Category: Uncategorized

This compact, cordless vacuum is expensive—but it’s a dust-buster you’ll want to use over and over again.

Mark Sweney / The Guardian: The UK’s National Audit Office says a 2% digital services tax on the gross revenue of Amazon, Apple, and other US giants reaped almost £360M in its first year  —  Figure raised exceeds what most of the digital businesses have been paying in UK corporation tax

Amid Twitter chaos and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, the conservative social network is having a moment of its own.

Shen Lu / Wall Street Journal: Baidu EVP Dou Shen downplays the impact of US semiconductor restrictions, after the company stockpiled parts, and says its AI business would benefit long term  —  Executive says the search-engine giant’s AI and cloud businesses don’t rely heavily on chips restricted by the U.S.

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg: Amazon’s Twitch makes changes to address child predation concerns, including mandatory phone verification and improving account termination for users under 13  —  Twitch, the video game livestreaming site popular with teens and kids, announced changes it’s making on the platform to increase safety …

Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works. Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and cooperate as effectively as humans remains a thorny problem. A key challenge is enabling AI […]

Before a machine-learning model can complete a task, such as identifying cancer in medical images, the model must be trained. Training image classification models typically involves showing the model millions of example images gathered into a massive dataset. However, using real image data can raise practical and ethical concerns: The images could run afoul of […]

New York Times: Interviews and messages show how SBF used PACs, nonprofits, and consulting firms to woo politicians, regulators, and others to support his crypto goals  —  In just three years, the FTX co-founder built a massive operation to woo politicians, regulators and nonprofits to support his crypto goals.

The government soft-launched an entirely digital application process. Here’s what you need to know about eligibility and navigating the website.

Finding high-quality detection canines is hard enough—and the pandemic only dug a deeper hole.

Researchers monitoring a “firehose” of public tweets found signs of increasing toxicity—before Elon Musk reversed bans on Trump and other divisive figures.

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk: US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Durbin, and Tina Smith ask Fidelity to reconsider its upcoming Bitcoin 401(k) offerings announced in April 2022  —  The asset management giant said in April it would offer retail investors the option to put bitcoin in their 401(k) accounts at some point this year.

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Sequoia apologized to its fund investors for the $150M it lost on FTX and told them it would improve its due diligence process on future investments  —  Venture-capital firm tells fund investors that it will improve due diligence on future investments after $150 million loss on crypto exchange

An AI developed by researchers at Meta convincingly negotiated with humans while playing an online version of the board game Diplomacy. It was also ranked in the top 10 per cent of players

At the heart of nearly every galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. But not all supermassive black holes are alike: there are many types. Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects, are one of the brightest and most active types of supermassive black holes. An international group of scientists has published new observations of the first quasar ever […]

A look at the pros and cons.

It’s well-known that carrying one copy of the APOE4 gene variant increases one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease threefold and two copies about tenfold, but the fundamental reasons why, and what can be done to help patients, remain largely unknown. A study published by an MIT-based team Nov. 16 in Nature provides some new answers as […]

A conversation with Georgetown’s Christine Porath about how to improve customer-facing work in an era of incivility.

It’s in founders’ best interests to not only accept, but invite, oversight.

David Enrich / New York Times: An investigation reveals how online US sports betting grew so big, so fast and what the consequences are likely to be for public health, taxpayers, and others  —  The New York Times examined thousands of pages of documents and interviewed lobbyists, executives, lawmakers …

Samuel Stolton / Politico: The UK’s CMA launches an investigation into Apple’s and Google’s dominance in mobile browsers and cloud gaming, following a survey that found a “stranglehold”  —  Apple and Google could be forced to loosen their grip on mobile systems after the United Kingdom’s competition watchdog launched …

After months of meticulous planning, investigators finally move in to catch AlphaBay’s mastermind red-handed. Then the case takes a tragic turn.

