Rural

Drive down any of the the long, rutted back roads of Anza, a dusty Riverside County community, and it won’t take long before you feel like you’ve fallen off the grid.Telephone poles disappear. Street signs and lights are nowhere to be seen. And ramshackle houses and fences hide behind thickets of weather-beaten manzanita and chaparral.If you’re quiet, you’ll hear the wind roll across the valley, or maybe the bell-like clink of a sage sparrow in a nearby bush. But if you make a sound, one, two, three or more barking,…

Researchers have discovered the limits to ChatGPT's ability to provide location-specific information about environmental justice issues, which they said possibly hint at the chatbot's geographic biases. The researchers at Virginia Tech University in the US asked ChatGPT to answer a prompt about the environmental justice issues in each of the 3,108 counties across the states of the country. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, developed by OpenAI, that is trained extensively on massive amounts of…

Researchers have discovered the limits to ChatGPT's ability to provide location-specific information about environmental justice issues, which they said possibly hint at the chatbot's geographic biases. The researchers at Virginia Tech University in the US asked ChatGPT to answer a prompt about the environmental justice issues in each of the 3,108 counties across the states of the country. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, developed by OpenAI, that is trained extensively on massive amounts of data…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In California's vast northern rural school districts, with their mountain passes and long, snowy winters, the typical electric bus' range is not nearly enough. West Valley is one of Lassen High's nearest athletic opponents. One of the farthest, Yreka High, is 169 miles away.…

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: The FCC issues a final denial of Starlink's request for $885M to expand rural coverage, saying Starlink “failed to demonstrate” an ability to offer the service — The FCC has made a final denial of Starlink's application for $885 million in public funds to expand … Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: The FCC issues a final denial of Starlink's request for $885M to expand rural coverage, saying Starlink “failed to demonstrate” an ability to offer…

As Hurricane Larry lashed Newfoundland in 2021, university students from Halifax headed to a rural area in its track to find out whether the ocean might whip microplastics up into the atmosphere then transport them by air to otherwise pristine communities.The results, you could say, blew their socks off."It was such, like, an astonishing result that we weren't really expecting," said Anna Ryan, a Dalhousie University environmental science masters student and the study's lead researcher. To test their theory, the…

Researchers surveyed hundreds of volunteers from 12 festivals across Iowa, Michigan and Kansas for their study. Credit: Deb Berger/Iowa State University During Orange City's three-day tulip festival each May, the northwest Iowa town attracts roughly 40,000 visitors, more than six times its population. People come for the blooms and parades, traditional Dutch food and musical theater. For the community, it's an opportunity to…

When Reid DeSpiegelaere, chief development officer at Every Child Pediatrics, talks about his work’s mission, he points to the name of the nonprofit organization, Every Child Pediatrics. “We see every child,” DeSpiegelaere said. “We’ve never turned a child away.” That holds true regardless of a family’s ability to pay for medical services, from routine check-ups, vaccines and nutritional guidance to behavioral and mental health care. Every Child Pediatrics primarily sees kids who are uninsured or on Medicaid, offering a…

Until last year, Maureen Pam, a trader, always had to endure trekking to Ganawuri, a district in Plateau’s Riyom area, at the close of Friday market day at Vwang Market in Vom, Jos South. She was always fear-stricken, caused by her previous experiences with armed robbers on the route, who stole the money she made from her sales that day. Due to the unavailability of banks in these rural communities, most traders like Ms Pam had to return with the cash from sold goods to their homes, pending when they could access…

We had an adder in the kitchen once. My mum caught it in a biscuit tin and let it go out by the beck. Outside our front door there was a vast boggy field filled with sheep, and in the autumn, deer rutting in the copse next to it. Windermere lay hidden in a dip some way off, the mountains behind it. When the wind blew we could hear the beat of the music on the tourist boats. It was idyllic, it looked perfect – but it wasn’t ours. The countryside rarely is.I grew up in a tied house, which meant it came with my dad’s job as…