three years ago when she joined an online long Covid support group I'd started on Slack. We met again when she logged on to Google Meet to discuss becoming one of the group's first moderators, and again when I interviewed her and her partner on Zoom for an article about caregiving. We met on video calls and in Google documents where we wrote guidelines for our online support group. As our friendship blossomed, we met in text message threads and on phone calls—often offering each other a kind of care that had disappeared from my "IRL" life. But, no, Angela and I still haven't met "in person." Continued here

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AI Outraces Human Champs at the Video Game Gran Turismo Editor’s Note (2/22/23): This piece was first published on February 11, 2022. We are republishing it because Gran Turismo players can now race against the AI Gran Turismo Sophy in the latest version of the game. To hurtle around a corner along the fastest “racing line” without losing control, race car drivers must brake, steer and accelerate in precisely timed sequences. The process depends on the limits of friction, and they are governed by known physical laws—which means self-driving cars can learn to complete a lap at the fastest possible speed (as some have already done). But this becomes a much knottier problem when the automated driver has to share space with other cars. Now scientists have unraveled the challenge virtually by training an artificial intelligence program to outpace human competitors at the ultrarealistic racing game Gran Turismo Sport. The findings could point self-driving car researchers toward new ways to make this technology function in the real world. Continued here

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Meta must pay $175M for patent-infringing livestreaming tech, judge says After a jury unanimously decided last September that Meta owed $175 million to walkie-talkie app-maker Voxer for patent infringement, Meta tried to avoid paying up by requesting a judge either reject the jury's verdict or give Meta a new trial. This week, a federal judge denied Meta’s request, making it likely that Meta will have to pay all those running royalties for illegally copying Voxer’s technology and using it to launch Facebook Live and Instagram Live. Continued here

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Black Mesa gets shiny: Free Half-Life ray-trace mod adds subtle splendor Half-Life is a legendary game, a title that was ahead of its time in its storytelling, mechanics, and technology. Graphically, though, it can't help but look extremely 1998. A new, free ray-tracing mod makes the PC original a lot more compelling to revisit. Continued here

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Why psychological research on child sex offenders is important | Psyche Ideas is a clinical psychologist, researcher, and visiting assistant professor at Krea University in India. Her doctoral research focused on child sexual abuse awareness, myths and barriers to disclosure in urban Indian youth. She has worked with child victims of sexual abuse and facilitated capacity-building training for professionals in child mental health, child protection, education, medicine and the judiciary. ‘I honestly cannot imagine the kind of mentality or the kind of person it would take to molest a child,’ said one participant in my research on child sexual abuse awareness and disclosure. ‘The fact that people do this over and over again is just nauseating. I would not be able to consider such a person a human being.’ This response might sound emotionally loaded, but it reflects common opinion about child sexual offenders, which is rife with stereotypes and misconceptions (eg, that they are obviously and recognisably ‘different’ from most people) and suggests that their minds are beyond comprehension. Are these individuals truly outside the reach of our understanding? And if not, what explains how they are able to harm unsuspecting children and live with it? Continued here

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Another Patient Is Free of HIV after Receiving Virus-Resistant Cells The risks associated with a bone marrow transplant used to treat HIV mean the procedure is unlikely to be widely used in its current form A 53-year-old man in Germany has become at least the third person with HIV to be declared clear of the virus after a procedure that replaced his bone marrow cells with HIV-resistant stem cells from a donor. Continued here

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4 steps for overcoming guilt and shame from poor money decisions Financial shame can take many forms, but at the core it’s about feeling inadequate around money — as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. The psychological side effects are real. Financial shame can chip away at your self-esteem and create a cycle that makes financial hardship even worse.  Financial shame encompasses more than just regrets over how you’ve spent money in the past. Sometimes financial inaction can feel just as shameful. According to a 2022 Consumer Affairs survey, more than a quarter  of Americans said they felt “major regret” about not negotiating their salary more often. That can have a ripple effect that impacts your future earning power. Continued here

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The 5 Most Common Mistakes Leaders Make When Crafting a Business Strategy Creating a simple yet effective business strategy is hard. Here are the pitfalls to avoid. Continued here

