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The City of Boston is piloting a new scheme that will offer free public transport and shared-bike passes as part of an experiment into how financial incentives can impact commuting behavior. Workers in five Main Street Districts can apply for the pilot, which gives credits of up to US$60 for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) services and a two-month pass for the city’s bike-share scheme, Bluebike. Applicants will be selected on a first come, first served basis, and while the program is currently only open to workers whose employers are located in the five targeted neighborhoods, officials are working to expand the pilot to other Main Street districts....

I fell in love with programming because of the feeling of losing myself in ideas and concepts while being completely alone for hours on end. There’s just something about it, you know? When I decided to enroll in a coding Bootcamp, I thought it would give me the opportunity to meet other people just like me. Little did I know, I was about to meet my nemesis: pair programming. There are a lot of things I like about Agile development....

Gates’ fund also built fresh positions in Google’s Alphabet and China’s ecommerce darling Alibaba, worth $107 million and $100 million respectively. [Read: US tech execs have dumped $3.6 billion in company stock this month] Hard Fork built the graphic below to visualise the stock market calls made by the Gates Foundation in the first three months of 2020. It shows you the weighting of the fund’s $17.35 billion portfolio filtered by sector; click on a piece to reveal exactly how many shares it owns and what they’re worth....

Investment firm Baillie Gifford’s cash injection gives the company a 4% stake in Lilium. In return, the five-year-old electric vertical take off and landing firm has just become a tech unicorn with a valuation of $1 billion, the FT reports. [Read: Tesla supplier ready to make ‘million mile’ batteries, Musk remains silent] This investment brings Lilium’s total investment to $375 million, evtol.com reports. Lilium’s relatively basic concept, of what is effectively a drone big enough for five humans, is said to have caught the attention of Baillie Gifford, which has also invested in a similar startup from California called Joby....

Well, bye Also, there’s this quote from the article: “I am struggling to find a doctor who would like to collaborate with us to perform clinical trials and provide green tea and muscadine extracts to test their therapeutic efficacy to treat COVID-19.” For those who aren’t intimate with the the general geography of the Carolinas, it’s about a 30 minute drive from NCSU to UNC’s Chapel Hill campus, so the problem isn’t in finding a doctor (UNC has one of the most prestigious medical schools in the US), it’s in finding one who cares to spend their time on this specific research....

Resumes are important. They help showcase your experience, skills, and potential to possible employers. Do them right and you’ll land yourself an interview for your dream job. Get it wrong, and you’ll end up at the top of a pile of disregarded resumes. The fact of the matter is you need an awesome resume but don’t fret because it’s easily done and it shouldn’t take you too long. Firstly, don’t over complicate things....

Let’s be really clear right up front: AI can’t do anything a person, given an equivalent amount of time to work on the problem, couldn’t do themselves. And no human can tell if any given human is lying. Full stop. The simple fact of the matter is that some of us can tell when some people are lying some of the time. Nobody can tell when anybody is lying all of the time....

The system uses a barcode inserted in food packaging that changes color when it senses gasses emitted from rotting meat. A smartphone app then scans the barcode pattern to measure the freshness of the meat within 30 seconds. In tests on commercially-packaged chicken, beef, and fish samples that were left to age, the system predicted the meats’ freshness with 98.5% accuracy. Co-lead author Professor Chen Xiaodong said the app could help consumers decide whether meat is fit for consumption better than a “best before” label: [Read: Meet the AI-generated bipartisan president of the US] The researchers say their system mimics the mammalian nose’s method of detecting decaying meat by sensing its gases....

Symbolic AI involves the explicit embedding of human knowledge and behavior rules into computer programs. The practice showed a lot of promise in the early decades of AI research. But in recent years, as neural networks, also known as connectionist AI, gained traction, symbolic AI has fallen by the wayside. The role of symbols in artificial intelligence Symbols are things we use to represent other things. Symbols play a vital role in the human thought and reasoning process....

