“Six years after sailing out of San Francisco with the ambition of developing the technology to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, The Ocean Cleanup returned to San Francisco with the knowledge and know-how to relegate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the history books,” according to a new announcement Read more…
Alorica — which runs customer-service centers around the world — has introduced an AI translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers in 200 different languages. But according to the Associated Press, “Alorica isn’t cutting jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.” The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, Read more…
A schoolteacher using an interactive whiteboard is surprised by an alert. Their school is in “hard lockdown.” They knew — instantly — something was about to happen, and “got everybody into a corner,” they later told CNN. Classroom doors at the school are always locked, so they then “turned off Read more…
“The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education” recounts an experiment Eric Klopfer conducted in his undergrad CS class at MIT. He divided the class into three groups and gave them a programming task to solve in the Fortran language, which none of them knew. Reminiscent of how The Three Read more…
Digital rights activists want device manufacturers to disclose a “guaranteed minimum support time” for devices — and federal regulations ensuring a product’s core functionality will work even after its software updates stop. Influential groups including Consumer Reports, EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, iFixit, and U.S. Pirg have now signed a Read more…
An intense heatwave across the US west has brought unusually warm temperatures to the region — some of the highest of the season — and broken heat records. Millions of Americans from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Seattle are under heat alerts. Even before this latest bout of extreme weather, Read more…
Electrocuted, flaming bird carcasses are falling off of power lines and causing wildfires across the U.S. This surprisingly common phenomenon has been responsible for at least three Colorado wildfires so far this summer. These events are not isolated. A 2022 study found that electrocuted birds caused 44 wildfires in the Read more…