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Florida surgeon general fudged data for dubious COVID analysis, tipster says Florida's health department opened and then closed an investigation into the state's polarizing surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, after a tipster claiming to have insider knowledge alleged that Ladapo "manipulated data" and committed "scientific fraud" in his final edits to what became a contentious, widely panned analysis on COVID-19 vaccine safety in young men. Continued here

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High-Altitude Balloons Aren’t Just for Spying. Here’s How Scientists Use Them Students, scientists and hobbyists are beginning to worry for their research as balloons are increasingly shot down Since the United States government discovered and shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon floating over the country earlier this month, both public and governmental attention to unidentified aerial objects has been heightened. From February 10 to 12, for example, the government shot three more unidentified objects out of the sky.  Continued here

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Tessa Clarke: The surprising climate benefits of sharing your stuff There's something simple we can all do to help the planet -- and it's probably not what you think. With one-third of all the food we produce globally each year being thrown away, entrepreneur Tessa Clarke believes that sharing more and wasting less is an underrated solution to the climate crisis. Learn more about how you can join the growing movement reducing waste and building community worldwide. Continued here

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To Build Entrepreneurial Grit, Think Cookies, Not Lemonade How we can teach grit to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs Continued here

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81% of international flights into NYC had SARS-CoV-2 in waste, small trial finds In a small trial, aircraft wastewater proved easy and useful for monitoring the SARS-CoV-2 variants touching down in the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. Continued here

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JWST Discovers Enormous Distant Galaxies That Should Not Exist JWST discovers giant, mature galaxies that seem to have filled the universe shortly after the Big Bang, and astronomers are puzzled Nobody expected them. They were not supposed to be there. And now, nobody can explain how they had formed.  Continued here

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The Case for Software Criticism Here’s a quick typology of tech journalism today: news reporting (“Amazon announces layoffs affecting 18,000 employees”), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufecki et al.), investigative journalism (“The Uber Files”), industry digests (TechCrunch), personal blogs, Substacks, and—if you’re feeling generous—Hacker News comments and GitHub issues. It’s an incomplete catalog, but you get the idea. Yet surveying this landscape reveals a curious lacuna: software criticism, in which a piece of software is subjected to critical analysis.  Let’s be clear. Technology criticism is nothing new. Modern technology criticism, depending on who you ask, goes way back to Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. More recently, I assume you’ve heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen Ullman. Or to name a few from the academic flank, Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, and Sherry Turkle.  Continued here

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Happiness Is a Warm Coffee “How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. The year was 1977, and I was 12 years old. A neighbor kid’s parents had bought an espresso machine—an exotic gadget in those days, even in Seattle. There was just one Starbucks in the world back then, and as luck had it, we lived within walking distance. The neighbor kid and I bought a pound of coffee and had about eight espressos each. Feeling fully alive and inspired to get closer to the universe, I climbed onto the roof of his house. In the process, I cut a gash in my stomach on his gutter. Bleeding profusely, I marveled at how intense the stars were. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Best deals on chargers, cables, and batteries Whether you're looking to charge your gadget at home or on the road, the Dealmaster has dug up deals on the perfect charging solutions. If you're looking to charge at your desktop, Ugreen's 200 W desktop charger, which has six charging ports split between USB-C and USB-A, makes an ideal companion to keep all your devices powered. And if you pair that with a discounted USB-C cable, you'll have a great charging hub for your desk. When selecting a USB-C cable, choose one with a braided design and a durable tip for longevity, especially if you're constantly plugging and unplugging the cable for travel. Continued here

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How Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Effort Paradox to Stop Giving Up and Be More Determined, Successful, and Fulfilled A new study shows you can train your mind to enjoy, appreciate, and value effort, not just results. Continued here

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Here’s what to do when you encounter people with "dark personality traits" at work Have you ever suffered through tales of greatness from a self-absorbed “friend” who reminds you of Michael Scott from “The Office” – and not in a good way? Have you been betrayed by a colleague out of the blue, undermined on a project by the office mean girl, or had a work friendship dropped altogether without explanation? If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you may have been dealing with someone who has what psychologists term a “dark personality.” These people score higher on three socially undesirable traits: narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Continued here