The Google parent company announced that it’s shutting down the Loon project because the business model is unsustainable. “The road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped,” said Astro Teller, who leads Alphabet’s experimental X lab, in a Thursday blog post. “So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon.” The ambitious venture aimed to deliver affordable internet access to unconnected, remote, and underserved areas....

Speculation had been mounting about the e-commerce giant’s moves crypto strategy. The rumors starting swirling last week after the company posted a job ad for a “Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead.” They gathered pace on Sunday when UK-based news outlet City AM cited an unnamed insider as saying the retailer will take Bitcoin payments “by the end of the year” and plans to launch its own token in 2022....

The cameras are connected to sensors that measure the distance between workers, and machine learning models that differentiate them from their surroundings. A 50-inch monitor tracks their movements, using visual overlays to show whether they’re within six feet of one another — the minimum distance recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Workers that remain a safe distance apart are highlighted with green circles. When they get too close, the circles turn red....

A 2019 survey of 145 warehouse workers found that 65% of them experienced physical pain while doing their jobs. Almost half (42%) said the pain persists even when they’re not working. But the e-commerce giant may have found a solution. Is it a more humane workload? Upgraded workers’ rights? Of course not. It’s an algorithm that switches staff around tasks that use different body parts. [Read: The biggest tech trends of 2021, according to 3 founders] He said that muskoskeletal disorders at the company dropped by 32% from 2019 to 2020....

In the world of project management as outlined by one of the most popular PM methodologies, the Agile Scrum product owner is basically the team’s quarterback. Recruited by an employer to bring a new product to fruition, the product owner starts moving the ball down the field. They spot holes in the game plan. They make sure major weapons are being used correctly. They make sure the ball keeps marching downfield and the chains keep moving toward a touchdown....

In a developer session titled “Move beyond passwords,” Apple unveiled a new tech called Passkeys that’ll allow you to sign up for services without any passwords. Here’s how it’ll work: when you visit a website supporting this new tech, you’ll enter your desired username during registration, and then use Face ID or Touch ID — instead of a password — to authenticate yourself. Passkeys is coming to iPhone, iPad, and Macs later this year as a technology preview, so it’ll be off by default....

This has been rumored a few times, but 9to5Mac picked up a report from the Wedbush analyst firm that stated the Apple iPhone 13 will have a 1TB storage option. Currently, this amount of storage is available on the iPad Pro, but the highest the iPhone goes up to is 512GB on the 12 range. It’s interesting news, but… does anyone really want a 1TB iPhone? Yes. That might’ve sounded like a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t....

As the names suggest, the former will focus on “everyone’s favorite songs from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s,” while the latter will specifically cater to country aficionados. Apple Music Hits will feature a bevy of on-air shows hosted by Jayde Donovan, Estelle, Lowkey, Jenn Marino, Sabi, Nicole Sky and Natalie Sky, George Stroumboulopoulos. It’s also bringing a lineup of new exclusive shows hosted by artists like Backstreet Boys, Ciara, and Snoop Dogg....

The company previously only offered a 30-day trial for Final Cut Pro X. As someone who has gone through a myriad of 30-day trials in his cheapskate lifetime, I know that’s often not enough time to seriously get acquainted with such powerful software. Logic Pro X has never offered a trial of any sort. 90 days, on the other hand, might be enough to make you proficient enough to get hooked and make a more educated purchasing decision....

Don’t get your hopes up just yet. Third-party repair shops first have to attain certification from the company and can only provide fixes for “most common out-of-warranty iPhone repairs.” This means it’ll cover mostly faulty batteries, speakers, and screens. More labor-intensive processes like motherboard repairs and water damage fixes are not on the table. The iPhone maker said it’ll provide these vendors with the same genuine parts, tools, training, repair manuals, and diagnostics as Apple’s Authorized Service Providers (AASP)....

The invite gives little in the way of clues, featuring a stylized Apple logo and a cheeky ‘by innovation only’ tagline. But as always, a deluge of leaks and rumors have painted a strong picture of what to expect. From the rumor mill, we anticipate the new devices will be called the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max. The Pro models will get triple camera systems with an ultra-wide-angle lens, the cheaper one will just have two....