Astronomers (the human kind) have found 1,715 stars within 326 light years of Earth where astronomers (the alien kind) would have been able to detect life on Earth during the last 5,000 years. “One might imagine that there are worlds beyond Earth that have already detected us and are wondering if they are alone in the Cosmos. This catalog is an intriguing thought experiment for which one of our neighbors might be able to find and study Earth,” Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist at the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, describes....

Autonomous driving and other new transportation modes are key technological megatrends in the infrastructure industry. This calls for the built environment to adjust to these latest mobility technologies as they shape the future of roads and real estate construction. In the public sphere, assimilation to these new technologies in mobility has already begun in the regulatory space. Nations across Asia, Europe and North America for example have already issued autonomous testing permits and offered regulation for self-driving cars on public roads....

These are the words of the closing monologue of the movie Call Me By Your Name (based on the namesake book by Andre Aciman); the monologue of the father, Mr. Perlman, who assures his son Ellio of the inconceivable magnitude of emotions, insisting that even the most conflicted ones are better than none. These lines could not be more timely. We have begun to realize that feeling more not only makes for richer lives but is also the best antidote to a world of self-optimization and efficiency, in other worlds, a world of machines....

In fact, I’m not talking about any of the big tech companies, all of whom are currently under scrutiny over their use of humans in AI transcription. Instead I’m talking about Spinvox. You might not be familiar with this now-defunct British startup. During the late 2000s, it claimed to have an accurate, automatic transcription service for voicemails (back when such a thing was genuinely technologically impressive). In the process, it raised more than $200 million from gullible investors....

But — and I’m just gonna put this straight out there — the market has a new metallic daddy. So, please, everyone slap your rumps in honor of the just-launched VanMoof S3. Want to know exactly why the VanMoof S3 has become my favorite e-bike? Well, I’d suggest you scroll to the top of this article and watch the rather lovely video we put together. That’ll tell you everything you need to know....

The big idea here is that wrangling the myriad open-source and enterprise ML and AI platforms and solutions into production can be a challenging prospect. Per IBM’s developer blog: Developers can spend their time building, training, and deploying models or they can spend all day formatting and wrenching a pipeline together. IBM’s new machine-learning, end-to-end pipeline starter kit streamlines the entire process and gives devs everything they need to deploy solutions, including the tutorials and open-source support tools necessary....

For the same reasons, I have a stash of books that I did manage to borrow from the library, which I return long after the due date and end up paying some pretty big fines. But what if I could have access to books while strolling around the city to get a coffee or something? That’d definitely make it easier. So it’s too bad that I’m not living in Seongnam City in South Korea, where self-driving library robots will be demonstrated on November 19....

In a recent study with our colleagues Ramzi Said and Onne Janssen, we found that people who report stronger relationships with their bosses are more likely to engage in bad behavior on their behalf. This included things like misrepresenting the truth or withholding negative information about them to make their manager look good, even if it brought themselves no obvious or immediate benefit. We conducted two studies. One was an experiment with more than 150 workers from the United States and the other a survey of more than 200 European employees....

According to Reuters, the decision appears to have been a result of successive meetings between Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and French President Emmanuel Macron. “This is huge news, it means that the judicial process will be able to run normally,” Cédric O, France’s Minister for Digital Affairs, told Reuters in an interview. “It’s really very important, they’re only doing it for France.” Until now, the tech giant has cooperated with French courts in cases relating to terrorism and violent acts by revealing IP addresses and other identification data of suspected individuals....

So, you’ve decided to follow the Joe Rogan-Marc Maron path and become a podcast tycoon. Great! Welcome aboard. So once you’ve recorded the whole thing, edited it, then posted it to your podcast feed on iTunes or Spotify, you’re all done, right? Not exactly. Just like everything else on the web, a podcast needs a dedicated website. There needs to be a place to showcase your work and even sell the importance of your efforts to listeners, potential guests and sponsors, not to mention the rest of the world at large....

According to Firstpost’s calculations, mobile carriers lose about $1 million on average every three hours for each of the 22 circles (regions) they operate in. A telecom industry group known as the Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI) estimates that other businesses in each circle where a shutdown is imposed loses about half that during the same time period. Further, a 2018 study by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) noted that internet shutdowns cost the Indian economy about $3....

And the robotics company’s latest video, which shows Atlas successfully running a parkour track, is no exception. Within hours of its release, it received hundreds of thousands of views and became one of the top-ten trends of U.S. Twitter. But the more interesting video was an unprecedented behind-the-scenes account of how Boston Dynamics’ engineers developed and trained Atlas to run the parkour track. The video shows some of Atlas’s failures and is a break from the company’s tradition of showing highly polished results of this work....

As first noted by The Verge, the company published a bunch of new guidelines for creators to get the best results possible on the platform. These tips, posted on Instagram’s creators account, suggested video-makers to use the vertical format, the app’s own sound library, and start a replicable trend. The post also noted that users shouldn’t upload clips with low-resolution or visibly recycled content from other apps with logos and watermarks visible....

A notice published by the Home Department of Jammu and Kashmir suggests broadband services (with mac-Binding) will be provided to select institutions such as hospitals, hotels, and banks. Plus, 2G connectivity for postpaid users will be restored in the districts of Jammu, Samba, Kathua, Udhampur and Reasi. However, only ‘white-listed’ sites such as e-banking services will be accessible; VPN services and social media apps will be still inaccessible. The department also intends to set up 400 internet kiosks for tourists....

That’s changing: At WWDC 2020, Apple announced it would at long last bring picture-in-picture to iPhones. Finally, you can get distracted by cat videos while trying to get work done on the go. The feature works about as you would expect. You can resize and move videos around to different corners of your screen and switch between a few different sizes. There is also a handful of controls to skip ahead or backward in a video....

In Paris, it’s even hotter, at over 40 degrees Celsius. Insanity. Given the oppressive heat, you could be forgiven for not wanting to step outside of your climate-controlled houses or offices. That said, please keep in mind those gig economy workers who are working in these arduous conditions for companies like Deliveroo, UberEats, Stuart, and others. Can you imagine what it’s like pedaling through this heat with a rucksack full of steaming-hot McDonald’s on your back?...

— jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019 Dorsey basically says that a political meassage should earn its reach honestly; either by following an account or retweeting. Ad payments are highly optimized and targeted, compromising the element of choice. Moreover, internet ads specifically introduce specific challenges: — jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019 Money also compromises how Twitter deals with curbing misinformation: — jack ??? (@jack) October 30, 2019 Dorsey acknowledges removing ads can help incumbents, but he’s confident political messages can grow without paid advertising:...

The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight – and very few public health regulations at the time – General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas. It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy....

The Ohio resident was sentenced by US District Court Judge Jeffrey Helmick on Thursday after pleading guilty to charges in June. Speaking to the judge, Simon said that selling the fake IDs gave him a sense of financial security. He hoped to grow his business by employing his co-defendants Aaron Kuns, Sarah Alberts, and Benjamin Stalets, he added. As previously reported by Hard Fork last month, Kuns was sentenced to one year and one day in US federal prison....

Most notably, the leak confirms the Note 10 will come in two sizes, a 6.3-inch Note 10, and a 6.8-inch Note 10+, as well as a third Note 10+ 5G. Samsung is leaning into the extra power of its Note series by marketing the devices as full-fledged computers. One of the images reads: Speaking of ‘film studio,’ Samsung seems to be placing a particular emphasis on video this time around, perhaps to steal some of the thunder from LG’s V series....