Efforts

Credit: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Paraguay's Ciudad del Este is a busy South American contraband hub where scrappy Paraguayan vendors and Brazilian traders mix with businessmen from places as far away as Lebanon and South Korea. This hive of activity moves billions of dollars' worth of consumer goods—everything from smartphones to whiskey. The city…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeMore than 260 Jewish members of the entertainment industry, including actors David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies and Josh Gad, have signed an open letter criticising the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for excluding Jewish people as an underrepresented group in its diversity efforts.The letter, which was organised by Jew in the City’s Hollywood Bureau for Jewish…

Morgan Stanley is the latest firm to report on Apple’s AI plans, which should be unveiled soon. According to a note seen by BGR, 2024 will be the year when Apple’s “Edge AI opportunity likely comes to fruition, highlighted by an LLM-powered Siri 2.0 and a broader Gen AI-enabled operating system (introduced at WWDC in June) that has the potential to catalyze an iPhone upgrade cycle.”This analysis comes a day after Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported on the possible AI applications Apple is working to introduce with…

Oklahoma took a stand against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) last month. The state’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed an executive order defunding DEI efforts in public colleges and universities and banning it in other state agencies. He said the move would take “politics out of education” and encourage “equal opportunity rather than promising equal outcomes.” Affirmative action itself has been banned in the state since 2012. This latest executive order does not target student organizations, but it does ban state…

Beeper, the messaging platform that has fought hard to bring Apple's iMessage to Android phones, seems to have released a final update for its service. After multiple attempts at making iMessage work on Android devices reliably, with workarounds that involved users accessing a Mac, Beeper has said its efforts to bring the popular messaging service on Android are “unsustainable.” The company announced its future plans hours after it said it had found a stable solution for iMessages to work on Android for Beeper Mini and…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Extreme heat waves, once considered rare, are now frequent and severe in cities due to climate change. Phoenix faced such a brutal heat wave in July of 2023 when it endured 31 consecutive days of high temperatures of at least 110° F. The severity of the heat wave triggered a state of emergency. In June of 2021, the town of Lytton, B.C., Canada, hit a blistering 121° F, leading to a fire that…

Himachal Pradesh will make special efforts to increase the state's software exports from Rs 5 crore to Rs 100 crore, Cabinet minister Rajesh Dharmani said on Sunday. Today, India is exporting software worth billions of rupees and Himachal Pradesh's contribution in the country's software exports would increase and institutes like NIT should come forward, said Dharmani at the concluding day of the 31st State Level Children's Science Conference. Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are not free of inherent biases, and several ongoing projects from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft are working towards reducing these biases linked to large language models (LLMs).Rajeev Rastogi, vice president, machine learning at Amazon, is leading such projects where several Amazon India employees are working.The international non-profit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sponsoring a three-year project by Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Karya, which…

As delegates at the 2023 COP28 UN Climate Change Conference work to identify global climate actions by the Dec. 12 deadline, the head of the OPEC oil cartel urged the group’s members to block any deal aimed at phasing out fossil fuels. In a letter dated Dec. 6, first reported by Reuters, Haitham Al-Ghais, secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, insisted producers “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.” “It seems…

Apple has commissioned a study which reveals data breaches and attacks are at a record high, and growing at an alarming rate. The newsA new study commissioned by Apple and conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dr. Stuart Madnick has revealed that the total number of data breaches worldwide has tripled between 2013 and 2022 and that 2.6 billion personal records have been compromised in the last years alone. Why it matters to you(Image credit: iMore)Everyone who uses technology has to entrust their…