John Reed / Financial Times: After criticism, India’s government releases an updated and more “balanced” data protection bill, seeking passage in April or May 2023, the fourth such draft  —  IT minister says ‘balanced’ legislation is designed to accelerate economic growth  —  India’s revamped data protection bill is …

MIT Associate Professor Otto Cordero has always gravitated toward the most basic questions of life. How do ecosystems assemble? Why do species divide labor in nature? He believes these are some of the most central questions for understanding life. “The challenge is discovering something that applies across organisms and across environments — now we’re talking […]

Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as […]

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica: Report: Amazon’s hardware group may lose $10B in 2022, as many Echo devices are sold at cost and plans to monetize Alexa have failed  —  Layoffs reportedly hit the Alexa team hard as the company’s biggest money loser.  —  Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history […]

You could fill a stadium or two with all the cheap headphones out there. We tested a ton to help you pick the right pair.

You finally caved and bought one. These are our favorite straps, screen protectors, chargers, and cases to go with your smartwatch.

Lawmakers are growing concerned about a flood of data-hungry cars from China taking over American streets.

Alex Heath / The Verge: Sources: at an all-hands, Elon Musk said Twitter is done with layoffs and actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales; Twitter has 2,700+ employees  —  After purging nearly two-thirds of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce in three weeks, Elon Musk is hiring again.

Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk: US DOJ says two Estonians were arrested for a $575M cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering scheme that allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors  —  According to the Department of Justice, the two men used shell companies to launder the proceeds of their fraudulent schemes and buy luxury cars and real […]

The first trial of the ‘SharkGuard’ technology reduced the bycatch of blue sharks and pelagic rays by as much as 91 per cent, but didn’t impact the tuna that fishers were targeting

The performance of image-generating AIs drops when trained using images previously created by other AIs, which may create problems for them given the proliferation of these images

A simulated version of Paris where universities and telecommunication hubs are connected by a quantum communication network suggests that existing technology is already nearing the ability to create functional “quantum cities”

The room was abuzz with lively conversations as nearly 70 students came together to take part in the “Heritage Meets Heritage” event on Oct. 27, organized by MIT Global Studies and Languages and co-sponsored by the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and Hermanas Unidas.    Students participated in small group conversations on a […]

The people and planning you’ll need to set yourselves up for success.

In Mai Hassan’s studies of Kenya, she documented the emergence of a sprawling administrative network officially billed as encouraging economic development, overseeing the population, and bolstering democracy. But Hassan’s field interviews and archival research revealed a more sinister purpose for the hundreds of administrative and security offices dotting the nation: “They were there to do […]

A team of scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has systematically evaluated the functions of over 5,000 essential human genes using a novel, pooled, imaged-based screening method. Their analysis harnesses CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out gene activity and forms a first-of-its-kind resource for understanding and visualizing […]

Myth #1: School and childcare are back to normal.

Go beyond the generic thank-you note.

Algorithms that create art, text, and code are spreading fast—but legal challenges could throw a wrench in the works.

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: A look at Gary Gensler’s plan to regulate most crypto as securities and questions over the SEC’s handling of FTX, which met the regulator before its implosion  —  Gary Gensler, the chair of the S.E.C., is at the center of a reckoning over the future of cryptocurrency after the […]

Stephanie Murray / The Block: DCG’s Grayscale refuses to share proof of reserves, citing “security concerns”, as Grayscale Bitcoin Trust reaches new lows and DCG’s Genesis halts withdrawals  —  Grayscale will not show proof of reserves due to “security concerns,” after its bitcoin and ether products fell to all-time lows this week.

Fossil fuels are rapidly heating the planet, but their aerosols also help cool it. Just how much, though, is a major uncertainty in climate science.

The retailer has a price match guarantee for anything bought until December 24, so get ahead of your holiday shopping list without worry.

Investment that the UK government started in quantum technologies in 2013 seems to have paid off by enabling the existence of companies at the cutting edge of research

Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab: A look at things journalism could lose if Twitter dies: real-time feedback on stories, news outlets being publicly called out, DMs as a reporting tool, and more  —  Goodbye to screenshotted best bits, DMs, “that tweet should be a story”…  “If Twitter goes away my job would actually be […]

When you use self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drugstores, you are probably not — with all due respect — doing a better job of bagging your purchases than checkout clerks once did. Automation just makes bagging less expensive for large retail chains. “If you introduce self-checkout kiosks, it’s not going to change productivity all that […]

Tidy up your phone and get back to basics.

TechCrunch: A look at Unstable Diffusion, which is trying to monetize AI porn generators; the group migrated from a subreddit to Discord, where it has over 45,000 members  —  Of course, it’s an ethical minefield  —  When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI …