Category: Uncategorized

Wall Street Journal: A shortage of skilled workers is impeding Micron’s goal of a chip manufacturing campus in Syracuse, NY, where it plans to invest $100B and hire 9K employees  —  Micron plans to hire 9,000 employees at a new suburban Syracuse campus amid shortage of skilled workers

The US is proposing bold action to clean thousands of PFAS “forever chemicals” out of drinking water. It’s long overdue.

In the face of safety risks, experts have tightened the reins on heritable genome editing—but haven’t ruled out using it someday.

Wired: How the vague and varied US legal definitions of “cybercrime” causes issues, as the UN negotiates an international cybersecurity treaty with similar broad terms  —  From US state laws to the international stage, definitions of “cybercrime” remain vague, broad, and increasingly entrenched in our legal systems.

In 2018, MIT convened its Task Force on the Work of the Future, which concluded in a 2020 report that while new technologies were not necessarily going to massively wipe out employment, smart practices and policies would be necessary to let automation complement good jobs. Today a successor group is continuing the task force’s effort: […]

Even though Flavio Emilio Vila Skrzypek left his native country of Peru to study at MIT, you can tell immediately that his homeland is close to his heart. Vila, who is pursuing a master’s in city planning, has made it his mission to improve land-use policy back home. “Property policies in Peru should learn from […]

We analyzed an algorithm that evaluates people claiming welfare benefits and found shocking discrimination.

WIRED spoke with the coauthor of the Restrict Act, a bipartisan bill to crack down on tech from six “hostile” countries.

Want the image quality of a DSLR without the bulk? These WIRED picks do more with less.

Mitchell Clark / The Verge: Twitter starts showing the number of times a tweet has been bookmarked, but not by whom, initially for iOS users on the tweet details page, with plans to expand  —  Twitter is adding yet another public metric to measure posts by.  There’s now a counter for how many bookmarks a […]

Michael Kozlowski / Good e-Reader: Amazon stops selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions for Kindle and print, and plans to shut down Kindle Newsstand in September 2023  —  Amazon has announced they are abandoning the Kindle for Periodicals or the Kindle Newsstand, which will completely shutter on September 2023.

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: Google’s Project Zero finds 18 zero-day vulnerabilities, including four top-severity flaws, affecting some Samsung phones and other devices with Exynos chipsets  —  Google’s security research unit is sounding the alarm on a set of vulnerabilities it found in certain Samsung chips included …

AI entrepreneurs like to claim products such as chatbots could become conscious at any minute, causing an ‘existential threat’. We need to resist this dystopian marketing hype, says Annalee Newitz

A transparent material made from cellulose nanofibres and pockets of gas could replace air in double-glazed windows to improve thermal insulation

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Research shows they prefer interactions that fuel their psychological needs — even if they require more time or cost more money.

As a tech employee, Vivek Gulati has navigated multiple layoffs. Here’s what he’s learned.

This week, we ask ourselves what our reliance on smartphones tells us about our wants and fears.

More than a trillion insects are raised each year as high-protein, low-carbon animal feed, but the practice might have an ethical blind spot.

Early research aims to look for patterns in an individual’s sleep sounds using deep neural networks—with potential applications for health care.

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post: How San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, or “Cerebral Valley”, became a hotbed for “hacker houses” and AI events, as the AI gold rush revives the Bay Area’s tech scene  —  The money and power flooding into AI are warping and intensifying the typical Silicon Valley gold rush, now set to explode […]

Embracing your child’s love of video games can be framed as bad parenting, but it is actually the opposite, says clinical psychologist Naomi Fisher

Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day: OpenAI’s GPT-4 is an outrageous, if imperfect, step forward, offering a glimpse of a future internet where generative AI creates one big personalized web portal  —  Read to the end for a good Twitter reply  —  Building A Portal To Everything  —  Very often I will come up with a […]

Jen Wieczner / New York Magazine: Q&A with Signature Bank board member Barney Frank on the bank’s downfall, the impact on crypto, weakening Dodd-Frank in 2018, tougher regulation, and more  —  The sudden string of bank failures over the past week conjured traumatic flashbacks of the 2008 financial crisis for many a banker.

Integrating sensors into rotational mechanisms could make it possible for engineers to build smart hinges that know when a door has been opened, or gears inside a motor that tell a mechanic how fast they are rotating. MIT engineers have now developed a way to easily integrate sensors into these types of mechanisms, with 3D […]

Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to […]

Even if you signed up purely for Ted Lasso, there’s a lot more you should check out on the streamer.

Evgenii Serebriakov now runs the most aggressive hacking team of Russia’s GRU military spy agency. To Western intelligence, he’s a familiar face.

John D. McKinnon / Wall Street Journal: Sources: the Biden administration is demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell their stakes in the company or face a possible US ban of the app  —  TikTok says forced sale won’t resolve national security issues; its CEO set to appear before Congress next week

The Verge: SpaceX launches Starlink Roam, a rebranding of Starlink RV, offering global satellite internet service for $200/month and a regional option for $150/month  —  Last summer, we reviewed Starlink RV, a version of the satellite internet service that promised users access from pretty much anywhere on their continent.

The all-electric SUV combines rugged and sleek design, has movable seating, and is the first to use the company’s autonomous driving tech.

The 2019 fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris unexpectedly led to discovery of the building’s use of iron staple reinforcements throughout its structure. It’s the first Gothic cathedral known to have used such a method

Aaron Holmes / The Information: Sources: Microsoft has been rationing GPU access for teams building AI tools since late 2022; the company plans to announce Office 365 GPT-4 tools on March 16  —  Microsoft is poised to announce a suite of Office 365 tools powered by GPT-4, the powerful new artificial intelligence software made by […]

Peter Baddoo, an instructor in the Department of Mathematics, passed away suddenly on Feb. 15 while playing basketball on campus. Baddoo joined the MIT Department of Mathematics in January 2021. Prior to this, he was an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow at Imperial College London. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford […]

Using an RNA sensor, MIT engineers have designed a new way to trigger cells to turn on a synthetic gene. Their approach could make it possible to create targeted therapies for cancer and other diseases, by ensuring that synthetic genes are activated only in specific cells. The researchers demonstrated that their sensor could accurately identify […]

MIT’s new series “Dialogues Across Difference” will bring speakers to campus and create opportunities for community members to demonstrate practical ways to take on difficult subjects across differences of opinion, background, viewpoint, and life experience.  A collaboration among the offices of the MIT president, provost, and chancellor, the program kicks off March 22 with John […]

How to rehire former superstars — and ensure you don’t lose current ones.

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You can’t deliver a modern customer experience with a dated approach.

Researchers seek to develop advanced propulsion systems that can transform long-distance space exploration.

To lure back workers and compete with the convenience of home, companies are offering more substantial perks and giving architects freedom to experiment.

Financial Times: PwC partners with AI startup Harvey to launch a chatbot for its 4,000 lawyers, built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, as law firms rush to find ways to integrate AI  —  Technology from start-up Harvey aims to make contract analysis and due diligence quicker  —  PwC has announced a chatbot experiment …

New York Times: How Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Assistant fell behind in the AI race despite a decade headstart, hampered by clunky design and miscalculations  —  The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable.  But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise.

The threat of scammers using voice deepfakes in their cons is real, but researchers say old-school voice-impersonation attacks are still the more pressing concern.

A robot that mimics the motion of snakes can undulate in S-shaped bends or roll in spirals

Jon Porter / The Verge: Samsung responds to the controversy over moon photography on Galaxy devices, explaining its “Scene Optimizer” feature, “AI deep learning model”, and more  —  The post’s content isn’t exactly new — it appears to be a lightly edited translation of an article posted …

It’s easier than ever to view maps of any place you’d like to go — by car, that is. By foot is another matter. Most cities and towns in the U.S. do not have sidewalk maps, and pedestrians are usually left to fend for themselves: Can you walk from your hotel to the restaurants on […]

Bloomberg: Sources: TikTok’s leadership is considering the option of divesting itself from ByteDance as a last resort if its existing proposal with CFIUS is rejected  —  TikTok’s leadership is discussing the possibility of separating from ByteDance Ltd., its Chinese parent company, to help address concerns about national security risks.

Georgia Gee / Slate: A list of over a dozen US stadiums using facial recognition for testing, security, entry, analyzing fans’ feelings, ticketing, concessions, or other use cases  —  “Your face is your ticket,” goes the motto of A.I. startup Wicket.  “Your face is your credential,” says Alcatraz AI, another vendor.

A new version of the AI system that powers the popular chatbot has better language skills, but is still biased, prone to fabrication, and can be abused.