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Why does our Universe have 8 types of gluon? One of the most puzzling features of the Universe is the strong nuclear force. Inside every proton or neutron-like particle, there are three quarks, each of which has their own color. All three colors combined add up to a colorless combination, which the Universe seems to mandate. You can either have three quarks, three antiquarks (with corresponding anticolors), or a quark-antiquark combination: with colors-anticolors that cancel out. More recently, tetraquarks (with two quarks and two antiquarks) and pentaquarks (with four quarks and one antiquark) have been found to also produce colorless quantum states. But despite the fact that there are three colors and three anticolors allowed in nature, the particles that mediate the strong force — the gluons — only come in eight varieties. You might think that every color-anticolor combination that you can dream up would be allowed, giving us nine, but our physical Universe plays by different rules. Here’s the incredible and surprising physics of why we only have eight gluons. Continued here

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The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said. Continued here

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The number of staff who left their companies during the pilot program dropped 57 percent. @billmurphyjr Come for the trendiness; stay for the retention. Continued here

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The Marvel Movies From Worst to Best—and Where to Stream Them In May 2008, the recently formed Marvel Studios released its first film—and changed the face of modern cinema. Iron Man wasn't even the highest-grossing superhero film of the year (Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight took that crown), but it was a kernel that has exploded into an all-consuming entertainment juggernaut. Nearly 15 years later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a sprawling, interconnected web of character-based movies and crossovers that has pulled in billions at the box office. But which films are the best, and worst, of the bunch? Is Iron Man 3 better than Iron Man 2? How bad was The Incredible Hulk? How did the latest Thor entry hold up against its predecessors? We've spent hours arguing about the relative merits of Doctor Strange and Black Widow, and at the end of it, we've got some irreparably damaged working relationships and the definitive ranking of every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Continued here

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Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger Until recently, coaching was considered primarily a one-on-one practice. But no matter how effective employees are on their own, they can only contribute to the real power of the collective if their managers provide them with coaching as a group. In this practice, which the authors call team coaching, a leader’s role is to support the team as an organic unit, providing guidance, setting routines and practices, and creating constant opportunities for group learning. In this article, the authors describe three of the tools and techniques of team coaching that they’ve found to be the most important for fostering accelerated learning and successful outcomes. Continued here

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Mozilla says "most top apps" on Android have misleading privacy labels It looks like trusting developers to just tell the truth about data collection on Google Play isn't working out. Just like on iOS, Android launched app privacy "nutrition labels" in the Play Store last year, with the idea being that users could quickly get a look at how much data each app collects. The obvious problem with this system is that the developers fill out the data-collection forms, and there's nothing to stop them from lying or omitting certain data-collection policies. It's no surprise, then, that when Mozilla recently audited the top apps on Google Play, it found that "most top apps" have "false or misleading" app privacy labels. Continued here

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I’m a Mom and a CEO. Here’s What It Means to Me to Have a "Productive" Weekend Being productive doesn't always mean working. Here's what I mean. Continued here

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Why This Democratic Strategist Walked Away Simon Rosenberg delivered a major surprise last week when he announced that he was shutting down NDN, the Democratic advocacy and research group he has led since the mid-1990s. After working for three decades as an operative in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, Simon Rosenberg in 2022 became an overnight  sensation. While most of the media was breathlessly predicting sweeping Republican gains in the midterm election (“Red Tsunami Watch,” Axios blared in a late-October headline), Rosenberg was the most visible public skeptic of the GOP-surge scenario. Continued here

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Soft Robots Take Steps toward Independence Constructed from delicate, flexible and lifelike materials, soft robots have the potential to improve on their clunky, metal-bodied predecessors. Such machines could more nimbly explore other planets, gently collect organisms from the ocean depths and even lend surgeons a hand. But stubborn design challenges have long held them back from making it out of the lab and into our lives. Now a new generation of soft robots is navigating, growing and self-repairing its way to meeting researchers' lofty expectations. Squishy materials let robots deform to adapt to changing environments, such as constricting tunnels. Soft robots can also handle fragile materials, such as human organs or brittle rocks, without crushing them. Even some mostly rigid-bodied robots, including the famously agile walkers made by Boston Dynamics, incorporate soft parts for better movement. Many developments in soft robotics are inspired by traits of living organisms, such as octopuses' flexibility or the high water content of jellyfish. And new designs seek something less tangible: animal-like independence. Continued here

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Montessori: The world's most influential school? When considering the lives of the rich and famous, it is always tempting to look for the secrets of their successes. So here's a brain teaser: what do the cook Julia Child, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the singer Taylor Swift, and Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin all have in common? The answer is that they all attended Montessori schools as young children. In the US, the schools' influence in the art and tech world has long been noted. But the reach of the educational method goes far beyond that. Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi was a fan, and described how children taught with it "felt no burden of learning as they learnt everything as they played". Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel-Prize-winning poet, set up a network of Montessori schools to free children's creative self-expression.  Continued here

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Scammers are creating fake receipts -- and a digital shoplifting boom Johana Blanco, who worked for a ghost -kitchen company in Lima, sensed something was off when she received an image through WhatsApp last year. It was a receipt purportedly generated by Yape — Peru’s most popular mobile payments app. It was made out to her, complete with the date, time, amount paid, and the full name of the payer. “The voucher’s font seemed odd to me,” Blanco, who had previously worked as a graphic designer, told Rest of World. After checking her Yape account, she saw that no payment had gone through. Blanco confronted the customer, who stopped responding to her texts. “That’s when I knew they had tried to scam me with a fake receipt.”   It was a relatively small amount — the scammer had wanted to get away with not paying for a meal —  but the practice has drawn scrutiny across some of Latin America’s most popular instant payment apps. To confirm payment, vendors often rely on customer screenshots of app-generated receipts since many apps don’t always notify users when they are paid. But this process also opens the door to easy, low-risk scams. Fake receipts are the most common because they are the easiest to create. Less common are fake SMSes and other scams. But despite their differences, all kinds of app payment fraud share the same purpose: to convince vendors that they’ve been paid when they actually haven’t been. The payment apps are aware of the scams, but they won’t say what they are doing, if anything, to prevent them, aside from counseling their users on how not to fall for them. Continued here

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How to Use ChatGPT's Analogy Feature to Turbocharge Your Presentations Analogies simplify complex ideas but are hard to create. Continued here

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Once a ticket scalpers' tool, auto clickers now help migrants enter the U.S. Auto clickers are a common tool for people trying to beat digital queues, enlisting the inhumanly fast reflexes of a computer to snag a concert ticket, PlayStation 5, or any other limited item. But now, they’re becoming a tool for migrants trying to enter the U.S., helping them secure a precious slot that could ease the process — turning a previously innocuous tool into something with life-changing consequences. Apps, like AutoClicker or Click Automático, are being used to gain quicker access to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s own app, CBP One. Fewer than a thousand slots for appointments with U.S. border officials appear every day at 6 a.m. Pacific time; they’re typically gone within two minutes. But auto clickers speed through the process, selecting slots, clicking on the right links, entering pre-filled information like names and birthdays into forms, and even uploading photos. All of this happens in milliseconds: a speed impossible for humans. Continued here

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Batteries Are Ukraine's Secret Weapon Against Russia In January 2022, Valeria Shashenok uploaded a TikTok video of herself playing tourist in Paris: red beret, fresh croissants, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. A month later, her videos took on a much different character: Touring the bombed-out buildings of her town, Chernihiv, Ukraine; racing for cover as the air raid sirens sounded; reviewing the military rations served in her local bomb shelter. Through the next year, Shashenok's social media documented her life in the early days of the war, before seeking refuge in Western Europe—and then returning to Ukraine. In October, Shashenok uploaded a video promising to show her followers "how people live without electricity in Ukraine." More than 3 million people watched the tour of her darkened city, all set to George Michael's "Careless Whisper." Continued here

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The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up Your Smart Home The Smart Home: It's a place that anticipates your needs and empowers you to fine-tune your environment. Well, that's the pitch at least. Putting it all together isn't a smooth ride, but the right setup and combination of devices can make your life easier and add real convenience. With a myriad of ecosystems and standards to navigate, not to mention the diverse array of devices, the smart-home scene is daunting. We put together this smart-home guide to highlight your options, explain the jargon, and help you understand the consequences of the choices you make. A little planning goes a long way.  Continued here

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4 Ideas to Beat the New Year Doldrums Studies have found January to be the least-productive month of the year, and this year, the problem is compounded by headline-making layoffs, so-called quiet quitting, and a broader productivity slump. The signs are strong that 2023 won’t be an easy year to navigate, which is all the more reason to shake things up at the start. The author presents four ways to breathe new life into this notoriously dreary time of year. Continued here

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Did the Pentagon Shoot Down a Harmless Ham-Radio Balloon? Surging numbers of small research balloons increase the odds of airborne mistaken identity—and harsher regulations The Great UFO Turkey Shoot of 2023 began with a bang—several, in fact. U.S. fighter jets shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina in early February. In subsequent days, three more unidentified flying objects were shot down over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron. But late last week the situation apparently ended with a whimper when U.S. and Canadian officials suspended efforts to recover and study debris from those latter three objects after U.S. president Joe Biden said they weren’t thought to be part of China’s extensive airborne surveillance efforts. Continued here

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Google's Quantum Computer Hits Key Milestone by Reducing Errors Researchers demonstrate for the first time that using more qubits can lower the error rate of quantum calculations Physicists at Google have reached what they describe as their second milestone along the path to a useful quantum computer. At a laboratory in Santa Barbara, California, they have demonstrated that they can lower the error rate of calculations by making their quantum code bigger. Continued here

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How to Stop Scrolling and Focus at Work Sadly, this morning, my phone was by my side. As I wrote this piece, every time I felt stuck, I unconsciously picked it up and scrolled through social media for relief. The new messages, likes, and followers instantly made me feel better. But they also made me reluctant to go back to work, because Microsoft Word failed to fill me with the same positive reinforcement. Continued here

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3 Steps to Turn Your Fears Into a Powerful Leadership Tool Are your fears holding you back from being the leader you want to be? Continued here

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Chip Conley's Strategies for Becoming Wiser Don't knock the midlife crisis. It might be the perfect time to pivot. Continued here

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Survey: Employees Want Business Technologies to be More Collaborative Microsoft’s latest survey on business trends compiles input from 2,700 employees and 1,800 business decision makers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan across job functions to uncover the ways technology is — or is not — helping them do their work. Researchers found that employees are looking for tools that enable collaboration seamlessly, automate repetitive work, and guide with insights, and that can be customized for specific business challenges. The author presents three ways leaders can invest in these areas to realize efficiency gains in day-to-day operations and free up their teams to do more important work. Continued here

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The beautiful flowers that bees can't use To decorate green spaces, most cities and amateur gardeners rely on horticultural plants – those that have been selectively bred for certain qualities, such as their ornamental value. With their flashy colours, unusual shapes and larger proportions, they may be attractive to the human eye. But they are not necessarily useful for bees and other pollinators. Often, it may be the contrary: one popular garden flower native to South America, the petunia, originally had five petals. Because of artificial selection, hybrid varieties  now sometimes have 10. Continued here

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The Atlantic Hires Stephanie McCrummen as Staff Writer Stephanie McCrummen is joining The Atlantic next month as a staff writer. She comes to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2004. In a note to staff, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: “Stephanie is one of America’s most esteemed reporters; her stories are gorgeously written, memorable, and complicated in all the ways that Atlantic stories should be.” In 2018, Stephanie was a leading member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, for work uncovering sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate. In 2015, she spent time with friends of the perpetrator of the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was her chilling and deeply reported story “An American Void.” More recently she traveled to rural Georgia and, through the eyes of one voter, helped readers make sense of the surprising outcome of the midterm elections. In addition to her focus on the forces driving American politics and culture, Stephanie has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Post, covering East and Central Africa, and as a metro reporter covering the Virginia suburbs. Before her tenure at the Post, she was a reporter for Newsday. Stephanie’s journalism has most recently been recognized with the George Polk Award in both 2020 and 2018, a Scripps Howard Foundation Ernie Pyle Award in 2020, and a 2018 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.The Atlantic recently announced the hiring of Evan McMurry as senior editor overseeing audience, Yair Rosenberg and Xochitl Gonzalez as staff writers, and Eleanor Barkhorn as a senior editor. Continued here

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Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. Continued here S68 French Court Orders Musée d’Orsay to Restitute Masterpieces Stolen During World War II Descendants of art dealer Ambroise Vollard won a legal battle over works by Renoir, Cézanne and Gauguin Around the start of World War II, four major paintings were stolen—and sold to the Nazis—after the death of their owner, Ambroise Vollard, an eminent French art dealer. Eventually, they ended up at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Continued here S36 You Can't Trust App Developers' Privacy Claims on Google Play It's basically impossible to keep track of what all your mobile apps are doing and what data they share with whom and when. So over the past couple of years, Apple and Google have both added mechanisms to their app stores meant to act as a sort of privacy nutrition label, giving users some insight into how apps behave and what information they may share. These transparency tools, though, are populated with self-reported information from app developers themselves. And a new study focused on the Data Safety information in Google Play indicates that the details developers are providing are often inaccurate. Researchers from the nonprofit software group Mozilla looked at the Data Safety information of Google Play's top 40 most-downloaded apps and rated these privacy disclosures as "poor," "needs improvement," or "OK." The assessments were based on the degree to which the Data Safety information did or did not align with the information in each app's privacy policy. Sixteen of the 40 apps, including Facebook and Minecraft, received the lowest grade for their Data Safety disclosures. Fifteen apps received the middle grade. These included the Meta-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp, but also the Google-owned YouTube, Google Maps, and Gmail. Six of the apps were awarded the highest grade, including Google Play Games and Candy Crush Saga. Continued here S34 The Best Bags Made of Recycled Materials If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED WIRED's gear team has tested dozens of backpacks, totes, purses, messengers, slings, and even reusable shopping bags. More and more of these bags are using recycled materials that come from plastic water bottles, old nylon, and even fishing nets retrieved from the ocean. It's important to find ways to reuse what would otherwise pollute our oceans and sit in landfills forever.  Continued here S66 The War in Ukraine Is the End of a World The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world. Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century. Continued here S35 Should Algorithms Control Nuclear Launch Codes? The US Says No Last Thursday, the US State Department outlined a new vision for developing, testing, and verifying military systems—including weapons—that make use of AI.  The Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy represents an attempt by the US to guide the development of military AI at a crucial time for the technology. The document does not legally bind the US military, but the hope is that allied nations will agree to its principles, creating a kind of global standard for building AI systems responsibly.  Continued here S59 How and When the War in Ukraine Will End One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want. The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecast a decisive Russian win against Ukraine. Continued here S62 Photos: Larry the Cat’s 12 Years as Chief Mouser Last week was the 12th anniversary of the arrival of Larry the Cat to 10 Downing Street, the London residence and home office of the United Kingdom’s prime minister, where he was bestowed with the official title of “Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.” He was brought to Downing Street in 2011, at the age of four, and tasked with controlling rats that had been seen at the residence. Though cats had been employed as chief mousers for centuries, Larry was the first to be given the official title. As a permanent resident, his term in office has overlapped with five prime ministers to date. Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat, walks on the cabinet table wearing a British Union Jack bow tie ahead of the Downing Street street party, in central London, on April 28, 2011. # Continued here S58 The Invisible Victims of American Anti-Semitism Last week, a gunman shot two Jews at close range as they departed morning prayer services in Los Angeles. The first victim was shot in the back on Wednesday. The second was shot multiple times in the arm on Thursday, less than 24 hours later. The attacks sent fear pulsing through the Jewish community of Los Angeles, as members wondered if their own place of worship would be targeted next. On Thursday evening, the alleged assailant was apprehended. Prosecutors say the 28-year-old Asian American man had a history of making anti-Semitic threats and possessed both a .380-caliber handgun and an AK-style rifle. It was a harrowing ordeal for America’s second-largest Jewish population. And yet, outside the Los Angeles Times and Jewish media outlets, the story went largely undiscussed on national front pages and cable news networks. The attacks never trended on social media. Which is why you might well be hearing about them now for the first time. This is not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to American anti-Semitism. Here’s another disturbing story that has garnered little national attention: Over the past several years, local elected officials in New York and New Jersey have systematically worked to pass and impose laws with a single purpose—to keep Orthodox Jews out of their communities. The conduct of those officials was so egregious that the states’ attorneys general, Democrats Letitia James and Gurbir Grewal, respectively, pursued civil-rights lawsuits, alleging deliberate anti-Jewish discrimination. Continued here S65 'Cocaine Bear' Is Exactly What It Sounds Like Elizabeth Banks has promised her viewers no more than a bear on drugs, and a bear on drugs is what they get. Pretty early into Cocaine Bear’s running time, I started searching desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-horror is, as you might have heard, about a black bear in 1980s Georgia who eats a lot of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her angry and hungry for more cocaine, and given that she’s already a big bear with sharp claws, the combination is quite distressing for the people in the forest around her. But is there something deeper going on here? I wondered as the bear mauled yet another victim on-screen. Perhaps a critique of selfish 1980s individualism: No amount of money or expensive products can protect you from a coked-up bear! Or maybe it’s a statement about the dangers of our modern world encroaching on nature? Continued here S56 When a Christian Revival Goes Viral At Asbury University, in Kentucky, a student chapel service turned into a revival that has captivated TikTok. On February 8, after a regularly scheduled chapel service on Asbury University’s campus, in Wilmore, Kentucky, a group of about 20 students lingered and began to worship and pray for one another. The chapel speaker that day, Zak Meerkreebs, had exhorted the students to “become the love of God by experiencing the love of God,” and closed with a prayer asking God to “revive us by your love.” According to the students, as they stayed and prayed, an unexplainable, surreal peace descended upon the room. As minutes stretched into hours, many students who had gone to class returned to the auditorium when they heard what was going on. They would eventually be joined by faculty, staff, and community members who trickled in to participate in worship and prayer. Continued here S57 Why Rewatching 'Titanic' Is Different Now Twenty-five years ago, the movie turned tragedy into romance. Today, that alchemy takes on a darker absurdity. The Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, has a very good gift shop. Among its wares are sparkling replicas of the Heart of the Ocean necklace, T-shirts that read He’s my Jack → and She’s my Rose →, and, for the kids, tubs of electric-blue “iceberg slime.” In one corner, the visitors who have availed themselves of one of the museum’s main attractions—the chance to pose for pictures on a replica of the doomed ship’s grand stairway—pick up their photos. Next to sample images of grinning tourists stands a rack offering commemorative copies of newspapers originally published in mid-April of 1912. One of them reads, “NO HOPE LEFT; 1,535 DEAD.” Continued here S69 Parisian Opera House That Inspired 'Phantom of the Opera' Becomes an Airbnb For just one night, two travelers will spend the night in the Palais Garnier's Box of Honor Phantom of the Opera fans can now spend the night inside the opulent Parisian opera house that inspired the beloved musical and novel. Continued here S61 The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat. I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat. Continued here S63 Never Mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘National Divorce’ According to the author Richard Kreitner, the United States has always been in a troubled marriage. This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage. Continued here S64 Are Colds Really Worse, or Are We All Just Weak Babies Now? For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs. The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses. Even my work Slack is rife with illness emoji, and the telltale pings of miserable colleagues asking each other why they feel like absolute garbage. “It’s not COVID,” they say. “I tested, like, a million times.” Something else, they insist, is making them feel like a stuffed and cooked goose. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (7) ►  August (1) ►  May (2) ►  April (3) ►  March (1) ▼  2023 (432) ►  December (9) ►  November (25) ►  October (20) ►  September (33) ►  August (72) ►  July (6) ►  June (77) ►  May (12) ►  April (2) ►  March (8) ▼  February (85) Wegovy: what you need to know about this weight lo... Feb 28, 2023 - Music Book Room at Bras Basah closi... Does Not Being Able to Picture Something in Your M... Do You Cause Your Own Stress? How To Stop a "Toxic... Is Natural Wine Better For You? The Great Resignation Didn't Start with the Pandemic Ukraine: Beijing's peace initiative offers glimpse... 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A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... ►  January (83) ►  2022 (115) ►  December (13) ►  November (10) ►  October (2) ►  September (12) ►  August (25) ►  July (1) ►  June (15) ►  May (13) ►  April (8) ►  March (12) ►  February (1) ►  January (3) ►  2021 (111) ►  December (21) ►  November (7) ►  October (17) ►  September (24) ►  August (18) ►  July (2) ►  June (20) ►  May (2) ►  2020 (388) ►  June (58) ►  May (17) ►  April (74) ►  March (89) ►  February (118) ►  January (32) ►  2016 (11) ►  August (1) ►  June (1) ►  March (2) ►  January (7) ►  2015 (6) ►  December (3) ►  November (3) ►  2013 (7) ►  May (1) ►  April (5) ►  March (1) ►  2012 (4) ►  October (1) ►  May (2) ►  March (1) ►  2011 (7) ►  August (7) About Me Rijo Stephen Cletus Bangalore, Karnataka, India BE Medical Electronics, PGD Hospital and Health Care Management, CMT and MBA Finance. Pursuing MBL from NLSIU. Experienced in Domestic and International Consulting. View my complete profile